Life Coaching Translated for People Who Were Adopted — Part Two

I jumped right into the topic in my last post without covering what life coaching is. (Give me a pool, I’m going to jump in it before I check the temperature…or even put on a bathing suit.)

The International Coaching Federation says coaching is partnerering with clients in the thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. According to the course materials, Martha Beck’s Wayfinder program focuses on helping people access the compasses, the internal mechanisms that will lead them to a unique and specific destiny. No two people have the same destiny just as no two people have the exact same personal and professional potential. Being a Wayfinder is about helping people find their own inherent guides to their own best life. A Wayfinder coach is supposed to help others find their internal compasses so they can come to their own conclusions and not lead or guide them in any way.

Summing up Martha’s description to our group, she said that coaching is to therapy what personal training is to a medical doctor. A medical doctor or a therapist is working to restore a dysfunctional system to functioning. A personal trainer or a coach is there to enhance functioning and assume you have basic soundness of mind, body, and life. A coach helps you move forward and experience wonderful things and offer wonderful things to the world.

Here’s the thing: if you go to a medical doctor or your average therapist and say, “I’m adopted,” when talking about inflammation or IBS or anxiety or depression or migraine or an eating disorder or any internalized or externalized cry for attention or help, you might as well say, “I’m blonde.”

I signed up for Martha’s program because 1. I love Martha’s spirit and books and podcasts and brain and 2. I love the ways my life coach Katie Peuvrelle has helped me to reframe my thinking over the years. She taught me the power we have over our own thoughts and that if I say, “This is hard,” when doing a task, for example, I make it hard. If I say, “This is easy,” my brain gets completely different operating instructions. That oversimplifies the process, but so what. My point is that I felt empowered going to Katie as she taught me to focus not on the story of my struggle or suffering itself, but on how the story made me feel and act. The only catch was that she was not adopted and did not meet me in the field of the abandoned child. (But also, she might have, so there’s that.) I wanted to learn more about how to do work with my brain and my thoughts as a person whose brain was sculpted, it seems, by the confusion of the relinquished. I wanted to become the person I needed. I wanted to learn how to take this brain of mine that is often like fifteen out-of-control maniac children in the mall and find ways to have clearer access to my core self with its eight characteristic C’s Richard Schwartz names: calm, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, creativity, courage, and connectedness.

I know that me with all those C’s, and she’s such a relief to be around. I feel for the maniac kids I have in me, and I want better tools to let them express themselves without them trying to push me out the car door so they can drive. Having them at the wheel is often exhausting and expensive and embarrassing and scary. They like to spend money and worry and binge watch shows and holler at people and have tantrums and eat with their hands and freak out and run around yelling that the sky is falling while they look for some Ketamine to take the edge off.

Referring back to the previous post, one could argue that coaching is not the answer for an adopted person like me because I’m past-based, hooked by my own stories, and not all that willing or able to turn my head to the future and start dreaming and scheming about my perfect life when I’m in the corner crying for my mother.

But what it that’s not in fact true? What if I’m wildly coachable?

What if I need some kind of permission slip from the universe, from myself, to exist? What if I find that through coaching? What if I go back in time and claim my right and desire to be in the world, and start again? Version 2.0, here to give the bat a swing.

Huh? What about that?