Life Coaching Translated for People Who Were Adopted— Part Four —Living With Two Body Compasses

In addition to the confusion I have between distinguishing between my nervous system and my body compass, I would like to talk about the confusion I have as an adopted person over the existence of having both a body compass and an adopted body compass.

One compass helps me navigate to the true north of my life. The other helps me navigate to the true north I inherited from my adopted parents and adopted culture. I have two voices telling me where to go, what to do, who to be.

I developed the adopted body compass as a survival mechanism for living as an adopted person. This is the kind of food this new family of mine eat. These are their customs. This is their level of energy, of anxiety, of happiness and depression. This is how well they do in school. This is their belief system. This is when they go to bed and wake up. This is what they think about other human beings. This is their value system. As a person with two compasses that provide me with often opposing information, I can easily go in circles. My body compass and my adopted body compass try to sit at the helm, and having both at the wheel is confusing and dangerous and exhausting and weird.

My body compass got me in big, big trouble with my mother time and time again. She wanted our compasses to be aligned because I was, after all, her child, and my likes and dislikes needed to be in some sort of alignment with hers so adoption could not be at the table with us, talking, taking up space. I tried to live by my adopted body compass (I could also call this a should compass) while at the same time listening to my body compass. Boy did I try. I’m still trying, and I’ll be writing a lot more about that later. That kind of life looks like someone drawing a picture and erasing it at the same time. It looks like binging and purging.

Living with a body compass and an adopted body compass means going after a dream of, say, taking Martha’s Wayfinder course and paying for it and then quitting after a week because something tells you that you are in trouble. You are breaking some agreement that you don’t consciously understand. You are becoming your own person (thank you body compass) and that is not allowed (thank you adopted body compass).

If I could stand high above the time line of my life with both a blue and red marker, I think I could highlight which parts of my life were driven by body compass and which parts were driven by adopted body compass. Sometimes they are hard to tease apart. Living with both compasses can make a person look bipolar or like a quitter or clueless, but you try to be both Person 1 and Person 2 and see how fast you run the mile while stopping to play the piano somewhere along the way because one of your compasses told you that you should.

Truth won’t be ignored. You can should all over it, but our body compass’s pull towards truth steers us towards health and well-being, and our body compass will fuck things up, including your health and well-being and the health and well-being of others, if it doesn’t get its way. My adopted body compass sent me to Smith College, my mother’s alma mater. My body compass got me on my bike after ten days. You are not a Smithie, it said. This is not your thing. You want to wait tables so you have people and stories to write about. You do not give a shit about that economics class and the Wall Street Journal. Stop trying to calibrate your truth with your mother’s just so she will be happy. Be brave enough to say no to what is not yours.

My adopted body compass both likes and doesn’t like me writing these posts. It likes the attention, but it senses I’m circling it, seeing it for what it is, and so it starts to play dirty. It starts to badmouth me so I’ll feel powerless and wrong. Eventually I’ll end up being a person at 51 Flavors with absolutely no idea which flavor I like. I’ll end up asking the person behind the counter what they like and ordering that because in my mind, deep in that brain of mine, I’ve lost trust in my own feelings.

My body compass loves bad weather. It loves meditation and walks in the woods and being felt. It loves to steer the ship of me through chaos. We got this, it tells me. Keep your head up, keep talking, you are onto something. Listen to me and I will get you to the land of one true voice. Keep going. I am here.