Join Kathy Mackechney and Me for an IFS-Based Writing Workshop for the Parts That Did Not Get Adopted

Ten years ago this week, I published You Don’t Look Adopted. I was so in my head. If I could only get my story out, I would be…better…safer…freer to be myself.

I have worked with hundreds and hundreds of adopted people since then as a writing coach, and I feel as if I’ve walked miles and miles in their shoes, as well as in, of course, my own.

The more I get to know myself and other adopted people, the more amazed I am by just how intricately our bodies, minds, and relationships have been affected by these things called relinquishment and adoption. I started to feel like I was adoption.

If I could only get the story right. If only I knew my origin story. If only my mother had been willing to meet me. If I knew who I was, then I could know if I was living my truest life. I kept writing. Sometimes I blogged two or three times a day. I was a word machine. I was trying to name the world and my experiences in it so I could…I don’t know! Maybe not be adoption anymore? Maybe be myself?

In the effort to learn more about my brain, I took Martha Beck’s Wayfinder Life Coach program. Martha’s basic premise is that our body is a compass, and through the language of emotion and feelings, it tells us, in the most basic terms, to move toward or move away from an idea, person, or thing. It’s the whole body yes or no kind of thing, and all the feelings between: you’re getting warmer, you’re getting colder.... 

This was when I realized that I had long ago learned to override or question my body’s yes’s or no’s. And this, like so, so, many things, I connected with relinquishment and adoption and perhaps why I have had stomache aches and headaches for most of my life. If I think of myself as an infant, my body, I would assume, would have most likely given me nofeedback to bodies that were holding me for prolonged times other than my biological mother (stranger danger!). My stomach would have clenched. I might have cried. My breathing might have been light. But if there was no biological mother to help me reset to yes, I had to learn to turn no around myself, I guess. Sort of like learning to make lemonaide from lemons, perhaps I learned to make yes’s from no’s.

Or, my brain learned to read my body’s no as a yes or a possible yes.

It can be so hard to make decisions when you don’t know what you really want.

I have paid so much attention to my brain all these years while dragging my body behind me. Ignoring it when it hurts. Stuffing it full of caffeine and sugar when it is tired. Numbing it with Taco Bell so I can do the things my brain wants to do. I can barely stand to look at my body often. Sometimes I hate it.

My sweet, sweet body. It’s just being itself, and I’m up in my head like a mom who probably could go to jail for the way she has treated her baby, if I think of my body like a baby I have been given to tend.

It’s true that my birth mother relinquished my body, and it’s also true that I have, too.

How do I find me in all of this? My busy, often hijacked mind. My, to me, mysterious body.

This brings me to why I’m excited to do a writing workshop with the IFS therapist Kathy Mackechney for adopted people who are interested in finding the parts of us that weren’t adopted and giving them voice.  

I find it overwhelming to again and again come back to the subject of adoption when I’m thinking of who I am and what I want. To be adopted is only part of a life experience, but it’s so easy to get swept away by the impact of it. It’s easy to forget we have a Self that has been watching us all along, who is untouchable, who knows.

What happens when we access that part of us? It loves us. It wants the best for us. We have the best cheerleader in the world for us inside of us, but what if we don’t know how to listen for it?

And what if we do?

Please join Kathy and me on Zoom, July 18th from 8-11 AM PT. It’s $150. Email me at anneheffron@gmail.com with any questions or to save your spot. Our goal is for this to be So. Much. Fun. and to Change. Your. Life. in some small or large way.