Secret Son: Season 2, Episode 2 - Papa Was A Rolling Stone
My interview with Bruce Porth
Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice. Thanks for listening.
Show Intro: Good morning, Secret Sunshiners. This is Secret Son, the adoptive podcast about searching identity and secrecy. Welcome to episode two of season two. Season two is rolling right along. My guest today is Bruce Porth. He's a fellow Midwesterner. I lived in his hometown of Chicago for a while. I was doing comedy improv up there.
I was freezing in the winter. I loved the cheap rent. But, alas, New York called me. New York is cold too, but it has sunny skies. It was nothing like the brutality of the Chicago winter. Episode one is getting a lot of listens. So, somebody out there is spreading the word about the show. It's great to see those downloads coming in.
Bruce and I today, we're going to talk about searching - how it changes one's identity, how your identity is before you search, the kind of flux nature of it; talk about Chicago a little bit and a great many other things.
There's some kind of problem with my microphone in this episode. I'm not sure quite what it is. It's not up to snuff. We cleaned it up in the editing room in post, but it's still subpar. So, apologies for that. Next week we'll be better. That's the Secret Son promise.
Do you want to help keep up the technical quality of the show? Why not go to patreon. com/secret_son. That's patreon.com/secret_son. You can be a one time donator.[00:02:00]
Hey, why not help keep the show going? Thanks for listening. Here is Bruce.
Mike: I'm with Bruce Porth, one of my lovely patrons. So season one, Bruce, as you know, was about secrecy. That was the focus. In season two, we're focusing on identity and secrecy. I'd feel like I've talked enough about it. Now, I'm obsessed with identity and my apparent lack thereof.
I'm trying to talk about identity until I get clarity, like I did on the secrecy. So, I'm wondering if you're up for it, talking a little about identity. How was your identity before you searched and maybe a little about the search. And then how your identity changed.
Bruce: Okay. Yeah. Thanks, Mike. It's great to be here.
I love what you're doing with the podcast. I heard some early episodes and then I realized you were on Patreon, So, I jumped right away as a supporter. I appreciate the opportunity to be on the show because I've been an avid listener. So - identity. Yeah, I think this is a great progression, going from secrecy and now doing a deeper dive into identity.
For me - identity - I think is going to be an ongoing progression for probably the rest of my life. I lived with a certain identity and growing up in my family, adoption really wasn't an allowable topic. There's a number of other adoptees that I've gotten to know where it was a similar situation.
For me, it feels like there were two babies that were presented to my family ten days after I was born - that's when I was placed - and one of those babies was my original identity and that baby promptly got put into a closet in my family and never saw the light of day again. And that baby never got fed.
It never got nourished in any way. It never got love and was basically exiled. My process of healing has been a process of slowly opening that door and recognizing what's there. And, unfortunately, when you take something like that - an integral part of who I am - and lock it up for a long period of time, it grows pretty angry and pretty desperate.
My process of healing has been reclaiming this identity, reclaiming this part of me. And it's not trivial. It's a huge, huge part of who I am. It's quite a bit different than being adopted versus being kept. A kept person grows up with an identity that's based on a continuum and, for me, it felt like growing up as a tree without roots. Imagine a tree trying to nourish itself, [00:05:00] trying to live, in the summertime and just trying to stand up through life without roots.
And it literally felt that way, or it felt like a building without a foundation but a sub basement that was filled with demons. So, coming to terms with that and then incorporating both identities is what the challenge is and not feeling this sense of loyalty to one or the other, but having it be a both and is an ongoing challenge for me.
I was born in Chicago in ‘67. I think you might have been born in Chicago in ‘67 as well. Is that true, Mike?
Mike: Oh, I wish. No, I was born in St. Louis in 1967.
Bruce: My adopted name is Bruce Porth, and it took me a long time because of the environment in which I grew up and where adoption was a taboo subject.
The whole idea of searching never even dawned on me. It just remained unconscious and, and quite a bit out of reach. And it wasn't until I was in my twenties and fell in love and then had that relationship It was just like night and day, like all of a sudden I knew that I needed to search and I had not really fully embraced the fact that I was adopted, I think, and all that came with it.
I mean, there's so much that comes with that because it's such a profound experience and the, the, the damage and the wreckage from it goes so deep. I've heard Anne Heffron talk about it in terms of there being a raging inferno inside of us. And that's certainly true for me. My process has always been - how do I not get burned by that inferno through most of my life?
And now I'm moving closer to that fire.
Mike: I would say I was borderline delinquent. I was so angry and I was stealing all the time, horrible grades and hanging out. I guess that was the disreputable kid.
Bruce: No, I kind of aspired to be a delinquent. Like in high school, I really wanted to be part of the cool kid clique and the real badasses - that they seemed to possess a certain strength and a certain immunity from some of the vulnerabilities in life that I think I found pretty difficult, but I could never be that tough. And, so, it's always fascinating to me to hear which direction adoptees go in. I went in the other direction of being the good adoptee. In hindsight, I understand why I just felt this intense feeling of rejection from the experience of being adopted and relinquished and adopted.
And I could not risk having that happen again. And somehow sensing the dynamic and the emotional availability in my family, it just felt like I could not risk pushing my parents in a direction that they couldn't handle. There was a certain emotional shallowness there. So, I had to live in that shallow water as well.
And so acting out in any kind of significant way, I think would have pushed them over. In fact, there were times, there were infractions - times that I got in a little bit of trouble. And in hindsight, it's like - I really didn't do anything bad. I was sneaking firecrackers into the house when I was in middle school and got caught.
And that was required. This big conference and then, punishment afterwards. So, that's the environment that I grew up in and that's the, the water I had to tread in. It just felt very tenuous. So I opted for being the good student and the good adoptee and being fairly compliant.
Ultimately, through some of the things that happened through childhood - there were some moves across the country and things like that – ultimately, I ended up shutting down and withdrawing quite a bit. And that was instead of acting out, I was acting in. I just couldn't tolerate the emotions that were churning inside me.
And there was no space. There was no platform in my family to process them within. And, of course, a lot of it had to do with being adopted. And that just wasn't an unallowable topic in the family.
Mike: Did you have an idea of what you, so to speak, wanted to do with your life? I was just obsessed with two things: identity, meaning, philosophy, and just getting the hell out of my own town. Beyond that, I had no real career dream.
Bruce: I had aspirations early on, like in my high school years, wanting to get into certain fields of employment but when I, when I shut down, all of that just kind of evaporated and I was really just kind of lost in the darkness and couldn't really see or imagine myself beyond my high school years and, the way it panned out in my senior year of high school, I got very much into my head. It was an escape that I needed and it allowed me to get out of the pain in my body and find at least somewhat of a foundation upon which to leave.
I was heavily influenced by Ayn Rand in my senior year of high school. There was a main character in one of her books who was a metallurgical engineer. I was interested in engineering. So, I actually became a metallurgical engineer. Through that initial inspiration, and continue to be to this day. I had a summer of Ayn Rand.
I read Atlas Shrugged and Moby Dick that summer. That summer cured me of novels.
Bruce: Yeah. I think for me, it was a kind of a grasping for some form of an identity. I never felt like I could be who I was because I just didn't know who I was and there was certainly nobody helping me trying to figure out who I was.
And the role models in my life were not strong enough that I wanted to aspire to be them. Meaning, primarily my main role model, which would have been my adoptive father. Like I mentioned, I would aspire to be in the crew of tough kids in high school. They seem to have a strength that I wanted to have.
And there's that cliché. People say, “just be yourself” and that when people would tell me that, it would strike terror in me because there was no self. It had been robbed from me by adoption, but it had also been eroded in my family. like trying to deconvolve the dysfunction [00:12:00] in my family from, and the trauma associated with that, from the trauma of adoption.
It's really kind of impossible. And the two are sort of like constructive interference. They just kind of compound each other. Here I am trying to operate in life, trying to launch into my college years without any kind of solid foundation or any meaningful identity whatsoever.
Although getting up in my head was sustainable for a little while, eventually my body had to have its say. And it did. And I ended up kind of going into a really deep depression my freshman year, but still being enough in my head that I could function. But it was terrorizing what was coming up for me.
It was sort of touching that, that raging inferno inside of me, but I had no language for it at the time, no context whatsoever for it. But I would go for like really long walks in the evenings, just trying to settle my nervous system or find some kind of footing to stand on and figure out some kind of identity that I could claim as my own.
I couldn't. At one point, I remember thinking consciously, “who can I be? Who can I be like?” I thought about my high school geometry teacher who I really liked but the whole idea of just being myself never dawned on me. I hated those books like, What Color is Your Parachute? Because it was always like, “well, what do you like?
What do you want?” I was like, no idea. That's why I'm reading this book. I don't know.
Bruce: Yeah. I think Nancy Verrier's second book was - at least the second half of that book -had a lot of exercises in it similar to that, as a way of searching for self.
Mike: What are you thinking in this – let’s call it a wandering phase? Are you thinking you want to search? Or is it even something you think is possible? Did you know any other adoptees?
Bruce: I didn't know any other adoptees. Mike, I was just lost. I was completely lost inside myself and just didn't know which, even which way was. And I did find myself getting into a counseling situation through one of the school counselors.
And I did disclose that I was adopted, but it was never a topic that we could discuss. At one point, he asked me if the pain I was in might have something to do with adoption and I vehemently said, “no. Absolutely not.” Like, it was territory that I really was not equipped to step into at that point in time.
Mike: That's what we need. We need someone to say, “all this is stemming from adoption.” Don't ask us, you know?
Bruce: Right. But I think my nervous system at the time would not have been able to accommodate that reality. It would have been too much. And that whole process was just of confronting that raging inferno without the language or the context
or any understanding was a form of retraumatization as well. So, it was really kind of compounding itself in the moment.
Mike: Did you think you had to leave Chicago [00:15:00] to forge an identity? Did you leave for school?
Bruce: Yeah, I left for school, but we had moved across the country at that point in time. So, I had spent three years in Houston, Texas by then.
So, and I went back to the Midwest for school, which was I basically spent my junior year of high school daydreaming every single day about running away from home. It was what sustained me through that, that year. And then it was my senior year when I found Ayn Rand and I found a neighbor friend who was very much into Ayn Rand as well.
So, the two of us just did this kind of deep dive, not into, just into her novels, but her philosophy books as well. But, no, I'd never considered searching until this relationship ended when I was in my twenties. And that put me in touch with a level of conscious pain and awareness that I had never confronted before.
And then there was this voice that came up inside me that was so clear and so immediate that said, “I have to find my [00:16:00] mom.” I don't consciously remember ever thinking that prior to that point in time. So, that's what I went about doing.
Mike: Do you think this relationship ending had something to do with where you were?
Or could you track it back to? Something about adoption? Like you were unavailable or you were too lost or - I don't want to psychoanalyze everything. Was she's like, “look, I'm not your mom, right?”
Bruce: No, there was not even that level of awareness within the relationship. It was my mid-twenties.
Mike: That’s what you do.
Bruce: I had a little bit of 12-step work through AA and Al Anon at that time. I was starting to find some language. I was starting to do some inner work, but I was really just at the beginning of it. So, I had really no context for what was happening. I just know that I allowed myself to be loved into a deeper level than I ever had been before.
[00:17:00] So, the relationship took me to new territory inside myself and really vulnerable territory wasn't aware of how thin the ice was that I was skating in allowing myself to be that vulnerable. And, so, when the relationship ended, I basically fell through that ice.
Mike: Then you realized you had to search.
Bruce: It was just crystal clear at that point in time. Yeah. I was very much crippled in the relationship. I just had a narrow space in which I lived and that's what ultimately ended the relationship was I needed it to stay within a certain confines and stepping out into the world in a deeper way in the relationship just felt too threatening to me with where my nervous system was at the time.
My girlfriend at the time, she really was kind of finding herself in different ways and was really wanting to go out in the world and [00:18:00] explore. And I was still very much needing to stay hidden. The relationship was untenable because of that, even though I think we cared about each other quite deeply.
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Bruce: So, that launched me into my search. This was the mid to late-90s. And, we didn't have the search resources that we certainly have today. It was sort of the dawn of the Internet at the time. And I remember I bought one of the first laptops that was ever produced.
And, somehow, I realized that this was going to be a tool that I could use for searching. And I found this Internet mailing list called AIML - Adoptee Internet Mailing List – very, very crude kind of precursor to what eventually would become our social media today. And there were adoptees on there that were sharing posts. They would go through a moderator and they would get publicly listed.
So, I'd come home from work every night and check in on that list. I was finding community, even though I was still at such a superficial level of, of understanding of, of just how expansive this, this wound of relinquishment and adoption is. At the same time, I'd reached out for my non-identifying information from the Lutherans welfare services that I was adopted through and that's basically useless. I did get a letter that was handwritten by my foster mother. I was in foster care for ten days prior to my adoption and, and she was just describing various aspects of how I behaved and how I slept and how I ate and I don't know that it ever got passed on.
It was designed to be passed on to my adoptive parents and I don't know that it ever was passed on, but it was pretty significant for me, but really not that much information. I went through the whole process of through the courts getting my adoption decree. And whatever other document, documentation I could get, I remember getting, I think, it was the adoption decree and seeing this big stamp on it that said, IMPOUNDED, which even to this day, something in my heart just shudders at seeing that or just talking about it.
Mike: Can I ask you something? How's your relationship to authority growing up? Because I thought all authority was BS. A lot of it stems from just this institutional - being pushed away by these institutions. But to me, growing up, I just thought all authority was BS - the typical rebel attitude against authorities.
Bruce: Yes. I didn't tolerate authority too well. And my adoptive father was somewhat of a hollow dictator. So, I ended up being pretty much alienated, certainly for most of my adult life. I never could have gone into the military. That just never would have worked for me. The level of discipline and respect for authority there would not have sat well with me.
Mike: It's only recently I've been able, I've been able to think, well, maybe there is some good authority. Like only in the last five years.
Bruce: Oh, I'm starting to embrace the positive aspects of authority and even like in government, like imagining ways that we can we can do authority that really has an authentic invested interest in people.
I think there's ways to do that. I think we're a long way off from that, but, yeah, I think there's ways with the appropriate amount of vulnerability that leadership can be a really positive thing.
Mike: So, you searched; you found.
Bruce: Right. So, I had gotten my adoption decree and they white out the identifying information, but I could see through it and I could see my mom's last name.
It's a very common Scandinavian Midwestern name though - Swanson. And, again, like I said, there weren't that many tools at the time, but through this Internet mailing list, I discovered an investigator who would offer his services. And even though I didn't really try that hard on my own, it seemed like this was a logical next step.
And so I contacted him and, and he agreed to help me out. He was actually located in Chicago, although I think he worked nationally as well. But then he got back to me in three days and apologized for it taking so long and provided me with so much information about my identity, that it was truly unsettling how much information he had access to about me that I had no idea even existed.
Through that, I was able to find my, my birth name, Brian Keith Swanson. And he was the first one who, who informed me of what my name was at birth, if I remember correctly.
Mike: How long does it take to process hearing your name for the first time?
Bruce: I'm still working on it. And like with my mom, for the longest time, I could just call her by her first name. It's only been in the past three or four years that I actually refer to her as mom. That is a whole new identity for her and for me.
Mike: How was it regarding the name Brian? Were you like, “oh yeah, that makes sense. That fits better.”
Bruce: It's interesting that the name I grew up with is a BR name as well. It is interesting that at work sometimes, I work with a lot of people on various projects at different times. So, I get to know somebody and then I won't work with them for two or three years.
And sometimes I'll see those people in the hallway. And there have been times when people don't remember my name. And what they call me is Brian.
Mike: And they don't know that that's your birth name.
Bruce: And they have no idea that I've even adopted. So I think that's kind of interesting. So, maybe from that perspective, it is a part of my biological identity that they sense in some way.
I didn't have any strong feelings about the name. I did ultimately find out that I was named after two members of the Rolling Stones.
Mike: Brian Jones.
Bruce: Brian Jones and Keith Richards, I remember thinking like I was never a Stones fan. I didn't carry that as an identity or pride in that or anything like that. My musical interests were a little bit different.
Mike: Did you find out you come from a family of engineers?
Bruce: When I got that information and the investigator, he warned me. He said, “just take your time with this information.” And he did not have to warn me about that. I knew my nervous system enough by that point in time that I knew I needed to sit with this information and let it just infiltrate down into my cells a little before I could do anything with it.
And I waited about six months and then sent my mom a written letter that coincided with my 30th birthday. Then, I got something back from her a couple of weeks later. Reunion was unfolding beautifully. We started getting to know each other just through mail, initially.
I did go out and I met her the following year. It was about a year and a half later. I drove out to the Midwest and so we got to meet face to face. She was somebody that loved children and so - after I was born, she was a junior in high school - she ended up graduating and immediately got married right out of high school and then had three more kids.
So, I was able to meet all three of my half siblings when I went out there. So, that was really, really wonderful. But the family - there were no engineers in the family that I'm aware of. And I did then pursue looking for my birth father as well. My mom had no reservations about sharing that information with me.
She did warn me that he was not totally trustworthy. And I just kind of shrugged that off and just forged ahead and, and sent him a letter. He responded in a very positive way. So, I was developing a relationship with him as well. But he was not at all career-wise in any kind of - he went from, I think, kind of job-to-job.
He wove quite a story that ultimately ended up being untrue. I'm still kind of coming to terms with that because it seemed as if he was actually believing what he was telling me. And then I found out early on that he was also adopted and there's still a small part of me that is even questioning that. I'm assuming that it's true, but given the level of his untrustworthiness, I'm not entirely sure that it's true. But I'm going on the assumption that it is.
And certainly his behavior, I think, would suggest that there was some unresolved trauma there because he basically he had created a whole fantasy life for himself, including telling me that I had two half siblings from him and one of which was an engineer in my same field and the other of which was a famous movie actress and proceeded to tell me lots of details about their lives.
Mike: Your siblings or his siblings?
Bruce: My siblings. Yeah. His other children. He may have had other children based on what my maternal relatives have told me. I did an Ancestry DNA search hoping to try to make some connections with anybody that might be out there on my paternal side, but have yet to find anybody.
They would have been other young women that he had gotten pregnant in high school.
Mike: Since you found both of them and you connected, I assume your sense of identity is transformed somehow and has coalesced into something maybe more solid and you have a better idea of who you are. This thing about fusing the original, the pre-search self and the post-search self is something I deal with.
I'm trying to live more and more from the both/perspective, not an either/or perspective. And as a young person, in growing up, even well into my adult years, the world was very much an either/or world. I think I'm going to be continuing to form an identity for probably the rest of my life, given how much it was fractured from the beginning.
That used to be very unsettling for me, and I'm really embracing the fact that I'll be healing this wound for the rest of my life. There's a great deal of relief in that because I think on some level I felt like I needed to figure it out before I could really be fully alive. And now I realize I can move towards being fully alive while I'm still doing all of this work.
I think for me, there's so many tools out there now. But there would be times that I would go through where there would be things that would come up in me that basically felt so confining that I couldn't imagine my life going on, almost as if I was just being compressed out of existence.
And despite that, various levels of, of grief and despair and rage, it's always seemed like there was this, and, and I wouldn't necessarily experience it in the moment, but I would eventually come around to this belief that - if life allowed me to be here, then life would offer some way to allow me to stay.
And so, I believed that if I could just find the right tool, or the right, community, or the right therapeutic approach, or just the right touch from another person, that that would be enough to get me through. That's how I've been operating and getting by.
Mike: You're plugged into the adoptee world.
Bruce: Yeah, I found the broader adopted community about four years ago, and I just stumbled onto one of Haley's episodes that happened to come through my YouTube feed. It was transformational and that led me into the broader community, a community that I just never knew existed. I had a smaller community of other adoptees the previous ten years, but it wasn't enough to bolster that raging inferno that was inside me.
I needed a very wide array of resources to help me build that would support me and my healing process and support all of the directions I needed to go in and the depths I needed to descend to in order to find out who I am.
Mike: The raging inferno - was it a lot of rage?
Were you lashing out at people? That and depression?
Bruce: Right. Most of how it manifested for me was in the acting in, not acting out. So, my identity was really wrapped around a lot of my, wounded parts. So, I carried an inordinate amount of shame in me. So, my identity would be wrapped around that or my identity would be heavily wrapped around being a traumatized person, which really interfered with my relationship with my wife and my kids.
Mike: That makes it a challenge for me to even do the show because I think people say, “oh, you're wallowing.” I always wanted to talk about secrecy and identity. I don't know. Is that wallowing? I'm trying to get clarity.
Bruce: Well, I think sometimes if people really go to the depths of their despair and their pain, it can make a lot of other people pretty uncomfortable.
I'm okay with that now. If the depth of my grief makes you uncomfortable, that's not my problem. I'm committed to my own healing. And I will pursue my own healing for as long as I need to, and I will go as deep as I need to. And I will find community that supports that healing. Yeah. I didn't create this mess.
And sorry if it's messy for me to try to fix it. He told you guys made this mess.
Bruce: Exactly. And when I started my own recovery process back in the early 90s, I literally felt like I had to do it all myself - like I had to write the literature, I had to do everything - produce the materials that I needed to rely on to heal.
That's how isolated I felt inside. Now I'm totally embracing community and realizing that the community is absolutely essential. Like you said, I didn't get here on my own.
Mike: Yeah, I didn't run away from home when I was five days old.
Bruce: But this was a monumental betrayal. Separating a mother and a baby at birth is an act of violence against both.
And that wasn't my fault. And I need as much community as I need. I need as much time as I need. I need as much resources as I need in order to heal this, this wound. And move forward and claim who I am - claim and reclaim - because I think a big part of this is not recovery, but discovery, given that this wound happened at such an early stage of development, there was no self to begin with. So, I'm really discovering a self.
Mike: It's uncomfortable. I find it uncomfortable. I feel like I'm doing things that are not me but really they might very well be me.
Bruce: Yeah, I think for, for me, and I know I would feel this throughout my recovery process where I would start to feel a new sense of identity coming forward and coming to the surface and it felt very foreign to me and it felt in some ways because I had been so out of touch with it and it had been repressed for so long, it felt like an enemy.
And now with all that I'm doing, all of the tools that I have including a lot of expanded states work, there's this sense of discovery in me and this sense of curiosity about who I am and this openness to letting that just unfold. I'm really kind of turning it over to my body and getting out of my head in an effort to just allow my authenticity to come forward in the context of having a lot of support and getting a lot of mirroring and, and reflection back to help me form that identity.
I had a therapist once who said, “we need other adoptees, like we need oxygen.”
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Season 2 is underway. Thanks for being here. See you next week.