Adoption Trauma, Healing And The Body’s Memory with Guest Julie Brumley

“You’re so lucky you were adopted.” Most people mean it as kindness, but for many adoptees it lands like a shut door. We’re joined by Julie Brumley, a trauma-informed adoptee coach, CEO of Coming Home to Self, and host of The Resilience Project podcast, to talk about the part of adoption that often stays invisible: primal wound, relinquishment trauma, and the lifelong search for safety and belonging.

We get real about how adoption trauma can fuel addiction risk and behavioral patterns like codependency, people-pleasing, and the fear that closeness equals getting left. Julie shares pieces of her own story, including how grief and loss cracked things open, and why talk therapy can miss the root when a therapist isn’t adoption competent. We also unpack how well-meaning “gratitude” messaging can silence legitimate grief over losing a first family, culture, heritage, and medical history.

From there, we go practical. Julie explains why somatic healing and nervous system regulation matter, how body memory can drive choices long after the mind forgets, and what it looks like to learn the language of felt sensations through breathwork and other somatic tools. We also talk about identity and reunion, including the powerful moment of seeing your features mirrored in biological family and what DNA testing can reveal about heritage.

If you care about trauma-informed adoption support, adoptee mental health, and real-world healing practices, this conversation is for you. 

Subscribe, share this with someone who needs a new perspective, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Good morning and welcome to Breakfast of Choices, life stories of transformation from rock bottom to rock solid. I am here with my guest, Julie Brumley. Julie is actually the host of the Resilience Project podcast. She's a podcast host as well. Julie, I'm gonna get into a whole story here. It's just gonna blow both of us away, but first I want to go ahead and just introduce her a little bit. Julie's a trauma-informed adoptee coach. She's been coaching men and women for more than 15 years to overcome addictive behaviors and heal the primal trauma of abandonment. She is the CEO of Coming Home to Self, a company dedicated to helping adoptees heal. After her own birth mother tried to abort her twice, she found herself frozen in an unconscious trauma response for decades until she found the power of somatic trauma healing. Now she uses somatics, nervous system regulation, personal experience, and her master's and counseling to help other adult adoptees find their way out of their own trauma and into a life of radical self-belonging. Oh my gosh. Okay. Julie, that's amazing. That's literally that is some good, good, amazing stuff right

Welcome And A Small World Story

SPEAKER_02 1:12

there. So I'm gonna bring up a story on how Julie and I actually came to be on this podcast together today because it's so crazy. You hear people and we say it ourselves all the time, what a small world this is, right? Julie actually lives in Morgan, Utah, and I have a very good friend that lives in Washington, literally up by Canada. Okay. So I have known Teresa for more than 45 years. We call each other Shorty. I know we laughed about that.

SPEAKER_03 1:42

We did.

SPEAKER_02 1:42

Julie and I did. We call each other Shorty and have been through so many things, ups and downs of life, so many crazy stories. We we don't need to get into any of that, but she is a lifelong friend of mine, and she was adopted, and she's struggled with some of those things all of her life. And as children, we never really talked about it, right? We didn't talk about a lot of things. We we coped, we masked, we stuffed, we partied a lot, we did a lot of drugs together. You know, those are the things that we did to cope with some of our issues. We know better now. When you know better, you do better, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:18

But in Teresa's search the last few years, she has found some of her family. She actually found her adoptive mother, she found some of her family. Like, literally, y'all, this has been a crazy journey for her. She's she's literally should be a detective. And she found Julie through Facebook, and you all are actually related. Yeah, it's so weird.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

It's wild. I mean, I remember at one point she messaged me through Messenger and was like, hey, cuz. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And she she made the connection and helped me understand that she, so my brother-in-law is her basically, I think, first cousin through marriage. And then her, so his dad is her uncle. So from what I understand. And so she saw his picture and and she said, Are you related to and said his name? And I was like, Well, yeah, by marriage, she said, Girl, we're related. I was like, This is you can't, you can't make this stuff up.

SPEAKER_02 3:20

I know, I know. And Facebook, right? Facebook, um, you know, there's there's a lot of good stuff that comes from social media too. There's a lot of, as we know, negativity and a lot of not great things that come from social media, but there has been a lot of good things too. So I guess with life, we got to take the good with the bad, right? We do, yep. Had she not found you and connected us, we we probably would have never connected. So it's just crazy the way the world goes around, right? The way that we find each other is just pure, pure insanity. Yeah. Teresa gave me a book a few years ago um called Primal Wound about adoption. And I was able to share that. I work for South Coast Behavioral Health. I work for a substance use treatment center. Um, and we are a medically assisted detox as well as inpatient treatment. And I have a lot of books, and I would bring books in for my clients, you know, for group. I was at that time group facilitator. And uh, one of those books was Primal Wound. And I was able to let several people read that book that also struggled with some of the same things from being adopted. So I can't wait to get into this today and hear your story and just be able to share some of those, not only your powerful story, but some of those resources, life resources for people that they can really find some healing through that journey. So hi Julie. Hi. How are you? So good to be here. We just got through the biggest technical difficulty, y'all. And I messed up the whole morning with technical difficulty. So these are just things that happen in life, right? We just gotta roll with it, laugh about it, and move on. Yeah. Here we are.

unknown 4:57

Here we are.

SPEAKER_02 4:57

We mangled, we got back, and it's okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:00

So tell us, tell us a little bit about you. I would love to tell you about me. Thank you. So what's interesting is you just talked about giving the primal wound to people at that center, the recovery center. What I don't know if you know this, but adoptees statistically are two times more likely to be addicted to a substance, to something to escape into. Uh, and there's many other statistics that a lot of people don't know, but that one I think is really interesting. And one of the reasons before I even knew that my adoption had impacted me, that I went into addictive behaviors and studying that in my master's program was because my father was an alcoholic and the one that raised me, so the one that adopted me, and he actually died of a heart attack at 45 years old. And I was 15 when that happened. And so you can imagine how impressionable a young 15-year-old who didn't really understand the underlying trauma she had experienced from adoption, losing somebody like that, it messed me up. But I don't think I realized it messed me up until my early 20s. And I was able to work through all of that. But what's interesting is I didn't choose to go into a substance. I was behavioral. So my

Why Adoption Links To Addiction

SPEAKER_00 6:15

addiction had to do with people. And what I mean, and people are like, what does that even mean? So codependency, relationships, uh, and it's it's messed up. Like when you can't get your own worth from yourself, you get it from other people. That's basically getting validation from others. Yeah. Totally. And really, we know from the study that's been done in the addiction world that that's a very real part. We're enabling an enabling part of the addiction circle that exists. And so anyway, I was married to an addict for a while. And so I definitely have a lot of experience with that. And then I've been working, I had been working with those behaviors for a really long time before I chose to actually switch to working with adoptees. And part of that was because I felt this real pull toward that when I realized how impacted we were by that primal trauma that we experienced, that I didn't actually truly understand until probably six years ago. I knew around 2010 when I found my birth mother that there was some impact, but I didn't understand it at that point. My kids were small, I was too busy raising them, homeschooling them, doing the things that I needed to do, getting my masters during that time. So none of that really settled with me until she died. And when she died in 2020, it made me realize I think I have unfinished business and I need to deal with this. And that's when like a whole can got broken open. And I was like, now what? And so a lot happened from then on.

SPEAKER_02 7:52

So you were coaching um people with substance abuse, right? And so did you did you notice that repeat? You were getting a lot of people that were adopted in your action.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Okay. I didn't initially notice that, and partly because I wasn't looking for that. And now that I look back, I can see those people never said they were. But what's really, really interesting about that, Joe, is we don't. How do I explain this? When we go to therapy the first time, it's not because we're adopted, usually. Oh, because we notice negative patterns in our lives and we need help. That's the issue. What's so interesting? I went through three, four therapists, and the fourth one finally narrowed it down and was like, adoption's your issue. We need to go there. Nobody even brought it up before, knowing I was adopted, but nobody even brought it up. And so for years, I'm circling the drain of what's really going on in my life when it's way down here. And I needed somebody to be able to have the professional understanding. She was not an adoptee, but she was adoption competent to be able to find that. So I think for me, my degree, I got it in 2014. The switch for me to adoption to help people with adoptee stuff didn't happen until 2023. That's when that actually hit me. Like, I think this is what I need to do. It was like this lightning bolt from God, quite honestly. I was like, you need to change and this is what you need to do. And that's when I started making the connections, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 9:34

Yeah, absolutely. That's amazing too, because you know, I feel like we all, God lets us know where we're meant to be, right? And so that was just the journey until you found it and went, oh my gosh, that that is where I'm supposed to be. And that's beautiful. That's how it's supposed to happen, right? That's mission, that's purpose, that's service, that's all of all of it, and that's beautiful. So thank you for kind of explaining that. Um so go ahead and kind of get into that if you would.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

You were you were adopted as a baby? Yeah, oh yeah, you want that. I can tell you that. So I was adopted at seven weeks old. So, you know, still very young. As you read in my bio, my birth mother attempted to abort me twice between weeks 12 and 16. And that was in 1973, literally three months after Roby Wade passed. So really, really interesting. And I think I had to grieve that, that feeling of unwantedness that really did come along with my adoption. A lot of adoptees feel that way because they don't know their birth mom's story, right? Meaning their birth mom may have been forced to give them up back then or place them is what we we call it now. Giving them up people don't like anymore. But for me, she really didn't want me. Like she she definitely tried to get rid of me. And then basically what happened is they found two different STDs, I don't know, STIs, I don't know what they call them now. And each time she had to go and clear that up before she could come back. That's the reason why she attempted twice. And so once

The Primal Wound And Unwantedness

SPEAKER_00 11:12

she came back for that second time and found out there's still something here, you're too late now. Term-wise, you're gonna have to come up with another option. And that's when she chose adoption. And so the way I have really been able to internalize that is I was supposed to be here for sure. There's a reason why I'm here and I want to fulfill that calling, that purpose, as you were just calling or explaining, talking about. So there was that, and then I think when I actually found that out, when I found that specific detail out about my story, I was in my and I had just found her, my birth mother, and hadn't really had a conversation with her. But how do you do that? Hi, so you attempted to abort me twice. What was that like for you? How do you even go there? Right. And so when I found that out, it I remember it vividly where I was, the room I was in, how I asked my my husband at the time to leave so that I could deal with the emotions that I was feeling because it was mine to deal with. My brain felt like it had fragmented into pieces. And then I immediately had a headache. And it has taken me years, that was 2010. It's now 16 years later, to really put those pieces back together and make sense of them. No wonder I've chosen the addictive behaviors that I have. She was also an addict, not surprising. Right. And then my um half-sister also struggles with that from her. So I really, in a lot of ways, you know, I try to stay away from this trope, but I feel like I was rescued from that. Now, I wouldn't say that adoption is rescue. That is not what I'm trying to say. But for me, if I would have been raised in that house, I don't know what would have happened to me. Surprisingly, I chose addicts after that. So I don't think, I mean, it you know, it's within you. It's just so genetic.

SPEAKER_02 13:15

Yeah, genetic, yeah, genetic. That's real, right? We we can't deny the genetic side of it as well. You know, I know a lot of people don't understand addiction, but there is that side of it when we're predisposed. Um, and it doesn't mean that you'll you'll become an an addict. It doesn't mean that. Um, it's just there. It is there, and it and it's two times more likely. That's exactly the statistic, right? That's just that is it. And it and it may be more than that, but that's the truly yeah, hard to find, hard to really, that's a hard one to really determine, right? To narrow down, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I know with Teresa, and when her and I started talking about the adoption, and there were some of the things that she said that we don't really think about that we say to people that are adopted, right? One of them I remember is is, oh, you're so lucky that you were adopted. I mean, you're so you know, that that you are lucky that that a family wanted you. How does that come out for someone though, that's been adopted? Because she was explaining it to me that that's comes out very um when you're dealing with some of the pain from that and you don't know it, that one like really hits a nerve.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

It really does, but but this is the problem because our hurt, our harm was done before a lot of us had actual words for it. And that's what primal trauma actually speaks to. So primal trauma, primal wound speaks to is that it gives us words that we never had. So when you ask that question, it's hard to actually put to words because we don't understand it. When somebody says, you should be grateful, you're so lucky, we go, yes, and it's that whole both and thing that we hold, but we don't know how to communicate it when it happens when we're younger. When we hear, no, you're so lucky, you have great parents. It's like, well, I also lost a set of parents too. Like, do you realize that that's what this means? Like, not only did I lose a set of parents, I lost a culture, I lost a heritage. I had no idea what I was ethnically until I was in my 40s because I finally did DNA when I felt comfortable. That's another thing. A lot of us feel like we are being disloyal to our adoptive families when we do stuff like that. And it's like, you're so lucky, how could you do that to them? That's so harmful to them or hurtful to them. It's like, but what about my hurt? Like, what about the things that I experienced? You know?

SPEAKER_02 15:48

It's not intentionally trying to hurt anybody, it's trying to find some things out and figure some things out about yourself that you've always wanted to know. Right. And I can see both sides of that. I can't remember it's like, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:01

Of course. And I wanted, I was so careful. I mean, my dad at this point was obviously no longer with us, but my mom definitely initially really struggled with that. And I had to wait a little bit, but I I am a very like, if I want something, I'm gonna do it. And she knows that about me. And so she was just like, if you're gonna do this, I don't. This was back when I was in high school. There was, or not high school, um, college, there was a show called Find Your Family on ABC Family. And I wanted to be a part of that show because I wanted to find out my information, and she was just horrified. I do not want to be on television, I don't want to have anything to do with this. And I'm like, but it's my story. I want to know my story. And so I decided to not do that and just leave it alone. And I didn't actually, and partly because I don't want to hurt her. Sure. She raised me, I appreciate her so much for sure. But what people don't understand is when you are adopted and you separate, you are separated that primal trauma, the relinquishment trauma from the only thing you ever knew biologically, and put into this sounds really horrible, but genetic strangers' hands. That's literally what happens. There's not a bond that is created there. And attachment takes time to build when there's been seven weeks of multiple care. I had four different people that were caring for me in four weeks. I can't imagine as a baby, I probably was just doing my best to survive. Like, who are you? I don't know you either. Are you gonna stay? Like, this is now, of course, I didn't have words then, but I know that I was cycling through survival during that time now because I noticed in my life how much I did that. Fight, flight, fawn, freeze. Well, I was doing it all all the time, unconsciously. And that's why I chose the relationships that I chose, because I didn't understand what was happening in my body. And I didn't even understand it intellectually until later. So it was once I was able to connect those two things that healing was able to actually occur. Hopefully that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 18:10

That makes sense. And it's and it's honestly, I don't think fascinating is the right word. It's just powerful to have that knowledge to understand that somebody might be going through something that we don't have any idea about. When you have you haven't walked in someone else's shoes, you don't know, right? We all have a lot of opinions and we all have good advice and unsolicited advice and great opinions and all of those things, but you don't know till you know. And so when it's explained that way, it sounds very different from coming from someone that's gone through it, right?

SPEAKER_00 18:47

Right. It's the lived experience, you know? And one of the things that I teach all the time to my clients is this whole idea of recognizing their felt sensations. That's not something that a lot of people help you do with trauma. Now, we know with somatic experiencing, Peter Levine, the work that he did, helps us to be able to, you know, that whole waking the tiger, his whole idea was releasing it, learning how. Well, where is it held? In our body. In our body, right? Right. So we can't talk right. We can't talk our way out of trauma. Insight alone is not going to heal our problem. So for adoption, for those that have dealt with adoption or have been adopted, whatever, adoptive parents need to understand, and I hate even saying it this way, but that a lot of kids are ticking time bombs. Who knows when this trauma is going to show up in their life? And they need to be educated. Just like people need to understand and be sensitive to the birth mother's plight. They're 37 times more likely to attempt suicide because of what they experienced. This whole constellation triangle, as it's called, the triad, needs special

Somatic Healing And Body Memory

SPEAKER_00 20:02

attention and care, in my personal opinion, from what I've seen now. I can't unsee it. It's it's really, really sad. And so that's the reason why I want so much to help and support and hold space, because when you don't know how to connect to your body, you're not going to be able to know how to heal. And then the voice is what connects it, right? The voice connects the mind to the body. If you can't articulate that because you don't have the language, how are you going to be able to actually heal?

SPEAKER_01 20:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:31

100%, 100%. So I um, one of my very good friends is a breath work facilitator. Ugh, I love breath work. Right. And so I've been doing that for a couple of years, doing a guided breath work. And um, we've taken that into the treatment center, and it's phenomenal healing, right? Somatic healing, body keeps the score, getting it out, getting that trauma out of our body. We we weren't taught how to breathe correctly, right? Um, God gave us breath and it actually can heal us, and we just didn't know. We didn't know what we didn't do, right? So when I was talking with Teresa, it's been about two years ago, two years, a year and a half ago now, that we really started talking that through. Um, we really spent some time on it. And I was trying to, in my mind, really put myself in her shoes, right? I think just really trying to go, you know, because it's real easy to say you're 50-something years old, like people just want to say, get over it. You know what I mean? Totally get over it, move on. Yeah. But there's a reason you have to go there, right? And so I was really trying to put myself in that place. And the only way I could do it, and I don't know if this is right, wrong, or gonna come off terrible, but I'm just gonna go with it. I was looking at you know, when animals, babies, and a mom leaves her, and it just it happens with baby tigers or yeah, baby chimpanzees. A mom doesn't want to be the mom of that animal. We don't know why, and she just leaves it, and then they They rescue that baby and they try to pair it up with somebody new, right? Some people can, some animals can bond, some cannot. Some are so mean to it, they push it aside, it's not part of the tribe or whatever it may be. And then sometimes you have a successful match, right? And so that's in my head how I was trying to really take myself where she was at because I've known her her whole life, and I was really trying to understand because I could see that it was really bothering her. And so that's how I made it make sense to me.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

I don't know if that's no, I mean, I think that's good. I don't know if you've ever heard of the still face experiment. Have you ever heard of that? I have not. I have not. So it was, if I remember right, it was Bowlby who did this from my studies, but I could be totally wrong. Basically, what he did was he wanted to see if a child would be okay if his parent just removed emotional connection. And so what he did, this was back in, I'm gonna totally master this, but I think it was like the 70s or 80s. He had a baby in a stroller and then a mom with that baby, the mom, interacting, emotionally connecting, like cooing, enjoying, really interacting. And then he made her go still and not even respond or have any type of reaction to her. That baby lost its ever-loving mind, like reaching and screaming and crying and trying to get the mom to interact until he told her to actually re-engage. Then once she engaged, the baby calmed down. Just something that little, and that's with a mother and an actual baby. Imagine you separating a baby and putting them with some random stranger that absolutely loves the baby and wants the baby. Now, there are some horrible adoption stories that I've heard with the clients that I work with that I don't even, I mean, you can't even make the steak up.

SPEAKER_02 23:57

It's wrong. I have heard several of them myself, but I'm sure I know exactly what you're saying. It's horrific.

SPEAKER_00 24:04

Why were you even allowed to adopt? Like, what is wrong with our system? Is part of where I go. Thankfully, I had great adoptive parents. I did. Even though my dad was an alcoholic, he was very loving. I mean, he left me early, but either way, I was taken care of. Didn't matter. The connection was not there. I it took a while. And what's interesting, I slept for 24 hours after my adoptive mom brought me home. She could not wake me up. I was seven weeks old and she called the doctor. I don't know what to do. What's wrong? And they were like, well, just let her sleep. She'll wake up when she needs to, but she needs to eat. 24 hours isn't gonna kill her. She probably just needs to rest. What happened in my foster home that I needed to sleep that long? I have no idea. I have no you weren't safe.

SPEAKER_02 24:51

You didn't feel safe, right? You didn't feel safe, and you got somewhere where all of a sudden your body was safe and it could go to sleep, you know? Yeah. Babies don't have words, right? And so we it's very easy to tell ourselves they don't have feelings, they don't know any better. They're a baby, they don't feel, they don't know, they don't even see at that time, right? They can't even see. Well, you've been in someone's body for nine or ten months, right? Bonding with that person. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 25:18

Whether they wanted you or not. It's what you knew.

SPEAKER_02 25:20

Yes. And that's all you knew. That's that's been your only life up until this moment, right? And you come out, that's already traumatic. That's a whole nother thing, right? Dramatic from the womb out, right? And and then you're in in the world, and the first thing we want you to do is cry, right? We smack you so you cry. That's the first that's your first emotion, right? You're you gotta cry now, you're in the world. And so, I mean, just think of that as a whole. And then now you don't have that person's body that you were living in, and you're up, you're out here in the cold and it's loud, and all so that in itself, like we don't know because we're we don't remember. And I think there's a reason that we don't, right? Maybe there's a reason that we're not supposed to know or remember. I think it was by design. I really feel like that was by design. I don't know if that's correct or not correct. I've never studied it. That's my own feeling that that was by design, right? Yeah, and so there's just some trauma with the whole birth. And then now, and then now you don't have that person, that bond, that whatever, you know, that warmth that you had and that you built with that person is gone. And so now we've got to try to what build it with someone else, build it with someone new, hand it off, put in a blanket, here you go. I mean, God bless the adoptive parents. God bless them. And and I understand all of that too. They wanted for the most part, most 99. We'll say 99, you know, 80, 80, 20, 99, however we want to go. It's a good story, right? They wanted that baby, they've been trying, they couldn't have children. Those are the stories that we hear that we love, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:54

Yeah, those are the stories we hear, but we don't a lot of times hear the stories that I hear all the time in my practice.

SPEAKER_02 27:00

Absolutely, yeah. So those are stories that we hear. So in our minds, we think, well, why wouldn't they be happy? Why wouldn't they be grateful? Why wouldn't they think, oh my gosh, they're so lucky. They never know what they were could have been born into, right? Yes. I mean, I logically we can get that, right? But emotionally, you don't know till you know.

SPEAKER_00 27:20

So Right and I think that's part of the issue with adoptees, is usually even even like people that were adopted in the 80s have very similar 90s even experiences as I do, which I find really, really fascinating. But there's two things that you said that I want to highlight. One, we may not remember, but our body does. It holds the memory. You know, it's that whole idea of Bessel Vanderkoop when he wrote In the Body Keeps a Score, it's that idea. Absolutely. We've found through research that that is absolutely true. And we hold our birth mother's DNA in our bodies for generations. So it's it's not surprising that we would experience what we experience. So I think there's that. And then the second thing is a lot of adoptive parents, and I've worked with some, don't really realize, especially if they have been infertile, how much their own grief and them not dealing with their own grief will impact their adopted child, because a lot of those parents don't even understand that how that child feels subconsciously is a replacement baby. And that is so sad to have to hold. Like you used me to replace what you didn't get, or they've had a stillborn baby and they they they slip up and say things that you know, in the heat of the moment they shouldn't say, and then that baby or the the child feels awful, like you didn't really want me, you just replaced me. And so, or I just was a replacement. And so I think there's those things are kind of important to understand. And so when an adoptee talks or an adoptive parent talks to me about those things and they're struggling, I will ask them, have you dealt with your own grief? Have you done your own work? Because that in and of itself is gonna help the adoptee that you're raising more than anything else.

SPEAKER_02 29:09

So that's so amazing to hear that. Really, really beautiful knowledge to be sharing. Thank you for that. Because we don't think of those things. The average person does not think of those things, right? At all. And that's that's something definitely thought-provoking for sure. Uh thank you for that. Uh so you you have lost your mother and your father now. How did those things show up for you? Because you said you really didn't start dealing with this until 2020. Tell me what kind of happened.

SPEAKER_00 29:46

Yeah. So there's been a couple of things. So what's interesting is I lost my birth mother and my adopted father. So it's so crazy with us because we have multiple different parents. Yeah. So I mean, it's I'm living in my birth father's basement right now. So I mean, that I know. That's a whole other story. So found him five years ago. Wonderful man. But so I've, you know, I've lost those, and I've also recently in the last few weeks lost my my mother-in-law, who was very much like a mother to me. So lots of stuff. But how that impacted me. 2010 was when I found my birth mom. 2020 was when she died. So there were 10, 10, 10 years that I had with her. And honestly, I probably saw her a handful of times. I knew that spending time with her was difficult. And she had a difficult time. I don't know how to describe it. There was, she was asking me to be her counselor. I'm like, no, no, no, that's not how this works. It just wasn't healthy. And I knew I needed to kind of distance myself

Grief And Divorce Meet Intimacy Fear

SPEAKER_00 30:49

from her. How it impacted me. My relationship. So I was married for 28 years and have been divorced for about two. So it's been, I have adult children. What I realized, my part, my responsibility in it was intimacy, scared the bejesus out of me. If I get close to you, you'll leave me. So I'm gonna do everything in my power to keep myself walled up and not be uninhibited because if I do that, you'll harm me. And that happened for years for me. I didn't know how to give myself in a way that allowed me to be uninhibited because of my fear. It was very, very fear-based. And so for years in my marriage, that was a point of contention. Not that I didn't want to, I did. I so did, but I didn't know how to feel safe in that kind of relationship, in a close, you know, let's be honest, sexual relationship. I just didn't. And it scared me so much. And I think that's how it impacted our relationship. There was much more to it, but I think my responsibility in it was I really started noticing in 2020, this is going to cause problems. He had been trying to sound the alarms for a lot of the time, but I wasn't ready. I didn't know how to deal with it. I was scared, very, very scared. I didn't know how to uncover all of this. So when it started, I started reading Primal Wound. And I would go to him and share parts of it like, oh my gosh, listen, and I'd be sobbing and he'd be sobbing and we'd be like, oh my gosh, this is it, you know. And unfortunately, his dad, my father-in-law, who was my dad for 15 years of my life, you know, after my dad had actually died, before I found my new dad. I mean, I'm telling you, you can't keep track of it. She died in 2020 as well as my birth mom. Both of them died within months of each other. And it really sent him spinning. And he just was not okay. And it ended up that all of those things combined with some things that he had done just separated us. And I think what I realized divorced us, really. So what I realized was I need to figure this out. And and really that key was the somatic piece. And I started finding that, uncovering that in 2022. But it was kind of too little, too late. It was at a time when my ex just felt like he had no more empathy left for me. Now he was dealing with his own stuff. And I started working on myself somatically. And for a whole year of 2022, I really focused on that. And as I did that, he got further and further away because, in a way, I was calling him up to do something that he wasn't ready to do. And so that just was really unfortunate. And now we are friends, we're able to have conversations, but that's how I noticed it showing up for me was that I was so afraid to deal with myself intimately, not just myself. I couldn't have a relationship with myself that was intimate. I didn't know how. And so learning how to do that through the somatic practices that I have had has been a, I don't like this phrase, but it's the truth. It's been a game changer. Yeah. I'm a totally different person because it is the truth.

SPEAKER_02 33:59

Yeah, it is the truth. And people don't really necessarily always believe it either. They're like, oh, come on now. How can laying a hand over your heart change you forever?

SPEAKER_00 34:06

I'm like, trust me, it can, but you just gotta work with me. I'll help you.

SPEAKER_02 34:10

It's so hard to explain breath work to people unless they actually do it. And people will say, I've done that before, I've done breath work, I've done this, I've done that, I've done DMT, I've done that. I'm like, no. It's this is different. This is from the inside out, healing yourself. Very hard to explain somatic to people that aren't really open to trying new things, right? And it can be scary. It can be scary to deal with yourself. It's scary, right? So you started doing that. You obviously saw the change in yourself. You started dealing with things, doing the work, right? And then, so what did you notice as the biggest shift for you?

SPEAKER_00 34:50

I think the biggest shift was when it was probably about two months into doing the somatic work that I started making the connection to where in my body my emotion was held. So as I moved up the vagus nerve and learned the different parts of those nerve bundles, people call them chakras, people call them whatever you want to call them, they exist. They're real, but they have their own little brain. And as I began to learn what each of them held, it was as if light bulbs began to go off. Because I'd been learning intellectually, insight, knowledge, all of this stuff for years. And it was almost as if I felt a whoosh go down into my body when I finally realized it all. And I was like, I get it. I understand it now. Not that I had arrived, that's not what I mean. It all made sense for the first. I get the chills when I even think about it. Yeah, I just got the chills. I just got the chills.

SPEAKER_02 35:46

It makes sense because it all comes together. It all comes together. That's like that whole like yeah, yeah. You know, and it's really, it's really, it's really real. It's yeah, it's very, very real.

Learning Your Body’s Signals

SPEAKER_02 36:02

And um it's peaceful. It's just peaceful.

SPEAKER_00 36:04

I don't know how to free. There's a freedom that I had never ever felt before. And honestly, it's helped me. This is gonna sound funny, but it's well, I don't think it'll sound funny. It's helped me in my parenting with my adult children. Like they will call me and be like, hey, so my stomach really hurts today, and I don't know why. And can you help me understand? And so I'll be like, okay, bud. So this is where ego lives. This is identity. Something's going on where you're feeling like you're not enough. And they'll be like, damn it. How do you even know that? That's exactly what happened today. I was feeling threatened in this, and my this girl that I liked, but I was like, okay, well, there you go. It kind of bothers them a little because they're like, this feels like voodoo, but it's not. It's it's the reality of what's going on.

SPEAKER_02 36:51

You hit it right there. You know, you saw my face and I saw your face. You hit it when you said it. And that is sometimes what people feel. They feel like, but it is God-led. It is God led. Our bodies were made by God, right? So I'm not any type of believer in voodoo, right? And so that doesn't come to me. I don't have that thought process. I'm not trying to take in negative. Maybe some people practice it in some kind of crazy different way. I don't know. I've never seen it. But people that believe in God and and are filled with the spirit, this is something different, right? It's something different. And it's not, it's not an it's a very positive thing when your mind and your body actually work together. It's a real thing. And being able to explain it sometimes, I know that everybody doesn't understand it. And I I get that. I just take that with a grain of salt. That's fine. You don't have to understand it. You don't have to try it. But you mentioned like your son will call you. My son struggles sometimes with stomach and with things. And I know it's anxiety, baby. You got anxiety and it's and it's in your stomach, right? We all struggle with things that live in us. Chronic stress, chronic stress that lives inside our bodies. How many people have autoimmune disorders now compared to what, how many years ago? 10? 30 years ago. Absolutely, totally. That that are all based around those things, right? All based around, and I know that because I lived it in my own body. Um, I was facing back surgery at 42, and I said, I am not having back surgery. I'm 42 years old. I'm not going to be crippled for the rest of my life. And I started having to like something's wrong wrong here. And it was chronic stress. And it was what I was going through in my life, who I was dealing with, what I was living through. Um, so I am there's nobody can tell me any different because look, y'all, I'm up walking around, running around, walk around the lake, do all I could not even get up off the floor some days. Yeah. So it's real hard to tell someone that's been through it that it's not real. Yeah. Totally.

SPEAKER_00 39:00

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that's what my boys both said. Both of them were like, you've you've proven to us that it is, that this is how God designed it to be. And we just need to learn the language. That's really what it is. When I help people understand it, all I'm telling them is you're learning the language of your body. It truly is learning a new language. It's just like Duolingo for the body. That's what we're doing here. And that's that's what's important. If you can figure that out, I'm telling, I'm not saying it's the be all end all, but it is definitely a good stepping stone.

SPEAKER_02 39:33

So certainly helps to be able to connect your body together.

unknown 39:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:38

And because everything lives in it. Our bodies are amazing, they really living creatures, right? And uh being able to connect everything in our bodies, and I am no master at it. I still research it, try different things, want to learn different things. There's a lot to our body. You could definitely get lost in it. If you've read Body Keeps the Score, yeah, that is that's a tough one to choke down.

SPEAKER_01 40:02

It's technical, yeah, steady.

SPEAKER_02 40:05

Yeah, it is, but it is so incredible when you can finally I had to do it in chunks, right? I used to do it in pages and do it in chunks and put it together with some other things that I was working on. And yeah, the the reality is we are all energy, and energy moves through us and it has to get through us. And when it's stuck, it's literally stuck. It's stuck, right? And it has to move through. You have to get it out. So I I tell people for lack of I mean, this is just who I am, raw and real. And you gotta puke it out, right? Yeah, you gotta puke it up, otherwise you keep choking on it. And that's just that's just the reality of it. So I'm I'm so excited that you that you are the somatic healing. I I was so excited when I don't know if Teresa knew what she was telling me when she was telling me. She does all this. Yeah, and I'm like, oh my gosh, I I can't wait to talk to her, you know. So I was so happy to connect with you today. It's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 41:01

Yeah, I've been really happy to connect with you too, Joe. I think it's really crucial for us to be able, especially like for the population that I'm trying to increase awareness of. You know, there's there's five to seven million of us in America alone, but it's five to seven. They don't even know for sure. That's the crazy thing. And these statistics that I share with you, there's statistics based upon that. You know what I mean? Like it it's it's very hard to grasp at what's going on with us because people, society has made it something you are so lucky. It is such a beautiful thing. And what we're trying to illuminate as the population is okay, but there's also a lot of underlying trauma, both and there's there's we feel lost, we've lost all of these things, but then there's also beautiful connections that we can make, sure. But it's we need to validate that the trauma is real, that the lived experience is real. And and what I have learned, I think that's extremely important.

SPEAKER_02 42:05

I do too. And like I said, I was really trying to get really trying to understand her and and really trying to like see it from a different perspective. And however, I was having to put it together to make it work with animals. I don't know where that came from, but I know it's good. Yeah, I could see it. Like I could, I have seen that before, right? We've seen videos where you know we

Changing The Adoption Narrative

SPEAKER_02 42:26

they've shown them to us in school where you know, this animal they were trying to bond it with this new mom, that kind of things, and it makes sense why they couldn't bond, right? Then it starts making sense and and then forced bonding. You were forced bonded, yeah, right? Yep. And again, yes, it's a beautiful thing, but there's another side. There's another side. So I'm not trying to be negative here. There's another side to it if you're open and willing to hear it and learn, right? There's there is another side to it that really has not been talked about much by anybody, by anybody really. There's a few people out there that have in the past talked about it, but it was never really grasped or grabbed onto as a as a real thing. It was it literally just brushed off, right?

SPEAKER_00 43:13

Yeah, very much. And so now there's a lot more of us that are becoming more and more outspoken. There's a lot of podcasts, a lot of them. And I think that's how I actually really became more and more aware of the community and started connecting to the Adopte community because I realized I need to be around people that truly do understand it. But then I also felt like we need advocates for what is happening here. And some don't feel like they can have the voice, and I'm not afraid to have the voice. So I'm fine to be that voice and it may stir up some trouble, but I'm okay with that because I feel like this needs to be shared and it needs to be illuminated.

SPEAKER_02 43:54

So I completely agree with you. And and I struggled with it when she was talking to me about it, you know, because I'm just Like the rest of the world. We know what we've heard our whole lives, right? You know, get over it. You're like seriously, you don't even know when you're a baby. I mean, people go to that extreme of seeing things like that, right? That can be really hurtful. Yeah really, really hurtful. And so there's just so many avenues with it, you know, so many avenues with it. So thank you for coming on and talking about it. You're welcome. I know that you have sent me many links. Yeah. That I can, which is great. No, I I didn't mean that the way that came out, that I can put on Facebook and I can share with people so that they can connect with you, connect with your podcast, connect with other resources, because I was struggling to find Shorty some resources, right? I'm like, let me let me help you. Let me I was pulling out resources, right? What can I find you? Yeah. So I'm happy to have these. I'm happy to be able to share them. Now, before I finish that, you said you lived in your, don't think I forgot what you said. You're living in your phonological father's house now. How did that come about for you?

SPEAKER_00 45:05

Well, yeah, that's so random. Um, the divorce happened a couple of years ago, and I was living in the house that we raised our kids in, and I was alone there and just felt like, you know, my boys had launched. And after they both left, I just remember feeling like I was being smacked across the face by trauma everywhere I looked. This was a place that was supposed to have wonderful memories that we were supposed to grow old in together. And I just remember calling my ex at the time. This was in this was last January, so a year and a few months ago, and I just said, I can't do this anymore. I can't, I can't be here. And he understood. And so I made a decision that I was going to start over. And my mom that raised me, so my adoptive mom, who is wonderful, offered her condo in Palm Springs. So I started there. I did a six-month stint there. First time I ever lived alone in my life with my dog. Brought my dog with me, Murphy. He's here with me. He's a golden doodle. Love him. Drove across country by myself for the first

DNA Testing And Identity Mirroring

SPEAKER_00 46:05

time. Gary, um, so was there for six months. And then always with the uh hope to be able to be here with my birth family, my biofamily. So my sister lives 20 minutes down the road. So does my brother. My my dad and his wife, so my bonus mom, she's wonderful, live here. I have multiple cousins and relatives here in Utah. What was so funny is the minute I met them, they're like, we're not Mormon. I'm like, oh, because that's what everybody thinks when you live in Salt Lake City, right? So I thought that was really funny. But they're wonderful people. And I found out I was 50% Italian. That's that was one of the things I found out. And I also know that I'm uh 12.5% Penobscot Indian. I mean, there's so many fabulous things that I've learned that I'm still exploring about myself.

SPEAKER_01 46:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:49

But being here in his basement has been, it's humbling because I'm a 52-year-old woman living in my parents' basement. Let me just, I'm just, let me just be honest. And never what I planned on doing in my life, but I'm still trying to get my footing. I'm trying to build this business. I'm trying to support myself. And he's been wonderful to allow me to be here for six months to kind of get my bearings and figure out where I want to be around here because I want to be with my sister and her her um kids are my niece and nephew who really don't know a family without me. And that is a beautiful thing, even though I've only known them five years. I mean, she's five. One of my nieces is five, so she doesn't know anything other than Aunt Julie. And that really is is a wonderful thing for me. So that's the reason why. How did you find them? 23 and me. And I wasn't looking, Joe. I honestly did that back in 2020 as a gift. I asked for that for Christmas because I had never known what my heritage was. And that was something that's something that adoptees don't know. We aren't allowed our our original birth certificate, so we can't find any of that information. That is something that's been shielded from us still in a lot of states. We can't get that. We don't know our medical information. Anytime after we're born, we only know before. I mean, that's 52 years of stuff that I didn't know. I could have had some horrible condition or cancer, blah, blah, blah, and not know where it came from. There's multiple adoptees who have died because they didn't know their medical history. It's just sad. So, you know, I just I wanted to know what my heritage was. And when I found out I was 50% Italian, it was almost like this understanding went, oh, well, that makes sense. I use it.

SPEAKER_02 48:28

I was gonna ask you. So with that, did the stuff start making sense to you?

SPEAKER_00 48:34

Totally. Yeah. And I sound like them. It was the first time ever in my life, besides my children, that I was able to look at somebody and see myself reflected. And there was an emotional, it was, I don't know how to describe it other than it felt like I had a new boyfriend. I'm not kidding. It was the joke for me. They don't for me. It was like, I have a sister, I have a brother, oh my gosh. And and my brother looks just like my son. And my my grandfather, who's no longer with us, looks just like my son. It's just, but I never I never experienced that. And the other thing that it did was it brought out all of this stuff with my kids. And in that, in a good way, it was hard for them initially, but they were like, we're half adopted too. We didn't know what half of ourselves were. And they realized how hard that was for them. So that once I was able to uncover all of that, they highly identify with the Italian part of themselves, even though they're 25%. Like to them, they're like, We're Italian. Like that, it's hilarious. But it's just been a it's been a really cool thing for us to connect over and to be able to know that I I walk just like them. I I've just never experienced that. We as adoptees don't get that mirroring power that everybody else does, that kept people do. So there's something really healing about finding that.

SPEAKER_02 49:49

Or when Teresa saw the first picture of her family and she sent it to me and she was talking to someone at the time and showing him the picture. It was the first time she'd ever seen someone that looked like her. It was emotional. It was see, I'm gonna get emotional now. I I was emotional when she called me and was just telling me that she found her family. She was just, she's like, Oh my gosh, I have to, you know, it was very emotional. It really was. And um, I remember her being that excited about seeing someone that looked like her. So I, while I've never been through that, I've never been through it. Um, I feel like I felt it, you know, not not the depth that she did, but I definitely it still makes me emotional. I definitely felt it uh for her, for her, you know, and could could um empathize with her, uh what she was going through and and and really at that moment understood a little bit more. So yeah, it it was it was the understanding that kind of poured in when she said it's the first time I've ever seen someone else that looks like me. I was like, oh my gosh. You know, my whole life everybody called me little candy because I look just like my mom, right? And you just take that for granted because that's just what it is, right? And so realizing that she never had that, you know, or y'all adoptees have never had that. Never had that. It's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 51:05

Unless you have children, but I think even with that, when you have children, it's I remember that first my firstborn. I I was afraid. I'm like, I'm gonna screw this kid up. I don't know how to parent, I don't know what it feels like to be nurturing. I just I didn't because first of all, it scared me. If I can I even believed for years, if I connect to him, he'll leave me. I mean, there was a mess in my brain. And until I was able to really settle all of that, I mean, we were good. We're all good now. But I I remember feeling just this fear. It was fear-based parenting there for so long because I'm like, I don't want to ruin this kid. Like I was. Um and it wasn't even my adoptive parents' fault. It was just what was left within my body that I had to deal with.

SPEAKER_02 51:49

So wow. Yeah. It's amazing. It's amazing to learn all about this. Thank you. You're welcome. It really truly is. It just makes you it's a whole different perspective, right? It's a whole different perspective that people do not normally day-to-day life think about. We just go on about go on about our business and not something that we've had to, if you haven't had to deal with it, you haven't, you don't know. Right.

SPEAKER_00 52:12

You just go with what this the society tells you. You're so lucky, you should be grateful, all of those things, right? Where when sometimes you'll say that to an adoptee and they'll be like, man. So you gotta be careful. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 52:25

Um you know, and when she was telling me the story and we were talking it all through, I actually had two people at that moment at that time in my group that were adopted. I had to so we were they did talk some about it. They did talk about it in group because they didn't know genetically or their parents in addiction, didn't know there was things they didn't know. Uh, one of them found out, yes, that his the side was an alcoholic, and it was like, oh, it makes perfect sense because he kept saying, I've not been through anything, I don't have any trauma, I haven't been through nothing in my life. My parents, my adoptive parents were great, and I never, never been through any trauma. I don't know what why am I like this until he found out there was addiction on that side, and it was like, okay, that made it not okay, but it made it feel a little better, like right over him. Yeah. I totally got that. I totally got that. Yeah, and the other one had so many different adoptive parents, foster parents, so many different ones from little, little, little. By the time he was, I think, four or five, I can't remember exactly, and he had ADHD real bad, and um, he was on medication, and the deta he

Adoption In Recovery And Closing Links

SPEAKER_02 53:36

was detached by that time, right? He was detached and and didn't want to bond with the parents. And he said he stated they were lovely, they were good people, they were he said it was me. I mean, that had to hurt too, right? Because you know that you're not bonding with people that only have it, but you don't you don't know how you don't know how to change that.

SPEAKER_01 53:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:57

And so that I was l trying to learn a little bit about that and talk with her. Um kind of just dive into some of that because you just I just saw it from a really different perspective. Yeah.

unknown 54:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:08

And so yeah.

SPEAKER_02 54:09

So and that's good, right? We need to see all sides, all sides of the story.

SPEAKER_00 54:13

There's always well and be open to seek to understand versus judge for sure.

SPEAKER_02 54:19

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, you put that perfectly. That was that clip. Snippet. That was perfect. Yeah, that was that was great. So do you know um you're just kind of figuring it out right now what's what's next, but you're feeling good. I mean, I'm look I can look at you right now and feel your energy, and you're feeling you're feeling good.

SPEAKER_00 54:38

I am, I feel good about where I'm at. I mean, it's been a r like I said, it's been a rough few weeks because my mother-in-law has died, and I was just there last week going through all of her stuff, and that was horrifying and hard. Never wish that on anyone having to go through somebody who you love so much. It just was really difficult. And then having to help my kids through it. But we'll be fine. We will be fine. It's just, and she wanted to, she was ready. I mean, she was only 82, but she was ready. And it's hard when people leave stuff behind, but otherwise, I'm doing fine and I will be fine. And I'm grateful to be able to be with you and have these conversations because I think they're really important.

SPEAKER_02 55:16

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, you taught me so much today. I appreciate it. I love to learn. I always say if I could just get paid to learn, this would be so great. Oh, I know. Wouldn't it be great? Uh yes, it would that it didn't cost you to learn, that you got paid to learn, right? Wouldn't that be just fantastic? It would be amazing. It would be amazing. Yeah, there's not enough hours in the day to learn all the things I want to learn, and nobody wants to pay me.

SPEAKER_00 55:40

I haven't figured it out that piece yet. I know.

SPEAKER_02 55:43

They all want money for it. So yeah. So I I appreciate the knowledge today and and just the perspective, the pers the different um perspective shift for sure. Well, thank you for having me. Yes, absolutely. Is there anything about your story that we did not talk about that um you would like to finish with?

SPEAKER_00 56:04

I don't think so. You've covered a lot. I think I'm just grateful to be able to be used and help because I just think that's what I was put on this earth to do. It's a purpose. So all of my links are there and they can ask me. I'm so like I love it when people DM me, direct message me, because I just love having interactions with people. So if anything that I shared sparked anything, then feel free to message me because I'm honored to have those conversations.

SPEAKER_02 56:31

You said that you do groups. So do you you do virtual groups? I do. And so are those links in there as well?

SPEAKER_00 56:38

They are part, like if you were to go to my website, everything is on my website. The revelate the revelation was new so that I can share you set with you separately. Also, I do retreats and I have a retreat coming up in May with a co coworker-ish. Like she and I really do similar things, and so it's a two-day retreat in Moscow, Idaho, actually. So I know random, but really, really excited about that on the 23rd and 24th of May. And so that's another thing. That's an in-person retreat that we're doing, which is exciting.

SPEAKER_02 57:11

That's fantastic. And then uh as I stated, Julie has the Resilience uh Project Podcast podcast. Yeah. And I did uh listen to a few of those as well. They were they were fantastic. Thank you, Joe. And so I I'm a follower now, I followed. And we have to do that because we have to share, we have to share our resources in this world to we're both in the industry where we help people, right? And it's and it's a mission, it's a passion, it's what you're meant to do. We talked about purpose. And so I it's important to us to be able to share those things, right? It's just like you said, same in your DMs, like message me.

SPEAKER_00 57:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 57:52

That's important to us. So I I appreciate that about you, really. So thank you for that.

unknown 57:58

Of course.

SPEAKER_02 57:59

Well, I will I know you have a group that you're doing this evening, so I will let you know so you can get ready for that. And um, I'm glad you found a way that we could do it on the hotspot. And it all worked out.

SPEAKER_00 58:10

So weird. It's like, oh, maybe we can connect for my hotspot, and that's what worked this time.

SPEAKER_02 58:14

Worked. Yeah, we when we first got on this podcast, we talked for I don't know, three minutes or so, and then Julie froze and literally the internet went down. Um for 30 minutes, and I don't even know if it's up.

SPEAKER_00 58:26

Let's see, is it up?

SPEAKER_02 58:28

Oh, it is. It's finally up. Perfect. And so it was just so funny because she said, literally, I've been here doing this all day, and it was fine. And that is how it happens, you guys. Technical difficulties happen when you're right about to start or right in the middle of it. And it's so frustrating, but there's nothing you can do, it just happens, and we don't even know what it is sometimes. It just happens. So anyway, so I will let you go and get off of here again. I thank you so much. It was just fantastic to have you. Really enjoyed it.

unknown 58:56

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 58:56

I enjoyed being with you too, Joe. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful night. You too, you too. Can't wait to tell Teresa. I'm gonna tell her too. We'll talk to you soon. Good night, Julie. Good night.