Nothing Is Wrong With You: The Severance Cycle in Adoptee Healing

In this episode, Julie Brumley shares a framework foundational to her work with adoptees: Not because something is wrong with you… but because your body learned a different cycle. Drawing from the Satisfaction Cycle (Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen), she explains how attachment unfolds through attunement and safety. But for adoptees, that cycle is often interrupted. From that disruption, Julie introduces the Severance Cycle, a pattern she developed to describe what happens when connection is broken before we have words. This isn’t just theory. It’s the lived experience of so many adoptees. And when you understand it… everything starts to make sense.

⏱ Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction: How early body memories affect trauma and healing
00:27 - Adoptees’ patterns of receiving and adaptation
00:53 - The body's response from conception: body memory starts in the womb
01:51 - How trauma affects brain and body development in utero
02:46 - Development of the heart and brain during early pregnancy
03:16 - Sensations versus stories: What early body imprints mean for adoptees
04:01 - The significance of the early attachment and stress responses
06:06 - The satisfaction cycle: how healthy attachment is supposed to work
07:02 - The baby's natural rhythm: push, reach, take, and settle
08:30 - The importance of attunement for the satisfaction cycle to succeed
09:27 - Recognizing whether this cycle was experienced in your own body
10:48 - The severance cycle: rupture, recoil, reluctance, rejection, resistance
11:09 - Description of each phase and its emotional impact
12:28 - How the severance cycle disrupts choice, connection, and context
14:16 - What is lost in severance: early choice and connection, and understanding of the world
15:38 - The impact of rupture on the primal wound and lifelong grief
17:34 - The polyvagal theory and its relation to survival responses
18:42 - The body’s tendency to choose familiar danger over safety
19:13 - How healing begins: creating safety and relearning trust with the body
20:34 - Rebuilding connection through self-regulation and safe relationships
21:34 - The power of context: reinterpreting past pain in the present
22:42 - Recognizing patterned behaviors: nothing is wrong with you, your body learned a cycle
23:12 - The work of restoring the original rhythm: safety, reach, receive, rest
24:02 - Invitation to upcoming retreat for experiential healing
25:25 - Encouragement to notice bodily responses and cultivate curiosity over fixing
26:21 - Resources, community, and hope for adoptees on the healing journey

🌿 Resources & Links:

• Slides
• Unmothered: A Revolution in Adoptee Healing Retreat (May)
• Polyvagal Theory
• Schedule a call with Julie

Website

Instagram: @juliebrumley_

Facebook: julierasbrum

TikTok: @juliebrumley_

Click to Join My Free Adoptee Facebook Group

You Tube: @julie_brumley

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi y'all, I'm Julie. I'm a trauma-informed adoptee coach and somatic healing guide. After overcoming deep abandonment wounds, I now help adult adoptees move from feeling lost and disconnected to experiencing profound self-belonging. I know what it is like to carry the weight of abandonment, to feel stuck in patterns of longing, adapting, and searching for belonging. To have tried every healing modality available and come up empty. My own healing has taught me this. The answers aren't out there. They're buried within me. And I'm here to guide you home to yourself. The Resilience Project Podcast brings voice, visibility, and validation to the parts of adoption society rarely names, but all of us feel. Through an trauma-informed somatic lens, I explore the lived experiences of the entire adoption constellation with a tender emphasis on the adoptee experience. This podcast goes beyond storytelling into soul telling. It offers embodied insight, compassionate education, and a path towards awareness, hope, and strength. Each episode invites listeners to understand adoption more deeply, not just with the mind, but with the nervous system, and to reconnect with the truth, identity, and belonging that were always yours to come home to. Welcome. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so good to be with you today. I wanted to talk about something that has been really profound for me over the last couple of years as I have done this exploration of my own body and gotten my somatic training. It's something that I really believe will be helpful for you. Most adoptees, myself included, really didn't learn how to receive. We learned how to adapt initially. There's something that I want to talk through today that when I first understood it, changed how I saw everything. Not just about adoption, not just about trauma, but my patterns, my relationships, and my body. Because for most of my life, I thought something was wrong with me subconsciously for a long time, and then consciously, and started telling myself that there was something wrong with me through the words that I spoke to myself. I thought I was defective, not enough, a burden, unwanted. I've talked a lot about these, uh talked about that last week, actually. But what I didn't understand was that my body wasn't broken. It was responding exactly the way it was wired to, based on what it experienced from the very beginning. And when I say the very beginning, I don't just mean after birth. I mean in the womb. Because what we now understand is that body memory starts forming incredibly early. One of the things that I discovered in my research about that is that body memory is most often discussed in the context of trauma because the brain's survival systems, like the amygdala, develop before the centers of verbal memory, like the hippocampus. So the body can store the physical imprint of a stressful event, such as a racing heart or tensed muscles, without the mind having a conscious memory of the event itself. That's crazy. I think it's also important to understand that this formation, even the heart and the brain are the first to develop. They develop simultaneously. So the heart is the first organ to be completely developed. It's developed by week eight. The brain develops all the way up until we're in our 20s, but both of them begin developing simultaneously with each other around day 16 to 18 after fertilization. This is important because as these develop, we also experience things within the womb of the birth mother before we have language, before we have logic. That's the point. Which means the body is storing everything as sensation first, not story. And for adoptees, that matters because what's usually supposed to happen for a baby often doesn't for us. That's just the truth. So today I want to talk you through two cycles. But first, I want to reiterate what I just said. This early formation is very significant, especially for us who have early developmental trauma because the heart being the first organ to function, respond, and potentially hold imprints from that early environment. The brain starts forming before people even know they are pregnant. So it's a highly sensitive in utero environment that we are in. So when the mother experiences stress, so do we. Cortisol levels rise, we we absorb that emotional tone that she experiences, and the presence or absence of consistent connection that we may receive from her. So for us as adoptees, especially those experiencing that prenatal stress that I just talked about, separation or even attempts to terminate the pregnancy, it's not just what happened after birth, like I said originally. The body and brain really do remember. And I think it's important to understand this. I know I'm repeating myself, but I want it to be something that we all digest and understand. So, what's supposed to happen is called the satisfaction cycle. And we're gonna look at that in just a minute. And then we're going to look at what happens instead. So I don't want you to have to analyze this. I'm gonna do this for you, but I want you to begin to feel where this might still be living in your body. Just tune into it. Notice the sensations that arise as I talk about these things. So the first thing I want to start with is the satisfaction cycle. And I want to show you an image from one of the slides that I use for my presentation on this in Revolution. And this will give you a picture of what it is. This is the satisfaction cycle. This is the baby's natural rhythm of connection, nourishment, and rest. In the earliest days of life, babies are born experiencing and expecting attunement. These five phases that we're gonna talk about, not in depth, we're just gonna touch on them, are how a baby moves towards satisfaction, body, mind, and heart, all in response to having a loving caregiver. But first, this is what's actually supposed to happen. So I want to leave this image up so you guys can see it and experience it. But I also want to talk you through what it is that is actually being experienced in the satisfaction cycle. Now, this may be a bit triggering. When I first saw this image, I was in a coaching call with a dear friend of mine, Becky, and she was talking about it. And I got extremely emotional. I started crying, I turned off my camera for a minute, and then I ended up turning it back on because I realized I need to be witnessed in this. What ended up happening was as she was explaining this cycle, what I realized was this is not what I experienced as a baby. I didn't get this. And there was grief that came up and loss and anger, to be honest, about the fact that I didn't receive this, this beautiful way that it was supposed to have been experienced, I didn't experience it. So it's actually really simple. The baby pushes, reaches, takes, pulls, and then yields. So what this means in layman's terms is the baby initiates movement, they push out of the body, they reach for what they need, they receive what they need, they take it in, and then they rest, they yield, they settle, they feel full, they feel at peace. And here's the important part: this only works when there is consistent attunement. When someone is there to meet the reach that is known to the baby through sensation and smells, they respond, that caregiver responds, they hold, they co-regulate. That's how the nervous system learns. I can need something, I can reach for something, I can receive something, and I can rest. That's the satisfaction cycle. Now, I want to find out from all y'all who are listening and watching. Do you experience or did you experience that? My guess would be now that you're seeing this, now that this is being brought to your awareness, it may produce something similar as it did for me: emotion, sadness, a feeling of, what did I miss? Well, we can see that this is what we were supposed to have received. So for many adoptees, this cycle, this satisfaction cycle did not complete for us. It got interrupted. And instead, what ended up happening was something that I have created called the severance cycle. And this is where things start to make sense for us. So I'm going to share that with you now so that you can see that image, because I think that's important as well. This right here is what we experience as adoptees. This is when that attunement is interrupted. The body may hold on to confusion, longing, disconnection. And here's how it breaks down. The next slide is talking about this cycle in definitions. But first, let me actually go through the cycle that you will see on the screen if you're watching on video. It starts with rupture, moves to recoil, then to reluctance, then to rejection, then to resistance. Now let me break this down for you. If you're watching on video, you'll see the definitions that I'm going to talk through right now. If you're not, I'm going to explain them. So rupture for us, rather than a natural push toward birth, this phase represents being displaced from the original attachment figure. It's not a chosen push. We weren't choosing to push towards this. It ends up being a forced separation. And it's often experienced as rejection or abandonment. Then the next stage is recoil. Instead of reaching for someone who is there to catch us, this phase involves reaching into a void. Natural need for connection is left unfulfilled. And there's actually no one reaching back that is familiar to us, which then leads again to a deep sense of rejection. And there could be multiple different people that end up reaching for us that we don't feel comfortable with because they we don't smell, they don't smell familiar, the sensations don't feel right, we don't hear the same sounds that we were in for nine months. That's why we recoil. Next is reluctance. Rather than being held securely by that original attachment figure, the contact is either non-existent or inconsistent. Any sense of safety or bonding is fractured. It leads to a sense of emotional abandonment and confusion. Then instead of nourishment, emotional or physical, from that original attachment figure, there is a sense of emptiness. We may physically be cared for, but that deep need for emotional connection and bonding is unmet, leaving this ache or void, and this is the physical feeling of rejection. And then finally, instead of yielding into trust and safety, like I just described from the satisfaction cycle, adoptees are often forced to adapt. It's a survival mechanism. It's when the vagus nerve kicks in and causes fight, flight, fawn freeze, and flop, all of those things that I have talked about in the past. There's an emotional surrender, not out of trust, actually, but because there's no other choice. This adaptation often leads to self-reliance, but at the cost of intimacy and vulnerability. We fear all of that. Now I want to go back to a couple of slides here. These are three things that we end up losing in this severance cycle that those with the satisfaction cycle don't even have to worry about. First is choice. If you're watching on YouTube, you'll see this slide. It's the first thing we lose because choice was taken for us before we even had words to name it. We didn't get to choose whether we stayed with our first mother or our biomother or our birth mother. We did not choose the loss, the separation, the survival adaptations that we had to make. And for many of us, even after adoption, we still felt like we had to play a role. Be the good one, be grateful, don't rock the boat, don't ask too many questions, all in service of being able to stay connected for fear of losing that and staying safe. The second thing is connection. It was severed way, way, way too soon. We are wired for connection as human beings. So that is how we regulate, how we grow, how we feel safe in the world. But for many of us as adoptees, that connection was cut off before we ever had the chance to fully experience it as the satisfaction cycle describes. That rupture was too soon. Separation from the womb, from the sound of our mother's heartbeat, from the breast, from the scent, like I talked about earlier, the rhythm we knew, very first knowing of who we belonged to. Multiple caregivers, foster homes, well-meaning strangers as adoptive parents, truly. Even in good adoptive families, that first disconnection leaves a wound, as Nancy Verrier called it, the primal wound. It is a silent grief that we try to make sense of for the rest of our lives. And our nervous system now enters into the world on high alert. And third, context, we never got to make sense of the world around us because, especially in the womb, we didn't have a thinking brain yet, like I talked about earlier. No story, no logic, just pure sensation and impression. So when that rupture occurs, when there's separation, stress, or abandonment, the body stores that as truth, like I talked about earlier about the body remembering, the body memory. We think things like, I must not be wanted, something must be wrong with me. And we believe and begin to believe connection is dangerous. We think things all the time, like I don't belong, or how do I fit in? But we didn't have the context to understand what was happening. We couldn't say this isn't about me. We couldn't know that it was the system, not our soul, that was flawed. Now, here's how we shift these ideas, choice, connection, and context into three central elements that follow the polyvagal theory. Now, if you don't know what the polyvagal theory is, it's one of the basis for so much of the somatic work that I do. The vagus nerve runs from the base of your skull to the base of your spine. It is our super highway of information. And 20% of messages get sent from the brain to the body, whereas 80% send from the body to the brain. It's so important to understand the vagus nerve and how it navigates everything about us and regulates our nervous system. I think it's important to also understand, I meant to mention this at the beginning, that the heart is the first functional organ to pump. I said that, but the foundation of the nervous system, the neural plate, is one of the very first systems to appear. So when that gets disrupted for us, we we truly enter into the world with complex PTSD, like I've talked about many times. So here's the polyvagal insight that I want to offer you on this choice piece. The slide shows this, but I'm going to describe it for those that are just listening. The nervous system will always choose survival over authenticity. It will freeze, fawn, which means to please, it will fight, it will flop depression, it will flee if that's what it takes to stay alive. It's that whole idea that we will choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven. Healing begins when we remember that we do have a choice. Now we can choose differently. We can learn to listen to our body instead of overriding it. We can choose to pause, to resource, and to move at our own pace, slowly, gently, as we begin to teach our body that it is okay to have choice. Now, with connection, one of the biggest things that we fear, we fear intimacy. It's so scary for us because she loved us so much that she gave us up, right? There's that feeling of, well, if she loved me so much, why did she um place me for adoption? And a lot of times, those situations they were forced in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The ventral vagal system, this is the system that manages the parasympathetic, which is the rest and the digest, our pathway to social connection. This develops through safe, consistent, and attuned caregiving. Clearly, we did not have that initially, depending upon how long you were in that life gap of for me, it was seven weeks. I've had clients that it's been four years, five years. When that's missing, we may struggle to feel safe with others and even with ourselves. The work now then is to rebuild that sense of connection, starting with ourselves in a safe relationship, moving slowly through co-regulation. You can even do this with yourself by laying your hand over your heart or through a self-hug, through learning how to feel at home in our own bodies again, because our bodies, in a lot of ways, started with threat. So it's learning how to teach them that we can choose differently and we can connect differently. The context here, the polybagel insight is without that safe context, the nervous system stays trapped in a loop of protection. That fight, flight, fawn, freeze, fawn, all of that. We start cycling through that very, very early. But when we begin to make sense of our story through the context of sensations in our body, when we learn the language of our body without blame or shame, we can begin to make those shifts. The context allows the body to reinterpret the past in light of the present. It gives us language for our experiences and it returns dignity to our story. And these things are really, really important, y'all. And I want to remind us that even though we did not Have the satisfaction, the ability to yield, there are some things that are still really important to understand. That adaptation, that survival. And if you're listening and watching this, you might not remember any of that, but your body does. Because these cycles don't just stay in infancy, they become how we move through relationships, how we ask for what we need or don't, how we receive love or push it away, how we rest or stay hyper-vigilant. And this is where so many of us get stuck thinking: why do I do this? Why can't I just trust? Why do I pull away when I want connection most? It's not random, it's patterned. And here's what I want you to hear. There's nothing wrong with you. Your body learned a different cycle. That's it. And the work is not forcing yourself to behave differently, it's gently, slowly restoring the original rhythm, helping your body learn that it's safe to reach again, that it's safe to receive, it's safe to rest. And that's what somatic work or working with the body does. And that's what I walk people through inside my world. And it's not quick. There's six-month versions, there's 12-month versions, but it is possible. I also want to remind y'all about the retreat coming up because if this is resonating on a body level for you, there is something really powerful about doing this work in person. Being in a room where your nervous system can actually experience safe connection and co-regulation in real time. That's what we'll be doing at Unmothered, a revolution in Adoptee Healing in May on the 23rd and 24th in Moscow, Idaho. And I'll definitely link that in the show notes. We want to see as many of you there as can make it. It's not going to be a big retreat. We want it to be quaint and small so that we can really attune to everybody's needs. Okay, I don't want you to overthink this episode. What I want you to notice is where did your body respond and did it? If it didn't, that's okay. Just be curious about it. Where did something feel familiar? Where did you go? Oh yeah, yep, that's true. That's what I experienced. That's your entry point. It's not about fixing, it's not about forcing. It's just noticing because the rhythm of your body, that rhythm that your body was always meant to have, it's still there. It just needs space to be remembered. So if this landed for you and you would like to talk more about it, please feel free to drop podcasts in any of my DMs on all of the socials. I'm on every single one. I'd be happy to have a conversation with you about what this stirred up in you. If you have any questions about it, I'd be happy to talk more about it. And oh, also, I wanted to remind y'all that I do have a free Facebook group that I would love to invite you to be a part of as well. That link is in the show notes. And my website is also there if you want to look at any of the programs that I offer. I am so happy to be able to work with adoptees who are experiencing similar things that I have in the past, and that I have been able to find some forms of victory over. Still working on it, not saying that I have arrived at any level of perfection because I haven't, but what I can say is there is hope, and I look forward to being a part of that with and for you, to come alongside you and help you. Go ahead and like and download and rate if you can and even leave a review. I would love that to help the podcast be more seen. Share it with others. If there is an adoptee that you know or somebody in the adoption constellation that could benefit from this, this would be a great thing to share with them. I hope you all have a great Thursday and I'll see you next week.