Why Adoptees Disconnect from Themselves (And How Curiosity Helps)

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Understanding Your Nervous System: A Guide for Adoptees and Those Who Love Them

Summary

In this first episode of a brand-new series inspired by Julie Brumley’s workshop The Art of Cultivating Belonging: Returning to the Body After the Story, Julie explores the first condition that helps self-belonging begin to emerge:

Curiosity.

As adoptees - and honestly, as people shaped by trauma - many of us learned to immediately judge, suppress, explain, minimize, or abandon what we feel.

But curiosity interrupts judgment.

It creates space to notice what is happening inside us without immediately trying to fix it.

In this episode, Julie shares:

• how adoptees become skilled at reading everyone else while disconnecting from themselves
• why hypervigilance, people-pleasing, performance, and emotional suppression are survival adaptations
• the difference between asking “What’s wrong with me?” and “What happened in me?”
• why the body often tells the truth before the mind can explain it
• and how healing begins not through force… but through noticing

Julie also guides listeners through a gentle somatic noticing practice designed to help reconnect with sensation, safety, and self-awareness in a nervous-system sustainable way.

Because belonging is not something we think our way into.

It’s something the body slowly learns it can build internally.

Keywords

adoption, adoptee healing, curiosity, belonging, nervous system, somatic healing, trauma, hypervigilance, emotional suppression, self-awareness, embodiment, identity, self-belonging

Key Topics

• The five conditions that cultivate self-belonging
• Curiosity as the first condition of healing
• Hypervigilance, shape-shifting, and adaptation in adoptees
• Why love may not have felt safe in early life
• The body’s role in healing and self-awareness
• Learning to notice without fixing or judging
• Reconnecting to sensation after disconnection
• Somatic grounding and orientation practices
• Healing through awareness rather than force

Key Takeaways

• Curiosity interrupts judgment
• Survival often teaches adoptees to disconnect from themselves
• The body often communicates before the mind understands
• Healing begins with noticing, not fixing
• You don’t need to force transformation
• Small moments of staying with yourself matter
• Belonging grows through repeated moments of returning to self

Chapters

00:00 – Beginning a new series on belonging
01:20 – The five conditions of self-belonging
02:10 – Why curiosity matters in healing
03:00 – Hypervigilance, performance, and adaptation
05:00 – “What do I need to be to be accepted?”
06:15 – From “What’s wrong with me?” to “What happened in me?”
07:10 – Where the body holds truth
08:00 – Guided somatic noticing practice
12:00 – Grounding through sensation and orientation
14:30 – Letting the body know you’re listening
15:15 – Why healing begins with noticing
16:20 – Staying present with yourself
17:15 – Closing reflections + next week’s episode on clarity

Closing Reflection

Belonging doesn’t begin when we finally “fix” ourselves.

It begins the moment we become willing to stay curious about what we carry…
and gently turn back toward ourselves instead of away.

Website

Instagram: @juliebrumley_

Facebook: julierasbrum

TikTok: @juliebrumley_

Click to Join My Free Adoptee Facebook Group

You Tube: @julie_brumley

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 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 adoptive 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.

SPEAKER_02 1:58

This is the beginning of a brand new series that honestly feels really appropriate right now, especially after this past weekend, where I had the privilege of co-facilitating the Unmothered A Revolution in Adoptee Healing Retreat with Dr. Liz Debeta. And during it, I taught a workshop that I called The Art of Cultivating Belonging, Returning to the Body After the Story. And one of the biggest things that became clear to me while teaching it, and honestly, while witnessing the nervous systems in that room, is that belonging is not something we think our way into. It's something the body slowly learns that it can build internally. So over the next several episodes, I want to walk you through the five conditions that I believe help self-belonging to emerge: curiosity, clarity, capacity, connection, and consistency. They're not goals to achieve. They're not boxes to check, they're conditions, they're experiences. They are things that we cultivate in order for self-belonging to emerge, practices of returning to ourselves. And today we're going to begin with curiosity, because as adopted people, and honestly, so many people with trauma, we often learned to immediately judge, fix, suppress, explain, minimize, or abandon what we feel. But curiosity interrupts judgment. Curiosity says, what if I noticed what's here without immediately trying to change it? And that question alone can begin changing everything. So let's get into it. I think one of the hardest things for adopted people is that so many of us became incredibly good at reading everyone else. It's that whole idea of becoming a chameleon or reading the room. And in the process, we lose connection with ourselves. We learned things like hypervigilance, which is where all of the trauma states live fight, flight, fawn, freeze, flop. I definitely have talked about those in past episodes, and you can go back and listen because it's really important to understand those. We learned performance, we learned people pleasing, emotional suppression. For many years, emotions weren't understood or feelings weren't something that were able to be received when I was growing up. I, in many ways, was just told to go to my room because in that day and age, emotions were basically considered ridiculous. There was no understanding of how to allow a person to move through the emotion that they were feeling. We shape shift, like I talked about before, about chameleoning. We self-abandon. We learned shame and guilt because adoption really began with secrecy, with eliminating a part of ourselves that we weren't allowed to know. So for many of us, love did not consistently feel safe. And when love doesn't feel safe, the nervous system becomes more focused on adaptation than authenticity. So instead of asking, what am I feeling? We learn to ask, What do I need to be? Or who do I need to become in order to be accepted? That is survival. But curiosity interrupts survival patterns, not aggressively, but gently. Curiosity allows us to notice sensations, emotions, reactions, stories, body responses without immediately making ourselves wrong for them. And honestly, that's harder than it sounds. Because many of us as adopted people are deeply practiced in self-judgment and self-abandonment. We're often compassionate toward everybody else while being incredibly harsh internally. But curiosity creates space. And this is where healing begins shifting from what's wrong with me to what's happening or what has happened in me. That's very different. And at the retreat, I asked the participants this question: Where did the film land in your body? One of the things that we got to do at the retreat was watch Liz Debeta's digital version of her one-woman show Unmothered, that's award-winning. And so after we watched that hour-long presentation, I asked them, where did that land in your body? Not, what did you think about it? I didn't want to know what they thought about it. I wanted to know how their bodies responded to it. So I asked that question, where did it land? Because the body often tells the truth before the mind can explain it. And adopted people, especially, can become very practiced at intellectualizing experiences while disconnecting from sensation. But belonging begins when we slowly start reconnecting with ourselves again, not through force, but through noticing. Okay, so what does that mean? And how do we do that? So wherever you are right now, if it feels supportive to you, I would like to invite you into a brief noticing practice. Nothing to perform, nothing to get right. We're just going to experiment and experience curiosity. Maybe begin by noticing your feet flat against the floor. That's a grounding practice. Just paying attention to your feet against the floor. Another thing that you can do is go outside and touch grass. You hear a lot of people talking about that these days. Or notice the seat beneath your body. If you're driving in a car, notice the support of the car seat. If you're sitting at a desk, notice the seat that you are in. It is supporting you.

SPEAKER_00 10:29

And pay attention to what that feels like. You don't have to think about if it's gonna fall.

SPEAKER_02 10:43

You're being supported and held. Notice the sensations that come with that. There's a security, there's a safety. Then I would like to invite you to notice the room around you. If you are driving, just notice what's around you outside the window. Uh just notice.

SPEAKER_00 11:11

Is it the light? Is it sunny outside? Is it dark? Are there stars? Is it cold in that room? Do you have a candle lit?

SPEAKER_02 11:31

So can you smell smells in the room? Just notice the sensations. I would even encourage you to notice the textures. Maybe take your hands and place them on your thighs and notice for me right now, the workout pants that I'm wearing are really smooth and they feel really soft. Just notice, be curious about those sensations. And as I rub my hands against my legs, there's a warmth that is um created by the energy of my hands rubbing against my legs. There's a lot of ways that you can do this noticing practice. You're not trying to change anything, you're just being with the sensations that you are experiencing. And a lot of times, if a person feels uncomfortable with something like this, what I will do is I will say, I would encourage you to look at something in the room that's comforting for you and just hold that in your gaze for now until you can feel more comfortable with the things that we're describing. Because sometimes just a little bit of these exercises can be activating. And so you do a little bit at a time in incremental shifts. And then I would invite you next would be to just notice your breath. The in and the out. I'm not gonna ask you to do it with me. I just want you to pay attention to the breath, not forcing it to go deeper.

SPEAKER_00 13:20

We're not trying to calm ourselves here. We're just noticing the in and the out.

SPEAKER_02 13:35

Just noticing the inhale and the exhale actually begins to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which helps us move into that restful experience that we so much desire. We're just noticing. And now I want to gently invite you to notice what is happening in your body after doing all of that. Is there still tightness? And if so, that's information. Just notice where it is. Maybe you're noticing warmth come over your body. Like, oh, it's so nice that you are finally paying attention to my body, to me, to my needs.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

Maybe you're noticing a buzzing. Maybe there's a heaviness.

SPEAKER_02 14:32

Maybe there's a numbness or an ache or pressure, or there's emotion just beneath the surface that is wanting to come out, or maybe there's nothing at all. Whatever is there, see if you can just notice it without immediately trying to interpret it. There's no fixing, no judging, just oh, that's there. Hey, and maybe ask yourself, what might the sensation be trying to communicate? Not what's wrong with me, but what is this trying to show me? And if it feels supportive, you might place a hand somewhere on your body that wants acknowledgement right now. So if you were feeling the heaviness in your chest, just place a hand over your heart to let your body know, hey, I hear you, I see you, I'm recognizing you, I'm acknowledging you. And just allow yourself to be with that sensation, that heaviness. If you're noticing a numbness, maybe in your hands or in your shoulders or wherever you're noticing it, maybe place your hand there and just do a small rub or connecting kind of thing that will let your body know, hey, I hear you and I see you. There's no pressure to change anything. All we're doing here is being curious and letting our body know that we're finally listening to what it's trying to communicate. We're practicing staying with the sensation. We're practicing noticing, we're practicing curiosity because curiosity is often the first step toward reconnecting to ourselves, not judgment. I think one of the biggest misconceptions about healing is that healing begins with some big transformation. At least that is what people desperately want. But honestly, I think healing begins with noticing, with curiosity. Because we cannot reconnect with the parts of ourselves we've learned to ignore, override, minimize, or abandon without first becoming curious about them. And curiosity is what interrupts shame. Curiosity is what softens judgment. Curiosity is what creates space for compassion, not overnight, but slowly, incrementally, gently and safely. And maybe that's enough for today. We're not fixing ourselves, we're not figuring our entire life out right now, we're just noticing and becoming a little more connected to ourselves than before. So as we close today, I think one of the most powerful things curiosity does is it slows us down long enough to stay with ourselves long enough to understand ourselves differently. Like I've said multiple times, not to fix, not to overexplain, not to rush into some sort of meaning just to notice. Because so many of us as adopted people became incredibly skilled at moving away from ourselves in order to survive, away from sensation, away from emotion, away from need, away from vulnerability. But belonging begins to grow the moment we start turning gently back toward ourselves instead. Not perfectly, not all at once, but slowly, moment by moment. And honestly, every moment you stay present with yourself matters, even if it's just a minute. It's awareness. And we can talk more about that then. But until then, if you have any questions or any comments or anything that comes up as you've been listening to this episode, always remember that you can DM me on any of the socials, but you can also schedule a chat with me. I'd be happy to connect with you and have a further conversation about this and how I can support you if that is something that you were looking for and in need of. And remember that there is a way to review the podcast if you want. Give me five stars. If it has been something that you have found supportive for you, you can also leave a review, an actual review in words. I would love that too. Um to allow ourselves to be seen by more people in more countries. I would love that. Just know, no matter what, you are not alone. And we are in this together. And all I will say is just be curious this week. Hope you guys have a great Thursday. Peace.