"What's Wrong With Me?" - Why Adoptees Ask This and What to Do Instead

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Last week's episode on Condition 1 - Curiosity

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Clarity isn't certainty. It's awareness. In this episode, Julie explores the second condition for self-belonging: the gentle, non-judgmental ability to notice what's happening in you - without needing to have it all figured out first.

Building on last week's episode about curiosity, Julie unpacks why so many adopted people (and others with early trauma) get stuck waiting for complete understanding before they allow themselves to heal, and why that's not how healing actually works.

In this episode, Julie covers:

• Why clarity is awareness, not resolution - and why that distinction matters
• How the body holds clarity before the mind can catch up
• The difference between intellectualizing your experience and being with your experience
• The patterns that develop when love doesn't feel consistently safe: pulling back from closeness, working to justify your presence, hiding emotions that weren't received well
• The most important shift clarity makes possible: moving from what's wrong with me to what is happening in me

Somatic Practice - The Clarity Practice: Julie guides listeners through a body-based exercise to gently meet what they've been carrying. The practice includes grounding, orienting to your space, and three reflective prompts:

• A part of me learned...
• A part of me still believes...
• What I actually needed was...

Keywords
adoption, self-awareness, clarity, somatic practice, trauma, emotional patterns, healing, nervous system, curiosity, self-belonging

Chapters:

00:00 - Welcome & The Distinction That Changes Everything Clarity is not certainty - it's awareness. 

02:28 - What Clarity Actually Is Clarity isn't having it all figured out.

04:50 - The Body Knows Before the Mind Does 

07:12 - Seeing the Patterns Without Judgment Clarity doesn't diagnose or condemn.

09:27 - The Clarity Practice A guided somatic exercise to gently meet what you've been carrying.

15:38 - Whatever Came Up, That's Enough Reflection on what the practice revealed

16:03 - Why This Work Matters for Adopted People 

18:04 - Preview of Next Week: Capacity

Next week: The third condition — Capacity. Learning how to stay with yourself while emotion is happening, without leaving yourself inside of it.

If something came up for you in this episode, DM Julie on socials or schedule a conversation using the link in the show notes. If this podcast has meant something to you, a five-star review or a few written words helps this work reach more adopted people and the families who love them.

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You Tube: @julie_brumley

Transcript

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. Welcome back to the podcast, everybody. It is so good to be together again. Last week I left you with something that I want to come back to right now. I told you that this week we were going to talk about clarity, and that clarity is not certainty, it's awareness. And I want to sit with that for just a minute before we dive in, because I think that distinction alone is worth the entire episode. We live in a world that prizes certainty. Having the answers, knowing what's next, figuring it out. And for adopted people, especially, not having the answers about our origins, about why we were placed, about who we are, that uncertainty can feel like a wound we carry everywhere. So when I say clarity is the second condition for self-belonging to emerge, I want you to know that I am not asking you to figure anything out today. I am inviting you into something much gentler than that. If you were with me last week, we began with curiosity, that first essential condition. And if you haven't listened, I would invite you to go back and listen to last week's episode. The practice of noticing what is happening in our bodies without immediately trying to fix it, explain it, or make ourselves wrong for it. And I talked about how so many of us adopted people became incredibly skilled at reading everyone else while losing connections with ourselves. How the nervous system, when love doesn't consistently feel safe, learns to ask, who do I need to become? rather than what am I actually feeling? Curiosity interrupts that pattern gently and without force. And what happens when we begin to notice, when we slow down long enough to actually stay with ourselves, we start to see something, and that's clarity. Clarity is not having it all figured out, y'all. Clarity is not knowing exactly why you are the way you are, or having a neat explanation for every pattern, or fully understanding your story from beginning to end. Clarity is awareness. It's recognition. It is the ability to notice what is arising in my body, what emotion is underneath this reaction, what pattern keeps showing up, and what my body has been trying to tell me without needing to have all the answers yet. Let me say that again, without needing to have all the answers yet. Because I think one of the things that keeps adoptees stuck, and honestly, keeps a lot of people with early trauma stuck, is this belief that unless we have complete understanding, we can't move forward. Unless we know the full story, we can't heal. Unless we can explain it, it doesn't count. But clarity doesn't ask for complete resolution. Clarity just asks, what am I becoming aware of? At the retreat, it was really, really cool to watch as we worked through the somatic exercise that I'm going to share with you soon. And what I kept witnessing over and over again in that room was before someone had the words, their body already knew I could see it. Before someone could say, I feel grief, or I feel shame, or I feel relief, their hand would already move toward their chest, their breath was already changing, something in their posture was already shifting. The body holds clarity before the mind can catch up. And this is actually one of the hardest things for us adopted people because so many of us became experts. I'm putting those in quotes if you're not watching on um YouTube at intellectualizing our experience. Many of us became experts at intellectualizing our experience. We can talk about adoption, we can explain the research, we can describe the frameworks, we can even teach it, I know, because I do it, while still being slightly above our own bodies, managing from a safe distance. Clarity asks us to come down, to move from thinking about our experience to being with our experience. So when curiosity opens the door, clarity is what we find on the other side. Clarity lets us start to see the patterns, the ways we adapt, the survival strategies that made complete sense once and may still be running the show now, long after we needed them. Things like noticing every time someone gets close, something in you pulls back, not because you don't want connection, you desperately do, but because the nervous system learned early that closeness also meant potential loss. Or noticing that you work incredibly hard to be needed, to be useful, to justify your presence in relationships, not from a place of genuine giving, but from a quiet old fear that if you stop being valuable, you may not be kept. Or noticing certain emotions like anger, sadness, need feel dangerous to show. Not because they are, but because somewhere early they weren't received well. I've talked about many times how when I was growing up, I was sent to my room for my feelings because they were ridiculous and I needed to work them out. Clarity doesn't judge these patterns. Clarity just says, I can see you now. So one of the most important shifts that clarity makes possible is this. We move from what's wrong with me to what is happening in me. This may sound similar to each other, but they're completely different questions. What's wrong with me is a shame question. It assumes something is broken. It looks for a verdict. What is happening in me or what has happened in me is a curiosity question. It assumes that there is context. It looks for understanding. And as adopted people, so many of us have lived our whole lives asking the first question: what is wrong with me? Why do I push people away? What is wrong with me? Why can't I just feel safe? What is wrong with me? Why do I keep abandoning myself? What's wrong with me? But clarity, real clarity, offers a different answer. You adapted, you survived. Your nervous system did exactly what nervous systems are designed to do when the conditions are unsafe or unpredictable. You became whoever you needed to become in order to be loved. There is nothing wrong with you. There is nothing you need to fix. There is something that happened to you, and there are patterns that developed in response to it. And now, with a little curiosity and a little clarity, you begin to see them. That's not a problem. That is the beginning of everything. So I'd like to invite you into a somatic practice right now. If it feels supportive, I want to invite you into what I'm calling my clarity practice. There's nothing to get right, there's nothing to force. We're just gently experimenting with the body. So if you were with me last week, you may remember the curiosity practice, noticing the ground beneath you. Let's do that right now. Just feel your feet against the floor. Just that sensation that can be grounding, knowing that you are being supported. Notice the room around you. I would even invite you to physically look around and orient to your space. Notice the colors, notice the shapes. Notice anything that may make you feel safe or comforted. Notice the sensations in your body, even as you are just seated in a chair. The security and the safety that it feels to not have to worry about the fact that the chair may fall out beneath you. So just begin by noticing these things just for a moment. And take one slow breath, not forced, not deep, just a natural one. Inhale and exhale. And let your body settle just slightly. Notice what it feels like to just pause for a minute and pay attention to the inhale and exhale that happens involuntarily. There's something about just noticing your body breathing that can really settle your nervous system. Now I want to gently ask you, and maybe I would even invite you to close your eyes for a moment if that feels comfortable for you. If you're driving, please don't do that. But here's what I'd like to ask you Is there something that you've been carrying lately that you haven't quite been able to name? Not a crisis, not necessarily something huge or traumatic, just something that keeps coming up. A heaviness, a tightness, a familiar unease, a reaction that may have surprised you. Don't try to explain it yet. Just notice if something is there. And now if it feels right, see if it feels comfortable for you to place a hand wherever in your body that thing, situation, experience seems to live. Maybe it's your chest, if it was the heaviness, or your throat, if it was the tightness. It could be your stomach, that familiar unease and gurgling, nauseous feeling. And maybe it's your shoulders. A lot of times I notice with my clients, I can see their shoulders gradually moving up when I'm working with them. Just visibly place your hand wherever it is. And I would even gently move them down if that's what's going on with your shoulders. If it's heart, just lay your hand there. If it's throat, just lay your hand there. Stomach, I just invite you to lay your hand there and let your hand rest there for just a moment. And maybe take a normal breath in and out just to experience the sensation of you being with yourself in this moment. And now with real gentleness, I'd like to invite you to try finishing one or all of these phrases, phrases internally, if that's easier for you, or you could pause the recording and journal about these if you want to. Let's take a normal breath in together and out. Here are the phrases. A part of me learned. What I actually needed was dot dot dot. You don't have to share these answers with anyone. You don't even have to complete the sentence. You can just notice what comes and maybe write down words, phrases, or maybe images show up, draw them. That's fine. And maybe you don't like journaling. Maybe it's easier for you to voice memo these answers. That's fine too. But I would invite you to pause and take some time answering these. Whatever came up, that's clarity, not certainty, not resolution, just awareness of something that's been there, waiting to be seen. And that is enough. I think one of the most tender things I can say about this work is that so many adopted people have spent their entire lives feeling like something is wrong with them without ever being given a framework or understanding why they are the way they are. And clarity, this gentle, patient, non-judgmental awareness is the beginning of that framework. Not a diagnosis, not a verdict, just oh, that makes sense. Of course, I learned that. Of course, my body responded that way. Of course, that pattern developed. Quite honestly, that phrase, of course, is one of the most healing phrases I know because it takes us out of shame and into understanding and clarity. And the body, your body, has been waiting for that understanding for a long time. You don't have to have it all figured out today. You don't have to know the whole story. You just have to be willing to keep noticing. Curiosity opens the door, clarity shows you what's inside. Thank you so much for spending time with me today. I'm so glad that you are here. Next week, we are going to continue the series by moving into the third condition, capacity. And I want to offer you a preview of what that means because I think it's the one that surprises people most. Capacity doesn't mean becoming someone who never gets overwhelmed. It means learning how to stay with yourself while emotion is happening without leaving yourself inside of it. That is some of the most important work we will ever do. And I cannot wait to walk through it with you. As always, if something came up for you in this episode, a question, a reaction, something that landed, you can DM me on any of the socials, or you can schedule a conversation with me. I leave the link in the show notes every week if that is something that you feel led to do. I'd love to connect with you more and talk more about where you are and how I can support you. And if this podcast has been something that's meant something to you, a five-star review or even a few words and a written review goes such a long way in helping this work reach more people, more adopted people and more people who love them, their families, more people who need to hear that they are not alone in this. Because you are not. You are never alone. And I'll see you next week. Peace.