Why Adoptees Abandon Themselves (And How to Finally Stay)

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In this episode:

What if capacity isn't about handling more - it's about leaving yourself less?

In this episode, Julie Brumley dives into the third condition that cultivates self-belonging: Capacity. This is the heart of the series, and the condition that surprises people most. Capacity isn't becoming someone who never gets overwhelmed. It's the ability to stay connected to yourself while emotion exists - to feel the wave without losing the thread back to yourself in the middle of it.

Julie introduces two foundational somatic concepts - titration and pendulation - and guides listeners through a body-based practice they can use anywhere. She also shares something personal: what it felt like to stay with grief after losing her mother-in-law, and what she witnessed in the room at the retreat when participants practiced this work in real time.

This episode will change how you understand healing.

Chapters

[00:00] Welcome back + recap of Clarity 

[02:00] What Capacity is NOT, and why so many of us learned a version of strength that was actually self-abandonment 

[04:50] What Capacity actually is - staying connected to yourself while emotion exists

[06:30] The difference between being the emotion and having the emotion 

[07:30] Titration - why the nervous system heals one drop at a time 

[09:30] Pendulation - the natural rhythm between activation and settling 

[11:59] Somatic practice: pendulation guided experience 

[16:27] The most important line in this series 

[18:00] Julie's personal story - sitting shiva with grief 

[19:30] What this looked like in the retreat room 

[20:08] Closing thought - why Capacity asks the bravest thing of us 

[21:45] Next week preview: Connection

Key Takeaways

• Capacity is not handling it. It's the ability to stay connected to yourself while emotion exists - not after the wave passes, not before it arrives, but while it is happening.
• The adaptations you developed - suppression, performance, disconnecting from your inner experience - were intelligent responses to real conditions. They protected you. And they may also be the walls now keeping you from yourself.
• Titration means going one small drop at a time. The nervous system cannot heal everything at once, but it can heal a tremendous amount when we honor its actual pace.
• Pendulation is the rhythm between the activated place and the supported place. Transformation doesn't happen in the overwhelm. It happens in the moving between.
• The goal is not to never feel pain. The goal is to not leave yourself inside it.
• Capacity grows incrementally - through small, repeated moments of choosing to stay with yourself instead of leaving. Every moment you stay, even a little, matters.

Somatic Practice From This Episode

The pendulation practice Julie guides in this episode can be used any time you feel activated or overwhelmed.

1. Find where your body feels activated - tension, heaviness, tightness, contraction.
2. Find somewhere in your body that feels more neutral or supported - your hands, your feet on the floor, the weight of your back against a chair. Even your earlobes if that's what's available.
3. Gently let your attention move between those two places. Activated. Supported. Activated. Supported.
4. This is your nervous system learning it can visit the hard place and still find its way back.

The 5 Conditions of Self-Belonging Series

This episode is part of a five-episode series walking through the five conditions that allow self-belonging to emerge:

Curiosity → Clarity → Capacity → Connection → Consistency

Not goals to achieve. Conditions to experience. Practices of returning to yourself.

• Episode 1: Curiosity — Learning to Notice Without Judgment
• Episode 2: Clarity — Awareness Is Enough
• Episode 3: Capacity — Learning to Stay With Yourself ← you are here
• Episode 4: Connection — Next Thursday
• Episode 5: Consistency — Coming soon

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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 makes, 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 adopted 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 up to. Can I stay with myself without abandoning myself? That question might land lightly, it might land heavy. Either way, I want you to notice where it lands. Because I think for a lot of us adopted people, the honest answer, at least at first, is I don't know. Or even no, I cannot stay with myself without abandoning myself. Not yet. And that is not a failure. That is the starting place. That is information. That's why we're here. So first, I want to begin by talking about what capacity is not, because I think we need to clear some space before we can really receive what it is. Capacity is not handling it. Capacity is not holding it together. Capacity is not moving through hard things without making them a big deal. So many of us, and I say us, because I'm including myself here, learned a version of emotional strength that was actually just a very sophisticated form of self-abandonment. We learned early that our emotions were too much, that our grief was inconvenient, that our questions made people uncomfortable, that if we wanted to stay loved, stay chosen, stay safe, we needed to make ourselves smaller, more manageable, more grateful, and less complicated. And we got incredibly good at it. But that is not capacity, that is survival. And I want to honor survival as I have in many past episodes. The adaptations that we developed, the suppression, the performance, the disconnection from our own inner experience. Those were intelligent responses to real conditions. Your nervous system was doing exactly what nervous systems do when love doesn't feel consistently safe. Those adaptations protected you. And they may also be the very walls that are now keeping you from yourself. So what is capacity then? Really? Capacity is the ability to stay connected to yourself while emotion exists. Not after the wave passes, not before it arrives, but while it is happening.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

Let that settle for a minute. Capacity is not the absence of overwhelm.

SPEAKER_01 7:26

It's not becoming someone who never gets flooded, who never gets activated or triggered, never feels the full weight of grief or fear or shame. Capacity is what happens when you can feel that wave and not lose the thread back to yourself in the middle of it. It's the difference between being the emotion and having the emotion. When we have no capacity, or when capacity has been worn down, emotion swallows us whole. We become the grief, we become the panic, we become the shame. There is no part of us standing witness, no part of us that can say, I feel this and I am still here. Capacity is that witness, that thread, that small, steady, interior place that can hold the wave without becoming it. And here is what I most want you to hear. That place exists within you. It has always existed within you, even in your hardest moments, even in the moments that broke you open. Some part of you was present enough to get through it. Capacity isn't something you build from scratch, it's something you learn to trust. Okay, so now the nervous system has a lot of wisdom here that I think we often skip past in our rush to heal. And I want to introduce two concepts here. I want to introduce them not just as ideas, but as experiences, because they're most useful when you can feel them, not just understand them. The first is called titration. When I first started doing this work, this somatic body-based work, I had to start with the ideas in order to understand them, because learning the language of the body, of my own body, was just that, a foreign language. And I had been living in my head for a long time. So I started with the intellectual understanding first, and then gradually added in little things like placing a hand over my heart or doing a self-hug. These things are the way that I was able to titrate my system. And in chemistry, titration is the practice of adding a substance one small drop at a time, slowly, carefully, so the reaction can stay controlled and observable. You don't pour the whole bottle in, you go drop by drop. The nervous system works exactly the same way. When we try to process everything at once, every layer of grief, every wound, every unanswered question, all at the same time, we overwhelm our capacity. We flood. And a flooded nervous system cannot integrate. It can only survive, and that's what it's supposed to do. Titration is the practice of going slowly, of touching the edge of something tender, just the edge, and then coming back. Letting your system digest that small amount before moving to the next layer. This is not avoidance. I want to be really clear about that. Titration is not by passing the hard thing, it's honoring your nervous system's actual pace. The body can heal a tremendous amount. It just cannot heal everything at once. The second concept is pendulation. This is the natural rhythm of the nervous system, moving between activation and settling, between the place that holds the wound and the place that holds the resource. Think of a pendulum, not stuck at one extreme, not wildly swinging between them, but moving rhythmically, sustainably. In practice, this looks like noticing where your body is activated. There's some tension, maybe an ache, maybe a contracted feeling, some place that feels dense or guarded. And then finding somewhere in your body that feels more neutral, more supported, more settled. Maybe it's your hands resting in your lap. Maybe it's the weight of your back against the chair. Maybe it's the soles of your feet on the floor. Sometimes it's none of that because our whole body feels activated. And the only place that can potentially feel settled is your earlobe or something like that. That's fine. All you're doing is you're trying to find that place and gently letting your attention move between those two places. Activated, supported. Activated, supported. This is where transformation actually happens, not in the overwhelm, but in the moving in between. So let's practice this together now. And if it feels supportive, I'd like to invite you into a brief capacity practice, which is what I'm going to call it today. There's nothing to perform, nothing to get right. We're just doing a bit of an experiment here today. If you're driving or need to stay alert, just listen and you can come back to this whenever you're ready. I'd like to invite you to let your feet find the floor and notice the surface beneath your feet.

SPEAKER_00 14:08

Is it hard? Is it soft? Is it cold? Is it firm? What does it feel like?

SPEAKER_01 14:18

Notice your back against what is behind you if there is something behind you. Does it feel firm? Is it supporting you? Just notice the sensations of that, not having to worry about having to hold yourself up. And I'd like to invite you to take a slow breath in. Nothing forced, just a natural one.

SPEAKER_00 14:44

And exhale out and let your body settle just slightly. Now I want to invite you to notice.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

Is there something in your body that is holding right now, clenching? Is there something that your body is actually dealing with right now? Not necessarily something huge, maybe something that came up in last week's clarity practice or something that's been quietly present in the background. A tightness, a heaviness, a familiar ache.

SPEAKER_00 15:34

Don't try to explain it. Just find it and where it is in your body.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

And now, without leaving that place entirely, let your awareness widen. And find somewhere in your body that feels a little more settled, a little more neutral. Like I mentioned before, maybe it's your hands, maybe it's your seat against the chair, maybe it's your lower back against whatever it is that you are sitting on, or the soles of your feet, or the lobes of your ear.

SPEAKER_00 16:27

Just let your attention rest there for a moment and pause.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

And now, very gently, let your attention begin to move. From the activated place to the settled place.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

And back.

SPEAKER_01 16:55

Not forcing, not rushing, but just moving rhythmically like a pendulum finding its arc.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

I'm gonna pause and give you some real space here to do this work. The activated tense, the tight place, the heaviness, wherever it is, get to the more settled place. Just like a pendulum, back and forth. Y'all, this is capacity in practice.

SPEAKER_01 17:43

This is your nervous system learning that it can visit the hard place and still find its way back.

SPEAKER_00 17:54

When you're ready, take a breath in. And let your eyes open if they were closed.

SPEAKER_01 18:07

And I want to share something with you that I believe sits at the very heart of this part of the work. The goal is not to never feel pain. The goal is not to leave yourself inside it. Let that land wherever it lands in your body, and notice that the goal is not to never feel pain. The goal is to not leave yourself inside it. So much of what we as adopted people have been told implicitly and explicitly in families, in culture, in well-meaning advice, is that the goal is to get over it, to move on, to be grateful for what you have, to stop hurting. But that is not the work. The work is learning to be with yourself while you hurt, to stay, to not abandon yourself in the moment you most need your own presence. And I think about how many of us learn to do exactly that, to leave ourselves, because it was safer than staying, because staying meant feeling, and feeling meant needing, and needing felt dangerous. A couple of things come to mind here from my own experience recently. When I lost my mother-in-law in March, I found the emotions that I was experiencing were quite excruciating, more so than any other loss I'd ever experienced. So much so that there were a few days that I struggled to get out of bed. Before understanding this work, I would have completely shamed myself and pushed myself to work or clean or whatever, honestly, so that I didn't have to be with what I felt like were Godforsaken emotions. But I didn't do that. I allowed myself to be in them. I allowed the sensations to move through me and to notice how they didn't take over. I was able to quote unquote sit shiva with myself and them. That's a concept. I've taken that from Jewish tradition, where you sit with somebody in their grief. You don't say anything, you're just with them. I was able to sit shiva with them. And then at the retreat, when we did this experience that I just took you through, it was so moving to watch as those who attended bravely practice what I was asking them to do, and afterward were able to see how the area that was activated was less intense. In essence, they had increased their capacity in real time. Capacity is not about eliminating that learned response. It's about slowly, gently building a different option, a new pathway that says, I can feel this and I can stay. I think the reason why capacity surprises people is that it asks something of us that goes against everything we were trained to do. It asks us to stop performing. To stop managing ourselves into something more digestible. Treating our own emotional experience as an inconvenience to be minimized. To witness, to hold the wave without becoming it. That is not weakness. That is one of the greatest, most tender, most important work a human being can do. And I want you to know you don't have to have this figured out yet. Not all the way. Capacity grows incrementally. It grows through practice, through titration, through small repeated moments of choosing to stay with yourself instead of leaving. Every moment you stay, even a little matters. Curiosity opens the door, clarity shows you what's inside, and capacity is learning to remain in the room. Thank you so much for spending this time with me today. I'm so glad that we've been able to be together. Next week, we move into the fourth condition: connection. And I want to offer you a preview as I've been doing each week because I think it holds a particular surprise for adoptees. Connection starts internally. Before it can live between you and another person, before you can truly be met by someone else, something has to happen inside you first. You have to be present with yourself. We're going to talk about what that means, about the adopte paradox of longing deeply for connection and fearing it at exactly the same time, about co-regulation, and about what belonging actually feels like in the body. And I cannot wait to be with you for that one. 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 would love to connect with you and talk more about where you are and what support might look like for you. I've included a link in the show notes to schedule with me if that is something that you're leaning towards. And if this podcast has meant something to you, a five-star review or a few words in a written review goes such a long way in helping this work find more people, more adoptees, more families, and more people who need to hear that they are not alone in this. Because you are not. You are never alone in this. And I look forward to seeing you next week. Peace.