Series 6, Episode Two, Liminality & Adoption.

Join Dr Lisa Cherry in conversation with Annalisa Toccara-Jones on liminality and adoption.

Annalisa is a Doctoral researcher in Journalism at the University of Sheffield, an award-winning cultural producer, communications strategist, and graduate teaching associate. As an adoptee, her research explores how UK adult adoptees use social media to challenge dominant adoption narratives and highlight the colonial logics that shape UK adoption, drawing on decolonial theory, the theory of intersectionality, and critical adoption studies. She teaches on media, identity, and social justice, and her work spans digital storytelling, community engagement, and lived-experience-led practice. Outside academia, she supports charities and creative projects with narrative strategy and ethical communications focused on adoption, racialised care, and wider public dialogue.

You can find her on: 

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Transcript

Setting The Frame: Liminality

SPEAKER_01 0:04

This is the Trauma Resonance Resilience Podcast. And this is for you if you are interested in compassion, connection, and relationships and how we can all work together creating services that do not add to harm but rather seek to support recovery from it. I'm your host, Lisa Cherry, and this is your time to sit back and listen in on conversations that make a difference.

Introducing Adoption And Identity

SPEAKER_02 0:32

Welcome to the Liminality series, where we're exploring the theory of liminality, and hopefully you've been to some of our sessions already and you've been enjoying them. We're looking at lots of different themes and concepts to do with liminality. And today we're looking at liminality and adoption. And my guest is a rather special one. Annalisa Takara-Jones is a doctoral researcher in journalism at the University of Sheffield, an award-winning cultural producer, communication strategist, and graduate teaching associate. As an adoptee, her research explores how UK adult adoptees use social media to challenge dominant adoption narratives and highlight the colonial logics that shape UK adoption. She draws on decolonial theory, the theory of intersectionality and critical adoption studies, teaches on media, identity, and social justice, and her work spans digital storytelling, community engagement, and lived experience-led practice. Outside academia, she supports charities and creative projects and on and on and on. She's just all around pretty amazing. And I'm just so pleased to have her here. Hello. Hi, Lisa. Thank you for inviting me. I bet no one's ever asked you if you'll talk about adoption and liminality before, have they?

SPEAKER_00 1:59

No, this is my first time, so I'm quite excited.

A Formative Train Conversation

SPEAKER_02 2:02

Yeah, I mean, across the series it will become really clear how I got into uh thinking about liminality and started um looking into it as a theory. And it strikes me that there's so many ways that the theory of liminality can be used. Um, and I know that the you know it's been explored how it can be overused as well. So it's a very interesting subject. But I wonder if we could start by me asking you, could you share a formative moment in your adoption journey uh that shaped how you see yourself today? But also what does the word liminality mean to you in this context?

SPEAKER_00 2:52

Yeah, of course. So I think for me, one real profound moment was when I um was sitting on a train back in 2015, and I was on my way home from work, and um I had rang my mum, and I can't remember what we were talking about, but I had this thought about how adoptees are always the last choice. But I remember saying this to my mum on the phone, and I cannot, for the life of me, remember what we were discussing for me to have said this. And um, my mum got very upset when I was saying this to her, my adoptive mum, and I was and I was trying to explain where I was coming from on that. And I was sat on this train having this like argument pretty much with my mum, and for me, that was probably the moment where I that really kind of defined, I think, my practice and my research and where I am today. Um, because it was having that discussion with my mum, and my mum was very open to a point. So me and her would discuss adoption quite a lot, um, or just like big life things, and to a point she could have those conversations with me. But I this particular one really did upset her. Um, and I think for me that has kind of really shaped how I see liminality in this context, in the sense that as adoptees, and especially my journey, I feel like I've had to straddle those different positions between being an adoptee, experiencing feelings, having conversations within my adoptive family, um, but also recognising that I have another family, my biological family, and living in that space between these three different identities and kind of trying to figure out who I am within that has probably for me, yeah. That probably is for me how I the starting point for liminality and kind of those spaces and managing my identity within that as an adoptee.

Living Between Families And Selves

SPEAKER_02 4:54

I mean, it's quite a profound insight to suddenly notice that you're part of a system where you're thought about last. I think that's really profound. And of course I really get where that kind of comes from is that you know we can't have our own children and we can't I know I know we can adopt. And actually, where do you go after adoption anyway? I I can see uh the challenge and the awakening and the profundity of arriving in that space, um and that's interesting, you're thinking about that in-between space between being an adoptee, being in an adopted family, and then having your own family. And I wonder do you feel that adoption places you in a permanent in-between space, in a permanent conflict with your different emerging and emerged identities? Or perhaps you could speak to whether or how that shifts over time.

Adoptee Consciousness Over Time

SPEAKER_00 6:15

Yeah, and actually, this is part of my PhD research. So um I'm using the adoptee consciousness model to analyse my findings, which are interviews that I've done with 36 adoptees. Um, and I've also taken data from Twitter across a period of five years, which I use to inform my interviews. Um, but I'm using the model specifically because um it's written by developed by adoptee academics, but they explain how adoptees come into kind of this idea of consciousness through um their lifetime. And I think for me that really hits the spot, really, on how adoptees or how I have definitely kind of feel and experience my own kind of yeah, um, thoughts and feelings around adoption and and I guess that liminality state in that it's it's not necessarily a cycle that you can go through different phases through your lifetime, um, and that you may never actually end up at a point of acceptance or a point of being, like you could shift and change. And I think for me especially, I do feel a lot more pe at peace with my adoptee state right now than probably I've ever done in my entire life. Actually, no, I know that um through my entire life, and I think that has come through research, but it's also come through um having these open conversations with people who aren't adopted, but also people who are adopted, and just being able to feel like I can really express more about who I am and these in-between states and not feel like I'm having to hold a part of myself back because I think for many adoptees, we do sometimes struggle that kind of we can't completely be ourselves because of this fear of um or this kind of narrative that's been put on us on that we have to be grateful for being adopted, and so if you express any type of questioning that narrative, you're immediately seen as like being a challenge, or you're seen as being ungrateful. And I think I have arrived at that space now in my adulthood where I'm very much like, if you want to see me as that, that's absolutely fine. But I'm at peace with how I've kind of balancing these different states of liminality and that my views and kind of opinions and feelings on adoption, they come through obviously my own experience, but they also do come through research and also talking to other adoptees as well. So I think that's how I've kind of really seen these identity states, um, and and especially the adoptee consciousness model and how we come into consciousness as an adoptee has really affirmed that.

Midlife Processing And Healing

Intersectionality And Heritage

SPEAKER_02 8:58

Do you mind if I ask you how old you are? Yeah, I'm 38. And I think that that's really important when we think about how we recover from different childhood experiences, adversities, traumas, because there's often a real desperate need to be part of somebody's healing journey and see the outcome of it when they're still in their childhood, right? Because we want to make a difference, we want things to be okay. But actually, what I I always say is that, you know, really it's a mid-life experience. And so I'm unsurprised you're 38. Um, because I think what you're describing is that that's how long it's taken you to process, to articulate, to make sense of, to meaning make of those experiences. So I'm thank you for sharing your age. I know not everyone's very comfortable with it. I'm always telling everyone my age. I think it's amazing that I'm here. Um okay, so what role does, because you talk about intersectionality, which uh is something I've explored as well in my own doctorate, when we're looking at care experience uh of all kinds, it's going to intersect with something. Um, but research often wants to just talk about the one thing, you know, let's talk about care leavers, or let's talk about, you know, adoption, or let's talk, but actually, intersectionality is that's that's just a given. So, what role does ancestry, heritage, or cultural memory play in your experience of thinking about being in the liminal space?

Mixed Race In A Black Family

SPEAKER_00 10:38

Yeah, I think this is a really interesting question because I am a mixed-race adoptee, so I'm Jamaican and half Welsh. Um, but I was adopted into a Jamaican family, so both my adopted parents are black Jamaican. Um, and I think that you could on paper say that I'm a poster child for black adoption because my parents have always, my adopted parents have always um been brilliant at kind of installing my sense of heritage and culture. So from a very young age, I I knew I was black. My mum would always, my both my parents would always say, you um you present as mixed race, but you have dark skin, so you will be seen as black. So that's kind of how I've always um identified as as black, um, but then also have equally said mixed race because I never want to miss out my biological family. That's always been a big thing of mine. So even when my parents said to me, you identify as black, and I'd be like, Yeah, but I'm mixed race as well. And it was because of that fact, because I have two families, and it's really important to recognise that. Um, and my biological dad, who's uh Jamaican, my adoptive parents told me that he requested specifically that I was adopted into a black family because he really wanted me to have that cultural um and ancestry heritage kind of instilled in me growing up. And um, luckily that I don't really like using the word luckily, but I've used it there. Um, but that that was um yeah, that that was honoured. So I think for me, um, I've had an interesting experience in that I've always known like history um and the heritage in that aspect. Um, but I think this is where intersectionality comes in in in some sense because I was adopted into my parents would say they were working class, but over time they moved from working class to middle class. Um, and so I personally would say that I was adopted into a middle class family. Um, and I think that so my parents moved from where they were living in London, um, and I grew up in Midson Keynes, and it was a very white area, so I've always had been in um like at school, I was one of five black children in my school. Um, growing up, I had white friends, like I pretty much had white friends in my entire life, and so even though I've had the history side of being black, culturally, that cultural aspect of kind of being in a Jamaican culture, um, I've never really had at all. Um, my parents didn't want me to learn um to speak Paptua, so I don't speak it, don't understand it. I've never been to Jamaica. Um I've just not really had, I would say, that sense of culturalness. So um and then the other side of that, and it was this is only something that I've recently realised, I'd say in the last 10 years has has been a massive part of my experience. Where I currently live, um, it's a very mixed, um, it's a very mixed um city um in the sense that um there are a lot of mixed uh race um other adults here. And I, because I've always identified as black, it was only really when I started getting involved in um lots of kind of cultural um projects in the city that I actually realised that my experience as a mixed-race person growing up in a black family is very different to a mixed-race person growing up with mixed-race parents, um, or kind of a white parent, black parent. And um, that was something that I realised actually is a is a disconnect for me. Um, and so I think that also that does play in that sense of liminality, in that um I think I've got a bit of a unique experience. So in adoption, we tend to talk a lot about transracial adoption, right? But I definitely think there is a space missing for people who are mixed race like me growing up in same-race families. So, for example, mixed race adopted into a black family. We tend to feel, or I feel the sector feels that, you know, because you've been placed in this um black family, that everything's all solved. Like you don't have any disconnects, like you know your heritage, you know your, you know, you know everything. And I just think that actually that's not true. Um, and so I think that that is something that has really played in my kind of sense of liminality, and it was only really in the last 10 years that I've I've realized that deeply because I thought I was fine in in that sense, like I knew my heritage, I knew my culture. Um, but actually I didn't. So yeah, I I would say that that has played a massive part in that.

Gaps In Research And History

SPEAKER_02 15:28

I wonder, has that um exploration did that draw you into writing a history chapter? Because there is a specific history around adoption and mixed-race children. I suppose I'm thinking particularly about the GI, the GI blues, you know, the GIs who came over, um uh who had relationships, uh, the black GIs who came over had relationships with um some of the white British women and then had children, and then those children had to be adopted. I just was thinking about that history, slightly going off-pieced off topic, but I was just curious because I think there's something so interesting about when you do a PhD to start really, really kind of digging into the history. If if you're allowed, I mean, I did a chapter on history, much to people's kind of slight discomfort, because it's so difficult to do. But I wondered, did were you led in that in that way?

Wisdom Adoptees Bring

SPEAKER_00 16:28

No, actually, surprisingly enough, um, I think because my PhD starts from the links between colonialism and adoption. And even though that is very much interlinked in what you're speaking about, I haven't specifically looked into that, um, which might be an idea. Um, but also because my piece is is very much around kind of communication and journalism, so I think it might take it slightly off piece, but um, I do think that is a really interesting. I have so I have spoken to 11 transracial adoptees as part of my research, and so there is a lot that I've done in my research as part of transracial adoption. Um, and actually, this is probably an idea for me for another research piece on mixed-race children in black families. Um, but no, it's not part of my current research at the moment.

SPEAKER_02 17:25

Well, I'm sorry if I've now sent you off into a head spin into another direction, but I just I loved looking at, I mean, I was looking particularly at the relationship between children and the state, and of course, I found myself in 1739 at the Foundling Hospital, you know. I mean, it's just so um interesting, but it's messy because I was also looking at the intersection with education as well. And um, anyway, there we are, slightly off topic. So, what wisdom do you think um adoptees bring to broader conversations about identity and belonging? I mean, you've already alluded to so much, you know. But if you could just sort of break that down, um, I mean, I'm not um, you know, top three points kind of person, but if you can break that down into into certain things, I think that would be so helpful for people.

Beyond Lived Experience Tokenism

SPEAKER_00 18:16

So I think as a starter, for me it feels quite basic, but as I've been talking to other people, it's it's been a people are still like, oh, that's interesting, hadn't seen that before. So I think for me as a starter, it's that actually adoption isn't a fix. Like I think the way that adoption's set up is that once you're adopted, that's it, you're fine, you're sorted. But actually, it's an ongoing journey for an adoptee as they go through all the different stages of identity, and that it's okay for them to honour and recognize and see the biological family as their first family. Um, and I think that that is a great starting place for us to really understand these um the concept of liminality and adoption, because it doesn't have to be either or, it can be an and, it can be both, and there can be multiple ands. It doesn't just have to be um, you know, you're either part of my the this adoptive family or you're not, because that was something that was repeatedly said to me and my sister, who's also adopted, um, growing up. And I think there are when you hear these kind of subliminal messaging of, you know, you really have to be grateful for being in this adoptive family, that really does affect your sense of identity subconsciously or even unsubconsciously, as you grow up. Um, and so, like what we spoke about at the start, where you were saying, you know, it's unsurprising that I'm 38 and talking about this. I think that's another thing is that recognising that our thoughts and feelings on adoption can change over time, and that just because I might believe or say one thing one day, that doesn't mean I have to believe or think it the next day. Like my thoughts and feelings can change, and that is okay too. Um, and and also I think that we we need to stop sidelining adoptees. So, one of the things that I'm really passionate about is recognising our positioning myself as a doctoral researcher rather than an adoptee. Because I think sometimes our lived experience, though great, in what I've noticed anyway, in certain spaces or certain rooms, your lived experience as an adoptee kind of overtakes your professional experience. Um, and while that might sometimes be okay, I do think sometimes for adoptees, um, we actually bring a lot to the table as an adoptee, but also in our space as a professional. Um, and that can't be sidelined. So, as an as an example, I once asked to work on an adoption um campaign as a professional in my communications capacity. But I was told at the time that actually no, because your thoughts and feelings on adoption don't really align or match up. And I thought that's really interesting because actually the fact that I've got those thoughts and feelings on adoption can really feed in and help you with your communications campaign. And so I from speaking to other adoptees, it is really interesting just how we are positioned um with our lived experience, and sometimes that it is great, definitely, that our lived experience is taken into account, but actually, we also do offer a lot of wisdom in other spaces as well as our lived experience.

SPEAKER_02 21:43

I do, I do wonder though, if um that's my experience across most aspects of lived experience, that um it's often prioritized or bastardized or used or used as a defining tool. Um, so if you choose to bring an aspect of your lived experience into how you describe your positionality, people then can sometimes want to use that to define what you're doing there, which for those of us who've worked incredibly hard professionally for many, many years, it can be very disturbing. Now, don't get me wrong, some people are very happy to be defined by their lived experience. That's entirely up to them. Um, but for me, I really understand what you're talking about because it's it's been a frustration. I'll I'll say an example, but obviously I won't describe, I won't say where this happened, but I sent someone my bio, I was about to do a keynote. Um, they said, How would you like to be introduced? I said, Well, you've got my bio. Uh, there's nothing in my bio about me being care experienced because while I share all aspects of my positionality, uh I don't feel it needs to go into my bio. Um, and I was introduced as someone who'd been in foster care as a child, and I was so upset. Um I'm a 55-year-old professional woman, there are so many experiences that you could draw upon in your introduction, and you've chosen to draw upon one of one experience from decades ago, and that's how you're going to define me. And as much as I tried to explain that that was not okay, it was not really understood. So, and I th and I would imagine if we spoke to all sorts of people with different lived experiences, people who are doing lots and lots of work in the mental health space, for example, that they they would also have this same challenge. Um I don't know how we kind of move past that, other than having conversations like this so that people can listen in to, you know, that that's something that we experience. It's okay to present yourself with your positionality so that people understand what motivates you, what theories are you likely to be sitting on, what kind of experiences have shaped the way that you view things, but then please don't use that just to define a person, right?

Honouring Liminal Spaces

SPEAKER_00 24:32

Yeah, 100%. And and this has also come out of my research. So um, pretty much the majority of all my participants mentioned um adoption or being felt and being made to feel um infantilised, as in they're always seen as that child adoptee, even though like some of my participants were in their 50s, are in their 50s, 40s, you know, I've got a few in their 60s, um, but they felt that they were still seen as that adopted child. Um, and I think that it's like we're talking about wisdom, and it and I think it's really important that we recognize just that we're not children anymore. Um, and that actually we have a lot to offer as adopted people that might not just resonate in being adopted. So, yeah, I think it's um a really crucial point, and I think having these conversations is what helps other people who might not understand our lived experiences as care experience people, but they might understand through having these open conversations about it.

SPEAKER_02 25:40

So, how can those working in the adoption space um or society as a whole better honour the liminal experiences of adoption rather than trying to resolve them? So yeah, how can how can people better honour these liminal spaces?

Digital Communities As Lifelines

SPEAKER_00 26:04

I think just understanding that adoptees move through a series of different spaces um that might not necessarily be recognised already in policy, practice, or or um my my subjects media, um and recognising that actually we are expected to perform resolutions. So um I've previously discussed on other platforms about um just dominant media narratives of adoption and kind of how there are these really curated storylines, um especially when we look at long-lost family, for example. Um, but actually our identities sit between many spaces, so spaces of loss, spaces of attachment, race, belonging, and that if we recognise adoption through these different lenses and see kind of how we move through these different states of being, that it isn't necessarily always a clean story. There might not always be a before and after, so to speak. So before being adopted, now being adopted. And I think that will help to really understand this kind of identity framework that happens for an adoptee across a lifetime. And I think by recognising that, it really does open up these like different possibilities of sense making, but also how we can reframe this kind of idea or perspective on being fixed once you've been placed or matched into a family, and that as adoptees we might carry this kind of emotional, kind of emotional thoughts and feelings in silence, but actually, if we stop treating or the sector stops treating it as this conclusion, that actually we can really recognise that adoption is the liminal state. Um, and then like different institutions won't, or hopefully wouldn't just kind of see it as this finality, which I think would help adoptees kind of really be more at peace with their identity if they can, because I know for some of us we it that's not a possibility at all. Um, but I think this is where kind of my research really does sit in this space because one of the driving factors for why I chose to do this PhD in the first place was because in my own personal journey of adoption, I was really struggling about nine, ten years ago personally, and I used to use Twitter a lot, and it was more a case of I was just tweeting into the abyss. I genuinely wasn't tweeting for any attention, nothing. I was just tweeting because I was lonely and I was grieving and I had no one to talk to in my actual personal life offline. And I started tweeting, and that just naturally seemed to draw other adoptees to me, and then also non-adoptees and other people working in the sector who were um really intrigued by what I was tweeting, and I think because a lot of my tweets at that point were really raw, and I definitely wouldn't tweet like that now, it was just where I was at at that moment in time. Um, it really kind of I think helped other adoptees kind of really gravitate towards me because I was tweeting just so authentically, and and then non-adoptees who were really intrigued by the what I'm tweeting because it'd gone against their grain of understanding of what adoption actually is. But for me, I was sat in that liminal space of I am grieving and I've got no one to talk to. Um, and it was horrendous, it was a horrible time for me, absolutely horrible time for me. But it was that that actually led to this PhD research because I realized that there were lots of things that I was tweeting that other adoptees were also tweeting in maybe different countries, but that our thoughts and feelings were all very connected and the same. And so I naturally we kind of like adoptee communities began to kind of develop on. I was specifically on Twitter, but it also happens on Instagram, Facebook, and now TikTok. Um, and so this is really what my PhD kind of also really looks into is just how digital communities have become this space for adoptees because they are sat in that that liminal space of not being able to talk to anybody in their day-to-day lives. And so they're tweeting or they're posting, and that's really helping them to kind of understand who they are and their identity. Um, so I think, yeah, by us or the sector, reframing adoption as um not something that is a fixed permanent resolution solution, um, that can really help adoptees feel more comfortable or at least give more leeway to their own authority over their stories because they again that's something that has not really been there at all, is just adoptees being able to own who they are and their own individual stories rather than these curated storylines that we do see in the media or that we do see through National Adoption Week. Um, so I think if we were yeah, so I think there's just a massive, massive work to do in being able to kind of rethink or reframe adoption in that way.

SPEAKER_02 31:12

I think there's something really interesting about thinking about the those digital spaces as being liminal between knowing who who I was and who I can be, who I think I am, but who I'm not yet, where do I belong? Do I belong here? Do I belong there? I think there's a really massive conversation to be had about that, thinking about that in a theoretical way. And when you mentioned um long lost family, which of course it it would be really difficult to get through any conversation about adoption without mentioning long lost family, do you feel that they handle this stuff well at all? Or do you think it's so busy in having happy endings and good TV that it misses um the point? Because I always, when I whenever I've watched that, I've thought, God, I bet there's loads of episodes that they just don't air because it just doesn't have the happy ending. It just doesn't have what they need or want from the end of it.

Media Narratives And Long Lost Family

SPEAKER_00 32:14

Yeah, so through my research, um, again, pretty much the majority of adoptees mentioned that particular TV show and expressed their disappointment in the show for the way that they handle reunion. Um, and I do know that there have been a few adoptees um, not in my research study, but who have specifically written to Long Lost Family. Um, so for example, Claire at How to Be Adopted, um, and asked for them to actually show um adoptee reunion stories in this kind of real light that we're we're talking about. Um, so I think for me, I mean, I've watched a couple of episodes of Long Lost Family, and I haven't been able to watch it anymore. Like I'm it triggers me, um, and I refuse to put myself in spaces that trigger me. Um so, but but when I have watched it, yeah, it makes me feel really uncomfortable. Um, and and I think it's not just with Long Lost Family, but I think it is a lot of media TV films either want to portray adoptees as villains or they want to portray um adoption as this like happily ever ending. And I'm like, you know, not everyone has that beautiful reunion story or that beautiful happy ending in their adoptive story, and and that's fine. Like, that's okay. Why can't we show that that is okay? Why do we have to keep portraying this narrative of how adoption's great, adoption's beautiful? Why can't we have just an ending that is messy? Or because that is that's real, that's what a lot of adoptees experience and go through. But what I've always noticed, what I what I do notice is that even when we do want to talk about this, um, so for example, maybe there is the news news piece that will talk about kind of the um, you know, this this portrayal of adoptees as villains or something. But there will always be a comment somewhere in the news piece that is like, such and such is grateful for being adopted, such and such loves their adoptive family. And and why can't we ha talk about these stories without saying that line? Why do we still have to put that line in that they love their adoptive family? And and I refuse to do that. So one of the things that I don't do when I talk about my adoption story is say how much I love my mum and dad. I just won't do that because why should I have to use that as a disclaimer for me to be then able to talk about, you know, how adoption might be a bit complicated for me? Why do I have to start with I love my adoptive parents? So I don't do that at all. Um and I think this is that that for me is the way that I take back my adoption story and be able to reclaim my own narrative without having to permanently feed into the way that society sees adoption, that adoption is the solution, and so therefore I have to love my mum and dad. I would and again, I was just about to and I do love my I saw you, I saw you. But yeah, so it's just one of these things that I just think that um long-lost family don't do as well. And and and I do question the follow-ups as well. Like if we were to look at these reunion stories that they show, and obviously I don't know the answer to this, but I'm just thinking, I wonder if we were to then look at these stories maybe 10, 20, 30 years down the line, and visited some of these families, it would be interesting to see just how they've experienced that reunion ongoing, like after the TV films have stopped filming.

SPEAKER_02 35:49

Um, thought that too. Yeah, let's go like a year later, two years later. Um, that would be very interesting, wouldn't it? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 36:00

And it yeah, would those storylines still be the same? I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 36:06

Well, just kind of going to my final kind of inquiry with you, really. So if we refrained adoption through the lens of thinking about liminality, what new possibilities do you think might emerge?

Choosing Not To Perform Gratitude

SPEAKER_00 36:26

I think, and I've probably touched on this, but just the idea of messiness as being wholeness, that we don't have to have this perfect ending or this perfect solution. That actually the messy part of liminality can actually also be quite beautiful, um, or at least allows that freedom for an adoptee to really feel and be at or try to be at peace with this kind of unique space of being in these different identities. Um there's an adoptee scholar called um Betty Lifton who speaks about the ghost kingdom and about how adoptees, as adoptees, we do tend to live in these different kinds of this ghost kingdom where you know we might be grieving or we might be having feelings about our birth family, but that we also live in this kind of space with our adoptive family and just recognising that both parts make whole as well, like we don't just it's like what I've said, we don't need to choose one or the other, and I think that is a beautiful possibility because I also think that that then helps the different sides um within this kind of adoption constellation. So I think that might also help adoptive families in the sense that um so so speaking from my pick my personal experience, my mum found it really difficult um when my sister, and I'm allowed to say this because my sister has given me permission, but when my sister went and found her biological family, my mum found that really difficult. And when, and so that then made me feel as though I couldn't go and search because it was like this knock-on effect. But I think that if we really recognised um within adoptive families that actually we can have both, or we can kind of the yeah, just this idea of messiness, I think it will really help because it will also take some of that, like um, you know, just that maybe I don't know, I can't speak from my mum's side, but maybe some of that disappointment or some of that anger or some of that kind of sadness away because we're actually recognising from the very start that an adopted person has these different families, but will also have these idea different identities as they go through their lifetime. And I think that could just help, like this, just this beautiful. I think that's just something beautiful about being a beautiful mess and that that's okay. Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:06

That's wonderful. Anna Lisa, thank you so much for exploring liminality and adoption with me. It's been such a gift to talk to you, so thank you.

SPEAKER_00 39:17

Thank you, Lisa. It's been lovely.

SPEAKER_01 39:19

You've been listening to the Trauma Resonance Resilience podcast with me, your host, Lisa Cherry. Brought to you straight from the heart of the knowledge that high quality relationships are the cornerstone of learning, healing, and growing. If you've enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing or reviewing. Until next time.