At Ease With Jean Widner

[00:00:02] Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of the Thriving Adoptees podcast today. I'm delighted to be joined by Jean. Jean Widner, looking forward to our conversation today, Jean. Thank you so much Simon for having me on. I'm thrilled to be here with you. I'm thrilled you're here. Yes, yes, yes. So, Thriving, Thriving Adoptees, what comes to mind when you hear the name of the podcast, Jean?

[00:00:25] I've always liked your really positive focus, that thriving can happen, it can happen in any circumstance. It can happen no matter where you started. You know, life is definitely a journey and for some people it has a really, really hard or even terrible and tragic beginning. And I remember someone asked me something one time, like, how do you get over that?

[00:00:51] And you don't get over something that happens to you that is maybe awful or terrible or maybe even heinous and evil. You don't get over that.

[00:01:01] What you do do, though, is you learn how to first hopefully survive it. And then you do, I think, have to learn how to thrive, regardless of your circumstances, regardless of where you started, or maybe your life was not full of adversity in the beginning.

[00:01:21] Maybe it looks like, you know, sunshine and rainbows all on the outside. But regardless, we all have to figure out how to thrive. And I think thriving to me means defining a way to be at ease in your own skin as you move through the world and then can hopefully learn to relate to other people and to yourself from a place of personal security.

[00:01:50] And I think personal security leads to confidence. And I think confidence in oneself, confidence in one's ability to communicate with other people. I think that helps us thrive. And I think that can then open us up to all of the really wonderful things that life does contain for all of us. Yeah. Do you know, I love talking to authors about this stuff. Mm hmm.

[00:02:16] Um, because somehow, I feel that what you've done in writing your book is you've kind of got some distance from the tough stuff. Oh, yeah. I mean, you.

[00:02:38] Writing a book and taking on a journey like this, and then actually fulfilling it is a lot of discipline and a lot of hard work, right? You cannot deny that. I mean, I have a day job, if you will, I'm very, very fortunate in that I'm self employed. And thus do get to somewhat control my own schedule, but I nonetheless have a client load and people who need things from me.

[00:03:04] So I had to work and write for the majority of the time from 5am until 8am every single day of the week and on weekends. And that was how I got the job done, you know, over three years. And you grow a lot as a human being, when you decide to take on something like that, and then fulfill it.

[00:03:23] And I will say it is an incredibly rewarding experience to be on the other side of it and to now be with this creation pushed out there into the world, you know, for good or ill for whatever you think of it. If you love it, great. If you don't, well, okay, I did my best. To be able to sit there and say that is a feeling unlike any other that I've ever had. Topical.

[00:03:52] Well, for my book, I did interview, you know, a hundred people practically from, you know, all different sides of the adoption triad. As I took in those stories, again, good stories, hard stories, stories with both in, in, in the course of doing that.

[00:04:12] Plus all of the research that I put into the book, I learned and grew so much myself in hearing how other people had either a struggled and then how they came out. So, excuse me, the other side of that, to be at a point where they were able to tell their stories. And let's be honest, storytelling is cathartic, right? There's a reason why we're here.

[00:04:38] You know, you have this podcast with a very specific kind of goal in mind, which is to talk about how it is we thrive in adoption, which has impacted us to one degree or another. How do we thrive? And I learned bits and pieces of that really from everyone that I interviewed.

[00:05:02] And so their stories live within me, both the good and the bad or the hard. And it's like their toolbox becomes a part of my toolbox. Does that make sense? You know, I always think about life in that, you know, we have this little toolbox of skills that kind of we cart around with us.

[00:05:25] And when you add valuable things to that toolbox that helps you later in life, you can think, oh, you know how such and so looked at that this way? I can do that same thing here in this moment. And I can step away and I cannot do something that I would have done normally and can instead respond to something differently. It allows it allows us to respond to things rather than to just simply react to them. Yeah. I'm just thinking about where to go next.

[00:05:59] What do you see as, so you've talked about growth, tools, skills and perspectives. I think is to sum up one of the things that you said. Growth to tools, skills and perspectives. How do those relate to one another? Or let me ask you more.

[00:06:29] What's most profound? What has been the most profound part of this journey in terms of the skills that you've added, the tools that you've learned from others? The shifts in perspective that you had. What's been the richest part for you, Jean?

[00:06:51] Without a doubt, it's having a few people come up to me already and say, oh, my God, I didn't know anybody else felt like this. I thought I was the only one who had feelings like this. One thing that I found that was just really amazing is when we were in the very, very final proofing stages of the book. You know, it goes into the final proofer.

[00:07:18] And, you know, this person is basically, you know, periods and commas, right? You know, that's their job is to give it that one final polishing and once over. And this person happened to be someone who had been adopted through a step-parent adoption later in their life. And you never hear anything back from anybody in this process.

[00:07:41] But sure enough, a couple of weeks into the proofing phase, I got a message from the publisher saying, the proofer is actually really enjoying the book. And I was like, wow, that's cool. I mean, you don't hear that. And then when it was all over, I got a message from that person saying, you know, I went through a step-parent adoption.

[00:08:05] And this book helped give me some really new perspectives and has actually opened up some new conversations in my family that we didn't know how to have. And that right there is like home run.

[00:08:21] And not only did this person say that, they also said the author did a really good job of laying out the points of view about adoption and all of the things that are part of adoption and letting the reader make up their own mind about all of this. And so, again, I'm like, I can go home now. I won, right? You know, yay.

[00:08:52] So I would say that that is the best kind of feedback and the best reward that I could possibly have from this journey. Yeah. The whole thing you get right. Yeah. And it relates back to what you said about, so I said growth, skills, knowledge, perspective. Mm-hmm. Okay.

[00:09:19] What the reader got, and it was the proofreader, you know, rather than a regular reader, was what he or she valued was the perspective, the new perspective. You know, I don't know what the new perspective was, but I know that they were able to have conversations as a family that they previously hadn't known how to have.

[00:09:45] I think that's something in all of our journeys of growth. You know, when we start out as adoptees, anybody in the constellation as an adoptee, most especially, we lack agency. We do not have agency in this whole process. Everybody makes these decisions around us. We're handed off to a new family. Everything is wonderful, right? When you're a kid, you don't have the words, right?

[00:10:12] It's very, you can't expect an eight-year-old to be able to, I think, really clearly enunciate what their feelings are about the contradictions that they can feel. They can feel loved, wanted, and special, and all the things that we grow up being told that we are, and feel that love and that bond, and that, yeah, these are my parents. They're my real parents. They're the ones who are doing the job.

[00:10:41] And love them for that, and even feel like we belong with our family. And we also know that we are a part of something else. How on this green earth can we ever ask an eight-year-old to be able to enunciate that? Or a 12-year-old, you know? Or even a 17-year-old.

[00:11:00] It's, if we don't have words for things, it's very difficult to put any dialogue to it, which then therefore means, how do you ever acknowledge it, bring it into reality, shine the light on it, and then heal from it? How? And our society, unfortunately, does that with adoption, is we think everything's fine. So a lot of adoptees cart along through life, myself being one of them, saying everything is fine.

[00:11:28] Adoption's never affected me, but we've never had the verbiage to even go in and wrestle with some of these more challenging concepts. Like, okay, what is my actual heritage? Or where did I come from? Or why was I relinquished? Why was I given up or placed for adoption? Why? And so if no one's there to help guide us as kids, and then we wander into adulthood,

[00:11:53] how can we expect us to be anything other than a little bit, you know, again, you don't have a toolkit, right? You've walked into life, and you know how to drive a car, and you know how to do these other things, but do you know how to have a real intimate, emotional, hard conversation with someone about adoption? No. And so that takes perspective, that takes learning, that takes time. It doesn't happen by itself.

[00:12:21] We can't expect anybody to just grow or evolve or thrive without some assistance. Yeah. I want to just throw in something here that I think is one of the most important things that I've learned in the last couple of years, and it's to do with having words for this,

[00:12:46] and this notion of pre-verbal trauma. And if we, you've talked about having words for it and being able to have conversations and stuff, right? One of the biggest things that stops us thriving is trying talk therapy for trauma we have no words for. Right.

[00:13:13] So I never miss an opportunity to slot that in, because when it landed, you know, when it hit me, I'm getting goosebumps now thinking about that, because so many people go that route. So many therapists will take the client on because they want to help people, but they're not, no, they don't have, if they're not adoption competent, or if they don't know about this kind of pre-verbal stuff,

[00:13:41] and the fact that we don't have words for it, then it ain't, then it ain't going to work. Right. It ain't going to work. And you've got to go for something that's more, you've got to go for a therapeutic modality that is more about somatics, and people also talk about EMDR as something for non-verbal.

[00:14:08] But if you're listening to this and you're wondering why you're not moving on, listener, and you've been going down this talk therapy route, then I would encourage you to have a think about what we're saying here and see whether a difference would be appropriate. Well, yeah.

[00:14:34] I mean, are you inviting us to chat about that a bit in depth? Go for it. Yeah. I was just giving a kind of a public service announcement. Sure. Well, and it's funny because literally last night I was at a meeting with a reading critique, you know, writing organization that I'm active in, who I will say helped me tremendously in writing and creating my book without a doubt.

[00:15:03] And I ended up seated next to a woman who was new to the group who I never met, who happens to be a psychotherapist, you know, here in the Las Vegas area. And so we're talking and, you know, sure enough, we started talking about mothers and drama from families and generational trauma. And, you know, I had already talked to her about, you know, what my book was.

[00:15:26] And, you know, I had a few copies there with me that night because I have copies of my book. Yeah, you do that. I'll take them everywhere I go. I've seen you unboxing them. I've seen you unboxing them and packing them. I know. I know. So anyway, she and I are sitting there chatting about it and we are, we're talking about, you know, pre-verbal trauma and how that impacts, you know, folks. And she says, yeah, I have so many patients who do not understand this concept

[00:15:53] that you can have things that have happened to you that you aren't even necessarily going to consciously remember, but your nervous system absolutely does know. I think that's, you know, one of the things that we have really started to open our eyes to at least the psychological community and the mental health community has opened their eyes to the idea that there's something more happening to us than just our conscious mind.

[00:16:20] And my husband and I, we used to own a company called Wild Divine, which was a biofeedback guided meditation software, where one of the, one of the things that it was very useful for was patients struggling with post-traumatic stress. And, you know, talk about being a complete, I don't want to say victim, but being completely overwhelmed by our nervous system.

[00:16:49] Our nervous system, our brain is here to keep us alive, right? That's its job. Okay. Somebody cuts you off in traffic. Boom. Your nervous system takes over in a microsecond. And all of these amazing biological things occur to you in that moment. You know, your pupils dilate. There's a huge surge of adrenaline, blood's flowing, your heart's thumping. And all of that is to keep you alive.

[00:17:14] Post-traumatic stress forms up when you sort of get, we move back and forth through what's called the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system is in charge the way you and I are right now. Okay. We're talking, we're engaging. We have an empathy and a caring with each other because we've connected. Our prefrontal cortex is fully engaged. Digestion is happening. You know, I'm, I'm digesting my breakfast.

[00:17:44] All those things are happening. In the sympathetic nervous system, which is in sympathy with your environment, that's what takes over when somebody cuts you off in traffic. And if that stays in charge too often, too long, like say, for example, a first responder, military, someone who undergoes something traumatic, you can kind of get stuck with that

[00:18:10] sympathetic part of you in charge and you can't get back with the parasympathetic part of you in charge, which is where we need to be to thrive, to live, to be happy, to have connections with other human beings. This part has to be in charge, but this part can sometimes take over and we can get stuck there. And that's a very, very simplified lay person's term of what post-traumatic stress is. Well, the bridge is your breath.

[00:18:40] And that's why, you know, some forms of biofeedback and guided meditation and things like this can be so helpful for people struggling with that. But you're not doing talk therapy, you know, like what you just said. You can't talk your way out of this. You have to be dealing with your very natural biological responses that are hardwired into us to keep us alive.

[00:19:09] And so you're not trying to trick yourself. You're trying to say, no, this is who we are. This is this amazing, incredible mechanism that we are. And you're stuck over here and we need to help you get back over there. And so breath is one of those modalities. EMDR, lots of these other things, you know, that we're hearing about are a part of those modalities. And so, again, it's communicating with the nervous system and letting the nervous system figure itself out.

[00:19:39] And again, I'm speaking way layman's terms here. There are, I'm sure there are therapists out there going, yeah, she's cray cray. She's like really simplifying this, but it's sort of the lay person's way to interpret what these larger concepts are, what these larger concepts are trying to do, because that's the thing. We can't talk our way out or through or heal from pre-verbal trauma. We can't.

[00:20:06] We've got to let our nervous system express itself and then let a therapist guide us through how to heal that. Yeah. Have you looked? Well, first thing first is I saw some stats about PTSD and it was something I was expecting it to be like 100%.

[00:20:36] So 100% of people exposed to this stuff, like, because a lot of it came from Vietnam, didn't it? A lot of that was PTSD was, it was, you're nodding along. I think you probably know more about this than me. You looked into this before. So what, isn't that right?

[00:21:04] Kind of first world war, it was, we have this thing called shell shock, but then after Vietnam, a lot of work went into looking at PTSD because it was military funded, government funded because it was military. Do you know much about that or? A little bit, just again, from my research, you know, back in the day when we owned this biofeedback software company, post-traumatic stress was actually first diagnosed as a thing actually after the civil war.

[00:21:34] So they've known about this for a long time and then, yeah, but it didn't really get any traction with either the psychological community, which, you know, barely existed, excuse me, or the medical community. You know, again, people knew about it, you know, like you talk about being shell shocked from world war one, that was a common term. World war two, you certainly had veterans that came back that were clearly struggling.

[00:21:59] And then you had the Vietnam war, which in America was a real righteous mess. And then we sent a lot of men home that were again, given absolutely no coping skills. And you had an entire society that was not ready to deal with them and didn't know how. And so that's where I think you kind of had this after effect of an explosion of awareness of it's like, well, wait a minute, this man has come back completely different or woman has come back completely different than what they were.

[00:22:29] And so in the eighties, I think everybody sort of woke up and said, we really need to try to get some solutions, you know? And like Kristen Hanna, for example, wrote a wonderful book called The Women, you know, that was talking about the nurses who were frontline and the post-traumatic stress that, you know, her character and others struggled with, you know, after that. And, you know, it took a long time for our science to catch up. We're there now. We do know a lot.

[00:22:56] And so it really does, again, to pivot back to us as adoptees with pre-verbal trauma or first mothers in particular with pre-verbal, you know, they have their own traumatic experience in the relinquishment of us, which has sometimes developed into complex post-traumatic stress. You know, the main thing is to get the right kind of help. Yeah.

[00:23:22] The stats I heard, I think it was some, I was expecting a very high incidence of post-PTSD amongst the deaths, but actually the stuff was lower. And some people say, I think it was 20%. And I was asking somebody what made the difference about that. And they, and this was a researcher in the area. And all she could give me was the external stuff.

[00:23:51] She didn't give me anything about the internal stuff, what's going on with it. And I thought, well, how, why are you only looking at the external stuff? And she was flummoxed by the internal. So, like, it's all evolving, right? This, this study area. I've been looking at, funnily enough, I've been looking at post-traumatic growth over the weekend.

[00:24:21] Yeah. And it was, and listening to a podcast with one of the guys, I think he was from North Carolina, that coined this term. And I've always, I came across it about 18 months or so, but I didn't really dive deep, deep into it. And now I'm having a deep, deep dive into it.

[00:24:48] But don't you think it's strange that we, because I mention it to quite a lot of people and they say, I've never heard of it. You know? What, post-traumatic growth? What do I think is strange? Post-traumatic growth, yeah. No, I don't think that's strange at all. And I think, I mean, you know, again, science has been studying resilience. They're trying to figure out why it is that, say, you know, three or four troop members can be deployed

[00:25:18] into exactly the same wartime situation. And one guy develops post-traumatic and the other three don't. Or why do you have a handful of children that are all raised in the same household? That is, you know, maybe you've got addiction, maybe you've got abuse. Some of them manage to thrive and come out of that situation doing better than others and others succumb. Why is that? What makes a person more resilient than another? And I think we do just have some random chances of DNA fed in there.

[00:25:48] I think, you know, one of the things, though, that I did study also, again, back when we owned the company that we did, when you deploy troop multiple times into a war theater, you increase the chances of their developing post-traumatic stress. And that was what was really dangerous for America, say, as we entered into the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, is you had a guy go over and then he'd come back and then he'd go over again and then again.

[00:26:16] So when you expose that troop member to not just one deployment, but two, three, four deployments, you significantly increase his odds of developing post-traumatic stress. Yes. So, and there's a wonderful book also out there called The Choice by Dr. Edith Egger. Wonderful, wonderful therapist, wonderful woman. She's a childhood survivor of Auschwitz.

[00:26:39] And I really love that book because if you're talking about trying to learn how to thrive in exigent, you know, circumstances, and of course, you know, you hear Auschwitz, you go, oh, well, you know, I haven't been through anything like that. But no, that book is really well written. And so I would really recommend anyone interested in this concept to pick that one up and kind of journey through it with her.

[00:27:03] Because again, we're talking about the fact that whatever we go through, whatever our life experiences are, whether it's, you know, crap that happened because of adoption or other things that have maybe led into that. You know, I had, unfortunately, a mother who also suffered from alcoholism. So I was an only child, adopted, and a mother with an addict. That was less ideal.

[00:27:28] I worked for a long time on my issues that were much more clearly understood because they were surface level issues that everybody could see. Yeah, okay. You know, I joined Adult Children of Alcoholics and worked through a lot of that stuff. What I learned in writing my book is there were still other behavior patterns that I had. None of all of that work and all of that therapy, man, and I had really shown up. You know, I worked the 12 steps.

[00:27:58] I did that shit. I really worked hard. And there were still aspects of my personality that I knew were still somewhat unsettling and keeping me from being maybe my best self. And in the course of researching the book and in coming to understand what these things all mean,

[00:28:21] Oh, what a wonderful aha moment for myself as I sort of finally fit those pieces together on the Tetris board that made it make sense. And that was a wonderful part of this journey as well is because when someone, once you can kind of see, Oh, this is impacting me too. This is making me tick. And it's just because I haven't learned about it. That's wonderful. Wonderful.

[00:28:48] I've heard a fair bit about AA and Al-Anon. Is it the one for? For family members. Yeah. You have AA, you have Al-Anon, and then you have adult children of alcoholics. Yes. Okay. My understanding is that these 12-step programs are more about who we are than the way that we think and feel.

[00:29:19] I don't know that I would agree with that. My experience was very open and very much allowing for all of the personal level of exploration you wanted to engage in. What it is, is it's a container. It's a guidebook. You know, someone gives you the 12 steps and says, here, try to work through this the best way that you can. But there are no limits on it. And so it's yours to do with and adapt however you feel.

[00:29:49] You know, again, it's something in your toolbox. Yeah. So, you know, I was struggling. I didn't want to use the word spiritual there because everybody, whenever I say spiritual, people think I'm talking about religion. No. So what, if we look at 12 steps, right, to what extent is it psychological and to what extent is it spiritual?

[00:30:18] Well, in percentage terms. I don't know. I don't really know how to answer that or measure that. What I would say is your first three steps are about, it is about first and foremost accepting some sort of a higher power or collective consciousness or whatever. In other words, a belief in something greater than yourself.

[00:30:43] And then it asks you to be willing to surrender some of your will into understanding that I need help. Which, like, that for me is one of my triggers. I think that is something for me. I do not know how to ask for help. I do not. I could be drowning in the middle of a lake. I've been bobbing water for three hours. My arms are shot. I'm barely alive.

[00:31:11] And I will still maybe not yell out that I need help. Okay? I am that girl. I don't ask for help. And I don't know how. And so I think that definitely relates back to my own pre-verbal, you know, pre-verbal, you know, incidences of the way that I formed up under loss. Right? And no one was coming when I cried for my mother.

[00:31:37] And so I learned I had to do it all myself. I think one of the very profound lessons that, again, the first three steps of the 12 steps are really about this spiritual anking and the idea of humility and surrender. That in that actually lies more power than gripping tight. Right.

[00:31:58] And so I think that that is a very important lesson and a very important anchor to the rest of what the 12 steps have to say. Yeah. But it's really your program. You work it. Yeah.

[00:32:15] If I was people to ask me to sum up my thriving stuff, my healing stuff, I often say that I think the spiritual has been far more significant than the psychological for me. Sure. Do you concur? I mean, does that feel the same for you? Yes. Yes.

[00:32:45] In that, again, it's the reminder for connection, I think, is the most important thing that we need to remember. Is that nothing that we do or say on this earth is in isolation. That we are all interconnected. That if you believe in, you know, karma, right?

[00:33:11] The, you know, every single action kicks off something else that goes down the way and down the way and down the way and down the way. It ripples out. And if we remember that if every single one of us can be tossed into a pond and that our ripples will go out concentrically and touch, we don't know who and we don't know why or when and how that might affect them. You know, will it harm them? Will it, will it make them better?

[00:33:41] Will it, will it, will it, will it, will it make them better if we believe that we're interconnected? I think we do a better job as human beings in looking after each other. And I think that that is maybe one of adoption's messages is that we are not in isolation. That you do not just take an infant from its mother and reassign it to a new family without creating karmic ripples from that.

[00:34:09] And then bringing that back to center and then finding a way to heal creates its own ripples, right? If you've ever been in a relationship and you've watched someone shift, if it's a positive shift, that can help you shift into a new positive person. And then that way, and then that way, and then that way. And that's, I think, one of the ways that we can help each other.

[00:34:31] And so finding peace, I think, again, as I said, you know, at the beginning, being able to feel at ease in your own skin, to walk around. I think that is an inherently spiritual enterprise and a spiritual way of orienting yourself. If you're at ease in your own skin, then it costs you nothing to touch another human being. It costs you nothing. You know, empathy is free.

[00:34:59] You know, it's, and it's one of the best things that we can give each other is connection, empathy, compassion. Yeah. And I'd go as far to say is that the most profound shifts I've heard from fellow adoptees and actual birth mothers too,

[00:35:29] maybe adopted parents or adopted moms, has been around, has been in this space, the space of connectedness. And you can go even further than that. When we say, you know, we're, we're not, you know, the spiritual beings having a human experience. We're one, one spiritual being having seven billion human experiences. It's about, it's that identity piece.

[00:35:59] Do we, do we identify with the, what do people call it? The skin encapsulated ego, right? The separate self stuff. Hmm. I don't know much about that one. Well, it's connectedness. Sure. We're all connectedness means individuals. I'm talking about the end of separation. Sure. Sure.

[00:36:32] But I'm supposed to be interviewing you. Nope. We can, we can evolve this however you want. Yeah. What does growth mean to you? You've used the word growth quite a long time. Hmm. I think it's really important that we show up for ourselves throughout our life and understand that we're going to transition. You know, I mean, I just turned 60, you know, that's a major milestone. I'm not yet in the autumn of my life, but I can see it.

[00:37:01] I can see it from here. Right. And I think it would be a sad thing to not be able to look back at yourself 10 years ago or 20 years ago and not seen how you've progressed. I think we should never stop growing. We should never stop being emotionally and mentally curious about this human experience, that we should never stop learning how maybe things that we think aren't related to each other are.

[00:37:30] I think, I think that, that curiosity and remaining open to, oh, I never thought about this from that side. I think, I think what a boring existence it would be to not pursue that. I, you know, I think growth is essential. Yeah. Have you always felt that way? Or is this newer to you? No.

[00:37:55] I think, I think I was emotionally curious and intellectually curious as a kid. I liked learning. I liked learning. I liked reading and would, you know, I didn't like bugs. Now let's be clear. I mean, I had the limits on learning. Okay. No, no, no bugs. Not interested in learning about bugs. Okay. Or snakes. Snakes are also right out. Okay. Right. Yeah. So no, no biology. Well, no, no. Only human biology. Human. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:38:25] But human biology. Experience, you know, history, all of those things. I was always curious about that. Yeah. As you were talking about, I used the word human biology, right? Um, I was thinking about reading my sister's teen magazines for an insight into how the opposite sex found. Oh yeah. Good. Smart man. Didn't really learn much. I don't, it didn't, it didn't really inform me.

[00:38:55] I don't think. Um, I can't remember. Oh, right. Well, this is this, you know? Um, but I'm, but I also being, I also remember being remarkably let down. Um, by psychology. So I took a, I took a business degree that was called organized. What was it called? Management sciences. So it was a, it's a combination of different subjects.

[00:39:24] You know, one of those was organizational psychology. And I thought, oh, this is going to tell me how, you know, why people think and feel and do what they do. And I, I didn't, I didn't find any answers in it whatsoever. Yeah. It sounds like you did miss your calling. Like you should have been a psychologist or a psychotherapist or something. Well, I couldn't do that because I didn't think it didn't answer any questions for me.

[00:39:53] I just, it just created more. It, it, it, it looked at, it looked at superficial things. Well, maybe you could have been the one to change it. Yeah. Maybe I could. I didn't, I didn't take the, I didn't take the hook. I need to take the hook here.

[00:40:16] I think I got very curious about learning when I was running my own business. That's, that's when a shift happened for me. Oh, sure. I didn't see the relevance of a management degree. As I was doing the stuff, I didn't see anything as relevant to it. As I started working in it, in the business, when I was working for my dad, I didn't see

[00:40:45] the relevance of what I'd learned. But then when I started going on small business marketing courses and that sort of stuff, that's when I really got switched onto it because I could see the relevance of what I was learning to what I was doing. Sure. Yeah. I think entrepreneurship is a great journey. I mean, it teaches you discipline. It teaches you curiosity. It teaches you resilience, you know, cause you got to figure it out.

[00:41:13] And if somebody doesn't seem to know what they're doing, you're going to have to learn that thing that you didn't want to have to learn how to do, but you're going to have to do it. You know, that's, that's entrepreneurship. Yeah. It also drove me mad. It can do that too. Yes. Some days are harder than others. Yeah. So growth is for you expanding one's learning, right?

[00:41:40] It's expanding one's learning, but I think it's also expanding one's spirit. I think it's expanding one's humanity. And I think it's, and I think it's expanding, it's expanding our spirit and that, you know, who is it? There's, there's a number of different meditation teachers that I've listened to over the years, but you know how, when we encounter difficult people, you know, either, either inside the

[00:42:07] adoption constellation or outside of it, you know, sometimes a way to look at that is that this, this difficult person here that you're now encountering and you're having to figure that out. It could be your spiritual teacher in a, in a, in a different form. You know, sometimes one of the things I say to, you know, younger colleagues, when I meet them, as I say, you will learn more from a bad boss than you will from a good one. Uh, because you're going to learn what not to do for sure.

[00:42:35] And so it's the same thing, that difficult person that we're having to wrestle with may indeed be a spiritual teacher that has shown up. And you, you know, that's one way to look at that as you, you know, have to walk it back in the wee hours and think about, okay, what is the better way to handle this person? Or what is the better way to handle this situation to give me the outcome that I want? And remember to maybe, maybe what needs to happen is to set the ego at the door.

[00:43:07] I don't know. Life is full of those lessons, I think. Yeah. And what about how we relate to our trauma? Hmm. In peeling back the trauma and, in, in, in, in going at that, I think the first thing that we should always try to remember is forgiveness, forgiveness of self first and forgiveness of others.

[00:43:37] I think we have to, in my opinion and in my experience and my journey, I'm more successful in trying to understand people who hurt me. If I can look at the ways in which they were also themselves wounded individuals, because a hurt person who isn't healed will hurt others, period.

[00:44:02] And so usually, you know, and I mean, you can extrapolate this all the way out to, you know, some really terrible people that are, that have been on this planet. Usually they were hurt themselves. And some of them become monstrous and they do horrible, heinous and evil and vile things, but they were probably themselves once victims of something. And it doesn't mean that we excuse them.

[00:44:30] It doesn't mean that we don't hold them accountable. It doesn't mean that we don't have the hard conversations about who hurt us and what they did. It just means that I think, I think to move into a different place, we have to be willing

[00:44:54] to look at the whole of them, which can mean acknowledging their wounded inner child that never got what it needed. And so that inner child became a hellion that just hurt other people. And so I think we do have to, you know, and, and, and I really do not mean this in the Christian forgiveness way. I really always rejected that. Even when I was a little kid, you know, in Sunday school, you know, some kid pushes

[00:45:22] you down on the playground and runs away, you know, and you've got a skin knee and the teacher saying you need to forgive him. It's like, piss off. He didn't even say he was sorry. I mean, I, I rejected that when I was little, I was, I was like, no, that's horse hockey. But, you know, so, so I'm not talking about that, but I'm saying we have to remember to ultimately exercise some level of compassion or empathy or something, because otherwise

[00:45:52] you just stay stuck in anger and you can be angry. It's a righteous, necessary feeling. It's a righteous and necessary part of, I think a healing journey is to look at what people did. If people, if people have harmed you, they need to own it or you need to own it and other people need to own it. That's very, that's a terrible thing to not feel validated. If someone's really hurt you, right.

[00:46:22] You know, to not feel that validation of someone going, yeah, you're right. That was wrong. And we still have to move out of that place of just anger because otherwise, what is all this for? I don't know how we move into a place of gentleness and creativity and love and thriving without entering into some level of, if it's not forgiveness, maybe it's acceptance. Maybe that's the better word.

[00:46:52] And how was your, your, your take on, on your mom? You know, you mentioned that she was a, an alcoholic. How, how was your take on what we've just been discussing there? How was that? How's your view of your mom changed over time or has it changed? It has, it's continued to evolve. Um, I'll tell you another book that was very helpful that I would recommend to anyone who

[00:47:21] has, um, generational generational mother is a book from Kelly McDaniel called mother hunger. I found that very helpful. When I look at my mother, that is literally the embodiment of unrecognized. generational trauma. Uh, you know, my mother was addicted to prescription drugs and alcohol. This is my adoptive mother.

[00:47:49] She was addicted to prescription drugs and alcohol before I ever came on the scene and was a very deeply unhappy and insecure person. And she also struggled with depression. So she had a real, a real tough, you know, bag there that she was carrying around. She was raised by a woman who is, I gotta tell you, my grandmother was a piece of work. She was a terrible narcissistic alcoholic. And then here's the thing.

[00:48:18] She was raised by her paternal grandparents. She herself, this is my adoptive grandmother born as a little girl in the late 1800s. She was the product of the gentlemen of the house having an affair with the maid and astonishingly enough, rather than disowning all of them, he apparently sent her to live with his parents

[00:48:44] who unfortunately let her know every minute of every day that she was an unwanted burden, bastard child. And so again, you start to, once you start to peel back the layers and if you open yourself up to the idea that these are probably wounded people doing what wounded people do, well, my grandmother didn't have a good shot at becoming a good, whole, healthy human being.

[00:49:10] And then she didn't, she became a mean spirited alcoholic who then tortured my mother, who then made my life hard. And that's how that goes. Yeah. You know, and, but you have to be able to approach it again with honesty, with accountability, and then ultimately with at least some acceptance and understanding.

[00:49:32] So it is, is a bad mom, right? And yeah, I'm obviously surmising here. And perhaps it is, is a bad mom like a bad boss. It's a spiritual teacher in another form. Maybe. Maybe. You know, I mean, that's the thing.

[00:50:01] Everyone has to figure out how to hopefully thrive in spite of whatever it is we're handed. You know, it is a universal truth that none of us gets to choose our parents. A thing that really rankles a lot of us as adoptees is most people aren't often told with the frequency that we are, oh, you're lucky, you're special. Isn't that amazing? Oh, they rescued you.

[00:50:27] All of that dialogue that gets thrust upon a lot of adoptees, myself included, to a certain extent, even though my parents really never did buy into the whole rescuing thing. You know, lots of people, you know, all around us would say how special I was, or I was chosen, and I was the only child, and blah, blah, blah, you know. I think that's one of the burdens that adoptees often feel is very unfairly thrust upon us. Because again, nobody chooses their parents.

[00:50:54] Why do you assume mine are awesome just because they adopted me? Oh, that's right. Then we move into that other dynamic there, right? It seems to me that it, you know, you use the word perspective at the top of the conversation as one of the three or four things. We talked about skills. Yeah. We talked about growth.

[00:51:21] We talked about skills, tools, and perspective changes. I think. Yeah. And for me, it's the perspective. What you've been talking about kind of is all, it's all, not all, most of it is kind of examples of perspective changes.

[00:51:48] Now, you're nodding along, but I'm going to ask you is that might be the prove me, the, me, the, me proving what I believe. Have you heard this thing? Have you heard this thing? Confirmation bias. Sure. Yes.

[00:52:05] So that's what I believe that, I believe that insight, insights or aha moments or perspective changes or there's a gazillion different ways of, there's a gazillion different synonyms for a perspective change.

[00:52:30] That seems to be, I believe that perspective change is, insights are the greatest healer. Perspective changes are the greatest power in our thriving. So I'm just checking in with you that I'm not kind of putting my confirmation bias on what you've said. Yeah.

[00:52:58] And I want to, I do want to add the one element to this, which is. Please, thank you. It has to be perspective with clarity and honesty because people can, sometimes there's this sort of toxic positivity that sometimes can creep into our culture, which is like, oh, you just need a new point of view, dear. You just need to look at it differently.

[00:53:24] And so I want to, I want to caution against that, that we can shift our perspective, but we first have to be able to live in, look at, see, wallow around in, if necessary, reality, including its tough parts. Okay. I totally agree with you.

[00:53:44] And I think there's a, there's a huge difference between external stuff and internal stuff. Right. So somebody telling us that we need to change our perspective. That's, that's not what I'm talking about.

[00:54:04] I'm talking about here about a spontaneous insight, a spontaneous shift in our perspective that comes through our reading a new book, listening to a podcast episode, having an interaction with somebody else, like talking to the pre-verbal, the psychiatrist about pre-verbal trauma last night. Right.

[00:54:27] So it's, it's, it's an insight that we own, not an insight that is commanded upon us. I am only, there's no such thing as a second hand insights that don't work. We have to have them. Sure. Right. And I think, I think we shift our perspective through growth and knowledge. I think, I think that's how we shift our perspective internally. Oh, I love that. Because I think it's the other way around.

[00:54:58] Yeah. What if it's both, but what if it's both? Right. Well, who cares? Right. Yeah. Who cares? Let it be, let it be, let it be where, what it is and where it is. And, you know, whatever works for you, man. I'm going to be, I'm going to be thinking about that before. Sorry. Do. I'm going to try and get to one answer or see whether it's both. Right.

[00:55:25] So, so the question is, do insights stimulate growth or does growth stimulate insights? I'm writing this down. Or is it both? I think it's both. And I think they feed upon each other. Right. To be continued.

[00:55:55] To be continued. To be continued. We've done, no, but we've done an hour. It's like the itsy bitsy spider. Right. You know? Yeah. Sorry. When I meant to be continued. I mean, we've, the hour has flown by. Oh my God. Yeah. It's an hour. We'll continue this. We'll continue this next, later in the year. We'll have a second rounder and we'll both explore that together. That sounds wonderful.

[00:56:25] Thank you so much. Thanks listeners. Thanks Jean. We'll speak to you again very soon. Take care. Bye-bye.