Healing, Wholeness & Growth With Lynda Monk

[00:00:02] Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of the Thriving Adoptees podcast. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Lynda. I'm looking forward to our conversation today, Lynda. You're an absolute star, an angel. Thank you, Simon. You're in a beautiful sunbeam and I was just thinking how angelic you look. Wow, yeah. That's the Velux, that's the window.

[00:00:27] I noticed it yesterday actually, but I closed it slightly because, yeah, it does look slightly biblical, doesn't it? It's beautiful. Thank you. Thanks for having me here. Yeah, and yeah, it feels like I haven't interviewed many adoptees in the recent, recently. It's mainly been adoptive mums and adoption professionals. So it's a delight to, for a change to be interviewing a fellow adoptee, albeit from like, what is it? 6,000 miles away?

[00:00:57] You're over on the west, yeah, west coast of Canada and Salt Spring, Salt Spring Island, which is BC, right? Exactly. British Columbia. Exactly. British Columbia. We're between Vancouver and Victoria, Vancouver Island, where there's a strip of Gulf Islands and we're the largest Gulf Island.

[00:01:13] And it's where, it's been my home for over 26 years now. So I'm grateful to, grateful for the technology that lets us find each other and be together across this big world. Yeah. So, Linda's got a book and it's called The Adoptee's Guide to Healing, Wholeness and Growth.

[00:01:39] And so we came up, Linda came up with this idea of reading a little passage from the book about, and I think it's a word about words, right? So, because these are clearly big, big words, they're big themes, they're big topics. We're going to explore those over the next hour or so. But yeah, so take it away. Please feel free.

[00:02:03] Sure. Sure. I want to share that this book, The Adoptee's Guide to Healing, Wholeness and Growth, really became what it is while writing it, which is true of so many books. It started out as a journal, a guided journal for fellow adoptees. My work in the world is about the healing power of writing, healing power of journaling. And I'm also a registered social worker and a life coach, and my early social work career started in child welfare.

[00:02:30] And I've always had my adoptee experience. My identity as an adoptee has just been a quiet part of my life. I'm just, you know, I'm an adoptee and I'm lots of other things. It's part of what defines me. And I've never considered myself an expert on adoption. I have a really strong belief that we are all experts of our own experiences.

[00:02:53] And there are many professionals who are adoption experts and who study in the field and who study the trauma of adoption and abandonment wounds and attachment wounds and all of these things. And I know a lot about these things because of my professional life and my degrees in social work. And I have a past doing counseling and so forth. But when I came to this book, I just listened.

[00:03:21] Like, what is this book about? What is this book meant to be about with the sum total of my own experiences as an adoptee? My thoughts about what can be potentially helpful to fellow adoptees, knowing that we all have our own unique experience. And there are some commonalities potentially or some universal things that may be true for adoptees and also things that are not true for some adoptees.

[00:03:46] So I don't presume to have the universal voice on the adoptees experience by any means. But I remember in a writing workshop I was in years ago, a memoir writing workshop, the teacher said that if we write about our own experience as honestly and deeply as we can, that we can touch something in the universal experience.

[00:04:10] And so my hopes is that there is some of that universality in this book while speaking, being able to speak specifically to an adoptee who's reading it and really give a message of empowerment and hope and all of the good things that we care about in our lives. So this section, a word about words, I know that we want to focus on these words, healing, wholeness and growth.

[00:04:36] And I'll just share this and then we can see where we go together, Simon. So this is in the opening of the book after I share briefly my own adoption story. It's a section called A Word About Words. I often say there is a whole world in a single word. There are three intentionally chosen words in the title of this journal, this guide that I want to shine a light on before we move forward. And these include healing, wholeness and growth.

[00:05:06] These are all subjective ideas and can mean different things to each one of us as adoptees and as individuals. While this is true, it is also true that there are some key elements that can help us achieve healing, wholeness and growth. This guide and journal strives to share some of these elements through the many topics and touchstones offered. I want to say more about healing before we move forward.

[00:05:31] Firstly, some people might not even like the word healing, as it might conjure the idea that something is broken and needs to be fixed. Or they might not even relate to having an adoption wound to begin with, and hence healing is not needed or it feels irrelevant to them. Healing to me is part of our human experience. We all face different challenges and pains in our lives that can be emotional, physical, psychological, spiritual and existential in nature.

[00:06:00] I believe healing is how we come back to center. How we honor our wholeness. How we tend to our overall feelings of well-being. And how we evolve into the fullness of who we are here to be in this lifetime. I think healing includes all the actions we take to feel okay with who we are and who we are becoming.

[00:06:19] And that even if we are not feeling or doing okay at times, our healing practices remind us that we can cope, we can manage, we can survive, we can still live well or well enough in challenging times. We have all likely heard the expression that time heals all wounds. I'm not sure I totally agree with that. I think time can distance us from the acuteness of our wounds. For example, grief can potentially lessen over time or get a little more in the rearview mirror of our lives.

[00:06:49] But it just takes that one song to play, that one memory to resurface. And grief can feel immediate and real in the moment. And so healing and holding on and letting go and coping continues. I think it takes more than time to heal adoptee wounds or any psychological or emotional wound for that matter. It is not like a broken bone that gets set, cast and in a few weeks has fused together again and the healing is complete.

[00:07:17] Emotional wounds can be triggered and reactivate in our mind, body, heart and spirit at any time through the years. I have grown to believe that true healing involves reflection, insight building and releasing. Healing happens when we deepen our understanding of our experiences and can reframe them, restory them in empowering ways. Healing doesn't happen without some sort of processing, choosing and releasing. Without validation, compassion and care.

[00:07:46] Things can fester in us, but they can also be cleared and released. This is where journaling comes in. Journaling is a powerful, reflective practice that helps us build self-awareness and insight, especially when it is intentionally used for these very purposes, as it is presented here in this adoptee guide. So the point there is that healing is a whole world. Growth is a whole world. Wholeness is a whole world.

[00:08:14] And there's probably, you know, some frames on them that can be helpful to us. Yeah. So you talk about a process. Well, so much there to dive into. You talk about the process.

[00:08:35] If you were to kind of sum it up in a sentence, what would it be for you? What would healing be for you? It would be a combination of these words. And it comes not from my words, but a social work professor I had years ago, Ruth Sauve. And she said, healing means to make whole.

[00:09:05] Healing means to make whole. In other words, how do we integrate? All of the parts of ourselves, our experiences in ways that help us live our best lives. Yeah. So the make whole bit is a challenge for me. And before we hit record, I was having a look at the book on Amazon.

[00:09:32] And Julie McGoo, who has been on the podcast a couple of times, she wrote a forward for you. And one of the words, one of the sentences, the phrases on the blurb on Amazon said, healing is not framed as fixing something broken. Right. So she's describing the book and saying, that's not what it's about.

[00:10:03] There seems to be a bit of a clash there between what the social worker said in terms of making whole and seeing that we weren't broken. What do you make of that, Linda? And am I splitting hairs, first off? No, I hear what you're saying. And I also want to do a shout out to Julie McGoo for her beautiful writing in the adoption space with her memoirs. And a deep thanks for her beautiful forward for this book.

[00:10:33] Wholeness is more of an integration. So there's this piece of me, this piece of me, this part of my story. And I think for adoptees, there can be a lot of fragmented pieces. We only have maybe parts of our story or none of our early identity story. We have the stories that other people gave to us about why we were adopted. We have a narrative that we've been placed in inside of our adoption, adoptive family.

[00:11:01] So there's a lot of fragments potentially for an adoptee. And I think part of what our journey of wholeness is and healing is somehow making sense of those fragmented pieces into something that's coherent for ourselves. Something that doesn't feel like it's missing. Something where identity doesn't feel fractured. Or that, you know, we might have a narrative around being unwanted or unlovable or not enough.

[00:11:30] That can be inherent to the normal response to having been separated, let's say, from our birth mother at the very least. And maybe, you know, our father too, if he knew about us at whatever stage in our lives, in my case as an infant. And so the wholeness is bringing in these elements of our identity and our story in a way that serves us, doesn't weaken us, or doesn't make us feel less than.

[00:12:00] And so this idea of fixing, you know, it could be splitting hairs depending on how you want to language that word. But fixing suggests there's something wrong with me. There's something inherently not okay. And that's different than there's something I'm trying to understand and make sense of in a meaningful way that serves me in my life and my well-being. So I think language does matter.

[00:12:29] And as I've shared, language is subjective. So it has the language that can serve us is better. So, you know, we might, we could have language that says that I am, you know, I was abandoned, therefore I'm unlovable. Okay, we could say that. But we could also say I experienced a profound loss early in my life, and I'm deeply worthy of love. So language matters.

[00:12:58] How we frame our story matters to ourselves, first and foremost. And part of this book is about exploring that story in layers, in bits, through the process of reflective writing, and through the process of thinking. Thinking about some of these things that might be important and valuable to think about. Yeah. What about the deeper part of this?

[00:13:26] So we've talked about words, we've talked about narratives, we've talked about story. What about the deeper part? Because the feeling bit of this. Because, you know, one of the challenges with pre-verbal trauma as separation from our birth mothers is we don't have words for it. The words come later.

[00:13:55] Something I've been seeing recently is that we're born without beliefs. We're born beliefless. Yeah. And one of the, I'm not a Gabor Maté fan, right? But I saw the title of one of his courses and it was the gift of trauma. Right.

[00:14:19] So there's a fundamental play on, you know, like there's some shocking words there. Right. So the gift and trauma are not normally put together. Which was an interesting way. He talked about repositioning. Right. But he also said something that for me felt really, really profound. That he said in the blurb for this course, I didn't do it because I'm not a fan of his, right?

[00:14:47] But it said, I bought some of his books in the past and I just thought that, no, it's not for me. He said, feeling not good enough is actually a belief that we're not good enough. Now, this struck me as really, really profound because it's really hard to change a feeling. It's a lot easier to change a belief.

[00:15:15] And if we're born beliefless, then we can start to explore some of our beliefs. And this is clearly huge because one of the biggest things that lingers for adult adoptees is that we're not good enough.

[00:15:42] So if the feeling of not good enough is actually a belief that we're not good enough, we can do some work around the belief. And yet, beliefs, words, this is pre-verbal trauma. So what do you make of all that? Yeah. Well, what I make of it is that what you're saying is important, Simon.

[00:16:08] And it's the heart of cognitive behavioral therapy, which in its essence is looking at what we think impacts how we feel, impacts how we behave. And you can enter into that sort of anywhere. But the thought area, because of neuroplasticity, you know, I won't go into a big deep dive on neuroscience and so forth.

[00:16:38] But with effort, we can reprogram our thoughts. We can choose thoughts that serve us. And it takes effort because it means we need to sit with, well, what are my thoughts in the first place? That's why I love journaling, expressive writing. It's about our thoughts and our feelings.

[00:16:56] And so if we can really get connected to our thoughts and think thoughts that serve us, do the work of doing that, then our feeling state will follow. Over time, one reframe thought isn't going to shift our entire being overnight because our thoughts are well-run neural pathways in the brain. And so it takes effort to work with our thoughts, to create a different feeling state.

[00:17:25] And then from that, you know, what we'll do about it. And I really appreciate the work of Dr. Gaber Mate. There's many voices that inform the trauma field. I actually quote him in the book and there's a brief section on trauma. And the quote I used from him is, trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.

[00:17:51] And he talks about how trauma is the wound itself. So there's many symptoms of trauma that we can experience. And one of the ways I think that's important to work with some of that is not just through thinking, but through the body, through moving.

[00:18:16] Because trauma can sit in our physiology and our psychology and so forth. And the body, you know, there's another wonderful book by a trauma expert called The Body Keeps the Score. And the idea that sometimes it's just about moving. So I do a lot of five rhythms dance, for example. I do, I walk every day.

[00:18:44] I really move my body because I know when I move my body, I will move my state. I will move my, I will shift my emotional state. And sometimes in ways that just thinking about things, because we can loop in our thinking, we can ruminate in our thinking. There are well-read, you know, treads that we have. And the body is another way to access shifting how we feel. And I'll often combine thoughts that serve me in moving my body.

[00:19:14] So for example, if I'm walking in nature, and maybe if I'm feeling regret about something or shame about something or just not feeling like I did the best thing I could have done. Or maybe I have had something about my adoptee experience get triggered and activated and I'm feeling some pain or distress about that.

[00:19:37] If I go for a walk in the woods and I'm walking along, I can drop a thought in, you know, each step, I am enough. I'm doing my best right now. I've got my own back. I'm lovable. Words that are self-affirming, words that are self-encouraging, and words that I can get behind and truly believe.

[00:20:06] And, you know, I'm doing my best for now. It wasn't perfect, but I'm doing my best. Self-soothing things, you know, putting hands over our heart, saying the words, I've got you. I'm here for you. Being your own ally. Being empowered to know that you can influence your own emotional state with some very simple practices.

[00:20:29] And if you do them over and over again, the world of healing, the world of growth, the world of wholeness is a byproduct of that. It happens from doing these things. In my experience and in my work in the world, I've seen that over and over again. So it's a toolkit. We need a toolkit. What's in our toolkit for healing, for wholeness, for growth?

[00:20:52] What's in our toolkit to be on our own side to nourish an emotional state that is supportive and not distressing? It doesn't just happen with a magic wand. You need to do the work. Yeah. When I... I'm so glad that you brought in the somatic stuff. When I was exploring this a couple of years ago with adoptees, I was looking at breaking healing down, right?

[00:21:22] So healing down from the cognitive piece, the mental piece that you've mentioned, the emotional piece, the somatic piece. And we looked at the spiritual piece as well, right?

[00:21:48] And I had a Zoom call to look at this with a few fellow adoptees. Because I'd shared some stuff across these different sections. And all of them... I wanted to divide it down. And all of them wanted it integrated.

[00:22:11] And I found that interesting and also a bit challenging, really. Because otherwise, I just think we need clarity in this space. And the biggest reason that we need clarity is that talk therapy doesn't heal pre-verbal trauma.

[00:22:38] And adoptees and other people who have trauma have been sold talk therapy. And it doesn't freaking work, you know? Talk therapy doesn't work with pre-verbal trauma. Because pre-verbal, like, we haven't got words for it. Yeah. And yet people have taken money off us. Coming from the best of intentions.

[00:23:03] If you're going to go out into the space and seek some help on your healing journey, a pure talk therapy is probably not the right way to go. This somatic piece is far more powerful. Because as what's his name says, Betel van der Kolk says, and it was Peter Levine, the issue is in the tissue. Issue is in the tissue.

[00:23:34] I would say there's an and versus an or. Just from my perspective. I think all the tools we have for our growth and healing as humans can have a place. And talk therapy, while it may not be the best medicine, if you wish, for pre-verbal trauma, it can be something we can turn to to strengthen who we are in the present moment.

[00:24:00] So we can use some of that talk therapy to explore our beliefs and explore our feelings and to be empowered to take action in areas of our life right now. And so we can still strengthen ourselves and we can still build our resilience through talk therapy. And there's other things. When I talk about a toolkit, it's like talk therapy can be in that toolkit for a certain piece of one's experience.

[00:24:30] So, for example, when I was going through my first, when I went through a divorce from in my first marriage in my late 20s, I went, we did what couples who are, you know, falling apart do and tried to not fall apart and went for counseling. And which was all talk therapy.

[00:24:53] And that talk therapy helped me realize that some of what was happening in my marriage that was really hurting me was the triggering of the abandonment wound. Now, that talk therapy is what didn't heal that abandonment wound, but it helped me understand that it existed and it was influencing the choices I was making in my life. So that gave me something that was really important. So we can get a piece from here.

[00:25:22] When I go on that five rhythms dance floor and I move with wild abandon and let my body lead and my mind is really just along for the ride, there's something very liberating and freeing and that feels good that happens. That's another tool in my wellness toolkit.

[00:25:41] When as an adoptee, I journal about my own, you know, feelings of grief or loss, which I was just doing recently. I was just with my birth family, both sides of them. And there was a lot of intense things going on in those meetings. When I went to the page to write about how I was feeling, but stay grounded and not get tossed away and not get triggered into some big spiral.

[00:26:08] I have some agency, some control over that. I go to the tool of my journal. So it's like there's no one thing and we have to find the thing that works for us. Some people are much more verbal by nature. Some people are much more visual. Some people are much more, you know, auditory. Some people really can access their body. Some people are numb and they can't feel anything. So we need to, here's a smorgasbord of things that can be helpful. They've helped other people.

[00:26:38] They're evidence-based practices that have value. Which one do you want to pick up now in your life to help you with whatever it is you might want support with? So I really believe that in the word and, because it gives people choice. It's not entirely prescriptive. Do this. Don't do that. This works. This doesn't work. We don't actually know what will work for any single person. Because there's a lot of mystery.

[00:27:07] Even in the most evidence-based sound practices, there's still the mystery of that alchemy of what works for a certain person at a certain time in their life. And we have to trust that. And so that's my own belief, Simon. And because I've seen that rigidity or this is the way or that's the way or this has to be this or this doesn't work.

[00:27:33] It might close doors that actually, if they were opened, could be the thing that would be really helpful. Yeah. So if time isn't the greatest healer, is experimentation the greatest healer? So looking at this smorgasbord and trying different stuff out. I think so.

[00:27:58] And I think being willing to be an active agent in our own well-being. No one else is going to heal us. I mean, there are great healers in the world. But part of what helps us heal and feel good is deciding we want that and doing what it takes to experience that. And that's effort. That takes effort. That takes support. That takes commitment. That takes resources.

[00:28:27] That takes access to things that help. That takes knowledge. What can be helpful? Some people might not even know about somatic healing. Some people might not even know about energy work or the healing power of writing or the value of talk therapy for certain circumstances. They might not be knowledgeable. They might not know. We can go into the adoption field and the research in adoption. What does it say about what adoptees need for healing, wholeness and growth?

[00:28:55] There's lots of different points of view, I'm sure. I'm not immersed in that research, but I know enough for my work in the world and my training as a social worker and so forth. And my own experience as an adoptee. But I don't live and breathe in the adoption space. I've spent more time in the adoption space in the last 12 months in writing this book than I have in the last 56 years. So, you know, I don't presume to be moving deeply in that space.

[00:29:24] But what I do know is that as humans, we have things that hurt us. And we have things that can hurt us very deeply and profoundly. And being an adoptee is one experience in our lives. Lots of other things are part of our experience. Being a son, a daughter, a sister, a mother. All the rules, all the things.

[00:29:49] But because being an adoptee is at the very heart of one's sense of enoughness, of lovability, of worthiness, and because there's often so much shame and silence and stigma around the experience of being an adoptee, depending on everyone's circumstance, what era they were born, open records, closed records, the stories they live in.

[00:30:11] When you have those ingredients as part of your life, you inherently have places that it's probably very helpful to decide to do some inner work around so that you can, you know, have an emotional life that feels good. You can have a life that you can, you know, be happy in and feel your own worthiness to have a good life.

[00:30:42] And there's a lot of claiming and reclaiming. You know, we have to decide that our worthiness matters. We have to decide self-love matters. We have to decide. One of the biggest lessons I think I've learned, and I'm still learning as a person and as an adoptee, is to not abandon myself. Because that may be the bigger, bigger wound along the way.

[00:31:10] The times where we give up or don't prioritize our own needs. The times that we live according to someone else's expectations or agenda. The times where we harm ourselves with addiction or with coping mechanisms that don't serve us and our well-being and our lives, which can be normal experiences. And there's higher rates of addiction in the adoptee population.

[00:31:35] There's higher rates of divorce in the adoptee population from research that's been done, which speaks to how this wound can be festering. And so we want to heal festering wounds. We want to say, that's something that is hurting me and I want to do something about it. You talked about deciding to heal, to put it into three words, perhaps a little bit reductive.

[00:32:05] But how would you describe that in a sentence? I say deciding to heal, what would you say in your own words? And if you were to kind of come up with a sentence that kind of says that in your own words. I would say I can see there's an undercurrent of damage or hurt or pain that is in my life because of being an adoptee.

[00:32:34] And I'm going to do something about that so it doesn't cause additional pain in the future. One of the I spoke to a very well regarded adoptee and therapist. And they said when I talked about healing and wholeness, that person said the best the best that we can hope for really is coping strategies.

[00:33:03] I don't agree with that. Yeah. Because I want to do a lot more than cope in my life. I would cope. Coping is coping. I just want to think about this for a second. I would come back to the word and yes, we must cope. And we can expect a higher bar than that.

[00:33:34] So for me, we've got it when we're doing this experimentation, we need to be pretty. We need to reflect on the people that we're working with.

[00:33:49] Because if I was interviewing somebody that I was going to work with and they said the best that we can hope for is coping strategies, I wouldn't want to work with that person. So I'm drawing this out really because I think that we need to be pretty.

[00:34:16] We need to be pretty canny about who we who we work with and also who we hang around with. Because there's a lot of. There's a lot of people. There's a lot of adoptees who feel that we're doomed. Yeah, I don't feel that way at all. And that's a belief. That's a belief. And words become worlds.

[00:34:46] Words become our realities. And if I walk through my life every day and said as an adoptee, I'm doomed, then I certainly am. I'm with you. And I'm also thinking they wouldn't put it that way. They would explain it away. They wouldn't say doomed is a belief. They wouldn't sum it up like that. They would.

[00:35:14] Like we're so keen to hang on to our beliefs that we'll do anything. Like I had a fallout with a friend recently and it was nothing to do with adoption. But there was. I said, well, I wouldn't I wouldn't do that. You know, I asked somebody a favor.

[00:35:41] They said, I don't believe I don't believe you. I don't believe you. I just don't believe you, Simon. How could you possibly ask for this failure? I said, well, I would do it if I was you. No, you wouldn't. No, you wouldn't. And I'm like, who are you to tell me what? Do you know my own mind, my own actions better than me? But there was absolutely no way that this person was shifting their belief.

[00:36:09] And, you know, if so they're not going to say we're doomed. They're not going to they're not going to agree. It's a belief. You know, people use all sorts of stuff. And that's where the work comes in. If someone is interested in wanting to do that, because a lot of things that run our lives sit in the very, very little of our life is in our conscious awareness.

[00:36:34] You know, there's that iceberg metaphor and there's like five percent of our lives are in our conscious awareness or some small number like that. And the rest is below the surface. And so that means there's a whole world of potential and possibility below that surface to access. It also means there's a lot of things below the surface that are driving the bus in our lives. And our beliefs are very, very powerful. And then collective beliefs are even more powerful.

[00:37:00] You know, think of religion or any group belief system that's ascribed to. It's very, very powerful. And I just come back to simple things in my life. Is this for myself personally? Is this a belief that's serving my highest good? For myself at this stage in my circumstance of my life and take responsibility for that, because that's what I can work with. That's what I can pay attention to, become familiar with.

[00:37:27] And when I think about being an adoptee, because I have done a lot of thinking about it. I've done a lot of reflecting about it. I've been writing an adoptee memoir on and off for 25 years. I've been using the healing power of writing to author my own experience, my version of this experience that serves me in my life.

[00:37:48] And being an adoptee isn't just a fragmented part or a negative part of my life. I am who I am from that experience. I'm a compassionate person. I'm a caring person. I'm a nonjudgmental person. As best one, you know, I can be. There's blind spots, of course.

[00:38:08] But being an adoptee has taught me a lot about the power of love, the power of choosing love, of love lines. It's taught me the power of what a bloodline means to me. It has caused me probably really impacted becoming a social worker in my early choices in my career. It has made me the type of mother I am.

[00:38:33] It's given me a certain window into doing the work of trying to love myself. I've written, co-authored a book called Affirmations for Self-Love. In other words, I don't just see being an adoptee as something that somehow wounded me and doomed my life. I see being an adoptee like I see any part of this life that I'm living. It's something that's been in my experience, something I've been given, something to work with, something that shapes me.

[00:39:01] And I can make that a beautiful part of my story or I can make it a not good part of my story. And that is the work we do if we choose to. Some people hang on to wound stories because it serves them. It gives them maybe attention or it gives them a place. You know, stories serve us. Good stories serve us. Trauma stories serve us.

[00:39:25] Like there's a level of self-awareness that I believe is helpful to have to really get real with ourselves about our own experiences. And to come at them in the most empowered, hopeful way we can. You know, in the research on resilience, there's key dimensions. And all of these things are skills. Meaning we can build resilience by things we think and do.

[00:39:52] We can build our emotional well-being by things we think and do. We can build our physical health with things we think and do. In other words, we have agency. And the more agency we claim, the more empowered we feel, the more positive outcomes we can have. So one of the dimensions of resilience is hope, cultivating hope.

[00:40:18] So if I run around with a narrative in my head that says as adoptees we're doomed, consciously or subconsciously, I have not cultivated a sense of hope. Another dimension of resilience is optimism. This is from the research of Linda Hoops, who spent decades researching the key dimensions of resilience. Is optimism. An optimistic worldview and an optimistic view of the self.

[00:40:45] If I go around with beliefs in my head that, you know, I'm doomed or I'm not lovable, I'm not worthy. I'm, you know, I'm weakening my resilience. I'm weakening my capacity for joy and happiness. And I don't want to do that. And so that's just me. That's from my learning, my studies, my, you know, ways I've chosen to live my life.

[00:41:11] The invitation in this guide, you know, this guide goes through seven healing touchstones where it where I broke it down into some key areas to explore. And the first one is roots coming into awareness of your adoption experience. And there's lots on identity and all of that. Recognition, acknowledging emotional impacts and processing and things like acknowledging complexity, core wounds, grief and loss, self-worth.

[00:41:39] Resilience, connecting with inner strength. And there's a whole thing on thriving and resilience, safety and security, fear of abandonment, etc. Relationships, building meaningful connections and understanding attachment. And this looks at nature and nurture and intimate relationships and so forth. Reclaim, belonging, integration and empowerment, which is around belonging and healing self-abandonment.

[00:42:04] Remembering, honoring growth and wholeness and radiance, living with love and making peace. And in other words, moving through a process where we're turning over rocks and looking at some of the painful things and moving towards that resilient story. And we can remember our radiance. We can remember the things that serve us about who we are. And I think that's the work we do in this life.

[00:42:35] Cool. Last question. And just a couple of sentences, a couple of sentences coming up on time. I'm just wondering, have you, because we haven't mentioned, I mean, the Adoptee's Guide to Healing, you mentioned at the top, right, that assumes a wound, right? We've got Nancy Berry to thank for this primal wound metaphor. Have you come up with a more hopeful metaphor?

[00:43:07] Well, let me think about that. I really ground into the idea that I belong to myself. I can create a sense of belonging and attachment in my relationship with myself. And that can heal a lot of wounds, including a primal one.

[00:43:37] Fantastic. Thank you, Linda. Thank you, listeners. And we'll speak to you again very soon. Take care. Bye-bye.