Lightbulb Moments Rebecca Ricardo

[00:00:00] Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Thriving About Doctor Who's podcast. Today

[00:00:06] I'm delighted to be joined by Rebecca and Rebecca Ricciardo. Looking forward to our

[00:00:10] conversation Rebecca.

[00:00:11] I am too.

[00:00:13] It's like three months since we last spoke. A lot of water under the bridge. We're into

[00:00:19] 2024. It's an Olympic year. It's a leap year.

[00:00:24] It's all the place. definition of it. So how do you see healing? So you know, it looks different for everyone. How you get there is different for everyone. There are some common threads and themes. I think a lot

[00:01:40] of, for me, either helping someone heal heard. Those are all parts of healing and are often challenged because of what adoption does to us.

[00:03:02] And really, I'll have to say,

[00:03:05] I don't know that it is adoption that does it to us, So our system of adoption, particularly in the United States, which is the only system I really know well, has complicated what was already a complicated issue. As when a child doesn't get to get raised in their biological intact family, there is going to be a consequence.

[00:04:20] No doubt about it.

[00:04:22] That was a very long answer to what is healing me to me. heal is, is insights. So the stuff we know when we have a change in our when you have when we have a change in our beliefs. And, and I can point out lots of important moments when when my beliefs have been shown to be completely untrue.

[00:06:43] thing, it's not even an emotional thing, it's actually something that we do. So, you know, I think I probably made

[00:06:49] the understanding, I probably underestimated the importance of

[00:06:56] experience in healing. I perhaps overemphasized the intellectual

[00:07:03] and the emotional side, rather than the practical side. quite so easily, you know, like, I think this, but I feel this and they don't match. And, um, and it's hard to do that internal, uh, you know, self, that's why, you know, self-talk eventually does work because it is a part of your, your brain trying to help your emotional state

[00:08:20] come together and make sense. And it's what freedom they feel in like, Oh,

[00:09:41] my God, like, I'm not the only one who feels this way when you really look at what happened to us. We were taken from one family, plunked down in a completely different family and then offered no help, no support, no guidance, no roadmap, no nothing.

[00:11:00] And the whole expectation of you should be grateful,

[00:11:04] you should be thankful, this is far better.

[00:11:06] And then it wasn't. because so much secrecy is built around being a birth parent that are flailing around on their own. And you know, you go into survival mode as a person, and if all that's too hard to manage on your own, what do you do? You shut down, you shut off, you cut off, you act like, it's no big deal. I'm fine. Everything's fine. Because you have to survive.

[00:13:22] have five successful children, not just three successful children. I mean, that's really where I feel like she's cut

[00:13:26] herself off from but, but she's not I don't think has had enough

[00:13:31] experiences with other adoption connected people to come out

[00:13:35] from underneath that, or she just isn't able to do it. I

[00:13:38] don't know. I don't have the answer to that. That's her her

[00:13:40] journey, not mine. So

[00:14:42] As I have just come home from the hospital, walking away from my son is my primary worry and concern

[00:14:47] and reality check was if something happens to my son,

[00:14:52] I now will never know about it.

[00:14:55] Like if you were to suddenly die or have a major medical

[00:15:03] illness or like I understood high school, I finished college, I finished graduate school.

[00:16:23] You know, I just kept each other over the years. So that's one. And I would say the other my next sort of really big light bulb moment of my healing was when I did

[00:17:43] experience that my birth mother did not enjoy being oh, shit. Like, what does that mean? Like, that's what I thought is it will completely alter my worldview. And then she pushed me to go kind of like so, like, and I had to go back and go, well, huh,

[00:19:02] would it change my worldview?

[00:19:03] And if it did, is that such a bad thing?

[00:19:07] Maybe my worldview needed to be changed. who she is. I know where she is. I've met her a few times. I do know my siblings, but I don't know her. So, you know, that was a pivotal moment. And, you know, that realization of what I feared, the change in my world view, I actually didn't need to fear because it ended up being okay that

[00:20:22] it changed my world view. I needed to take a look belief. That's fair. Yeah. There's a lot of belief holding in adoption that has been drummed into us, ingrained into us,

[00:22:45] adoption, but it's a lot of trying to put in front of them in very quick soundbite nuggets.

[00:22:53] What you think about adoption is actually wrong. It's factually wrong, but the belief system in the United States has led you to think this is what's true about adoption. And so systemically we have

[00:22:59] that problem and individually we have that problem are able to let yourself think maybe it could be something else, now you have a whole range of things that it could be. But if you never allow yourself to think about, can I challenge my beliefs about adoption,

[00:24:22] you never get a chance to think about some

[00:24:24] of those other things.

[00:24:25] And I do think it's a blessing and a curse that I have to look at adoption from multiple, multiple angles and viewpoints, because I live it from multiple angles and

[00:25:44] viewpoints.

[00:25:45] And so I'm always open to, well of, is can we try to prevent all of that? And you can't really prevent it. If you're gonna move a child and move a child, then you have to know these are the consequences of moving a child. And the best you can do is the truth and transparency,

[00:27:01] the holding of feelings, the honoring of feelings,

[00:27:05] the acknowledgement of some parts of your life Can you give us an example of that? Well, I mean, my birth mother's one obvious example. I would love to have a in-depth conversation with her in person of, can we just talk it through? Like, tell me what happened. Tell me your story. Tell me how this happened for you.

[00:28:20] Tell me your decision-making.

[00:28:23] Why did you feel like you had to keep it secret?

[00:28:24] Why couldn't you tell anyone?

[00:28:25] Or is that even true?

[00:28:26] I don't even know if that's true.

[00:28:28] Maybe she did tell people had a discussion with my birth mother about my, about her pregnancy with me, about her birth of me and about her placement of me and, and sort of why she handled it the way she handled it. So that's, you know, that's one person who's clearly on a very different path than I'm on and it, and it, it impacts me that she isn't in the same place that I

[00:29:41] am. I could probably say the same about all of my siblings too, for that matter. You know, they didn't have a lifetime of wondering the way I think a lot of us as adoptees have spent a lifetime wondering, well, I wonder about my birth family. You were talking about that before, about stuff, like my own take on my own stuff changes with my mood, changes with my mood and then we look at tiredness or coming back,

[00:33:41] coming back flying back from holiday overnight, you know, gave me her notes after a few sessions and one of were finding partners through web apps, you know, used to have the

[00:35:04] columns and it was always GSOH, good sense of humor. Good sense of humor.

[00:36:02] You know, it is.

[00:36:07] The so it was as if the real like how it sounded to me was the realization.

[00:36:11] If the worst thing that happens is my belief changes.

[00:36:16] It isn't bad.

[00:36:18] It's a good thing, right?

[00:36:21] It was it was a lot about.

[00:36:23] It's suddenly going, oh, would that really be that bad?

[00:36:27] Hang on. Like maybe it wouldn't. over, holy crap, this is much harder. Helping her navigate launching takes a lot more skill and awareness and being present in her life to help her with that than it felt like it ever was when she was a toddler. And you think, oh, the toddler years, that's hard.

[00:37:42] I'm like, give me toddler again.

[00:37:45] And I love it.

[00:37:46] And it's joyful to old. Like it's, it's not, she's not going to be with me yeah. So that's ongoing. And that's gonna, that's gonna go on for the rest of our lives.

[00:40:21] Yeah. And I should sort of want it to, shouldn't we? Like, yeah, we shouldn't be

[00:41:26] please, I don't want another like big life upheaval, but then, then what? You're just doing nothing then. I mean, life just isn't happening. And it's a vegetative state. So

[00:41:33] I think it's, it's helpful to carry that with you in some way, shape or form of, yeah, I've

[00:41:38] been through some really awful stuff. And wow do think that we can get very caught up in adoption is all I am.

[00:43:01] It's shaped everything.

[00:43:02] And it has, it has shaped everything,

[00:43:04] but it is also not everything.

[00:43:07] Or it doesn't have to be,