Lucky Bastard With Anthony Akerman

[00:00:02] Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Thriving Adoptees podcast. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Anthony Akerman, looking forward to our conversation today Anthony. Yes, very much Simon, thank you. So Anthony's got a book out. When did you publish your book? It was a while ago, yeah?

[00:00:21] No, earlier this year. Earlier this year? Yes, it's only now kind of gaining a bit of traction. So it takes a bit of time. So it's very recent, yes.

[00:00:32] And we've spoken, the two of us, about the title of the book because ladies and gentlemen, it's called Lucky Bastard or Lucky Bastard I guess if you're from the south of England. And for me it's a great kind of a juxtaposition, right? Yes.

[00:00:53] Lucky Bastard I was, saw something from, what's the guy's name, one of the trauma guys, not Bessel Bandekop, the Czechoslovakian guy, Gabel Marte, yeah? He took, he had a course called The Wisdom of Trauma. The Wisdom of Trauma. And I thought that's a great juxtaposition. Yes.

[00:01:18] And wisdom and trauma those are things that you don't hear together. Yes. And Lucky Bastard, yeah, you hear it in, we don't hear it often in terms of adoption but in other ways. So you were telling me that you can't take the credit for it for them?

[00:01:43] No, not entirely. My wife is very witty and quick and she came up with the title. I was, I did want to use the word bastard because I kind of wanted to own that. It was interesting that when I was a kid at school and we studied Shakespeare.

[00:01:59] So we studied King Lear and then King Lear Gloucester has two sons, Edgar, who's a good guy, and Edmund, who is a piece of shite. And Edmund is a bastard because Gloucester had him out of wedlock with another woman and so he's called bastard.

[00:02:18] And in Shakespeare's day, there was a belief that was current and my teacher told us about that that bastards were believed to be inherently evil.

[00:02:27] And if you looked at how Edmund behaved in the play King Lear, I don't want to be too erudite about that but I mean he is really a terrible, terrible role model.

[00:02:37] So, you know, as a young person who was aware of being adopted and who presumed time it was just a presumption. One of the many stories you could make up about what your genesis had been that my parents were unmarried and therefore I was a bastard.

[00:02:54] It seemed like a kind of curse that you had to work through. And in a way, you can then proudly own it at certain points take it away.

[00:03:04] I think it was in Oliver Twist because there's many, many bastards and English literature, you know, from Tom Jones, Oliver Twist, Heath Cliff in that great Yorkshire novel. Yeah, thank you.

[00:03:23] And the ring Heights just set around the corner from where you live. They were all illegitimate or they were all, they were all illegitimate or bastards.

[00:03:32] And it was in Oliver Twist that Mr. Brownlow who was Oliver's kind of patron, he admonished Oliver's half brother who called him a bastard and said that's, you know, that that word only reflects badly on you.

[00:03:48] And it is something that we can own, you know, I suppose it's like black Americans can use a word that we would not be allowed to use. We'd be called racist but they can own that word. And I suppose I felt that I could own the word bastard.

[00:04:04] Yeah. Yeah, with a bit of a tongue in cheek with a bit of a tongue in cheek. And I guess it goes down to it goes to how long, you know, like when was Shakespeare writing 16th century? Was it or fifth?

[00:04:19] Yeah, 17th century the beginning of the 1600s. Yes, late 1500s. Yes. So yeah, so the villainization of of bastards goes back a long time. Yes. It's in it's in the culture for roots as long as Shakespeare and probably before that, I guess.

[00:04:40] And of course there were many bastards in England and high society. I mean, many people had illegitimate children who they kept including the royal family. The only downside if you were the bastard of a king is that you weren't in line for the throne. Yeah.

[00:04:59] You probably got some other perks. Yeah. And I see this and I feel this myself about as adoptees trying to change other people's perceptions of us. And I think that's a real, real uphill battle, right?

[00:05:25] I think a lot of people it's quite interesting that my book, which is an adoption memoir, I tell my adoption story.

[00:05:32] And quite a few people who've read it and were well entertained, enjoyed the book said it's opened kind of like windows where they'd never thought about it before. Many people don't really think about because it's not their experience. They wouldn't think that there's anything different.

[00:05:50] You know, if you're adopted, well, you're adopted. That's okay. You know, let's get on with it.

[00:05:56] I mean, one of my uncles who was a doctor and in the 1950s would have facilitated quite a few was in those days, GPs used to do what he called a childbirth and all of that sort of stuff as well. It was part of the territory.

[00:06:13] And he said to me, you know, when we were having this discussion, he said, well, he never imagined that that was anything but the best solution for the mother, for the adoptive parents who suddenly became a family. The mother's problem was solved and the child's problem was solved.

[00:06:30] And everyone could just get on with their lives as if nothing had ever happened and didn't leave any scars. So it's very naive how many people can be about adoption.

[00:06:41] And the I think about, I think about this quite a lot at the moment because the primal wound only came out in 1992 or 93. So yes, and she was the first woman to first order to point towards this.

[00:07:01] These days, these days, you know, I've been listening to a couple of podcasts with Bessel Van de Kolk this morning whilst walking the dog. And he didn't write the Body Keeps of the Score or release it to 2014.

[00:07:16] Right? So this is still, this is that book's only 10 years old, right? It sold 5 million copies. It takes a long time for the world to change. Like, didn't it take them 2,000 years to go from being thinking that the sun went round the earth?

[00:07:42] So the, yeah, to the earth going round the sun, that took like 2,000 years to change and same with flat earth. Like, flat earth thing. And still people think that there's flat earth. So things take a long time to change, you know, to spread.

[00:08:01] And we see so much of adoptees like trying to get people to understand our stuff, but they've got their stuff to deal with. So we shouldn't really be surprised when they're not really up for it.

[00:08:20] We have to be, if we feel drawn to that advocacy and spreading the word about adoption trauma, we have to be kind of in it for the long term. We have to be persistent. We have to be creative because their stuff is their stuff.

[00:08:35] They're not bothered about our stuff. No, but I think many people can be interested just as adoptees are not only interested in things that have to do with adoption. It just happens to be an important part of us, part of our experience.

[00:08:51] It forms what we are not exclusively, but importantly, but we're interested in all sorts of other things. And so, you know, not adoptees can also be interested in other sorts of things. But a lot of people just haven't really thought about it.

[00:09:07] But they do, you know, I mean, people are not uninterested. People are not cynical. They, you know, and so I think it's, I imagine it appeals to people who've got something to do with what was called the adoption triangle.

[00:09:23] So you work out how many people in some ways were involved in that from the triangle obviously being the birth parents, the adoptee and the adoptive parents and how many people are caught up in that.

[00:09:39] And when adoption, like the legal adoption was in America, they save around about two to three percent of the population. And if you think how many people were living in America, about 200 million people, that's a lot of adoptees.

[00:09:53] That's adoptees and then they've all got a mum and dad adoptive. They've all got biological parents and then siblings. There are a lot of people who in some way are touched by the experience of adoption.

[00:10:05] You know, they've got you'll often have people saying, oh, I had a friend, friend who read my book. He's a Dutch actor and I lived in the Netherlands for 20 years almost. And he wrote and said, now I understand much more about my adopted brother.

[00:10:20] And I didn't know that he hadn't adopted younger brother. So, you know, it kind of crops up all over the place. And quite often in families, as you know, that parents who assume or think that they are barren, that they can't have a child,

[00:10:35] go out and adopt a child and then, hey, pray, stow before you know it, they're bringing up baby and they fall pregnant. So adopted children sometimes have brothers and sisters who are biological children with their parents.

[00:10:50] And I think that probably gives rise to some awkward competition or rivalry. Yeah, yeah. Of course, that was Nancy Barrios' experience wasn't it? She had one biological kid and one adopted kid. And the difference between the two was what kind of sparked her intuition.

[00:11:14] So healing then, the focus on the podcast. What was the word healing? Well, to what extent does that word resonate with you, Anthony? A lot Simon, because you know, you also you don't realise sometimes you don't realise in what ways adoption has affected you.

[00:11:39] In fact, even writing my book I realised thinking about it a lot when I was analysing certain things I came to realisations that I hadn't had before.

[00:11:51] You know you think well, in my case adoption was I was told when I was 10 years old, it was an accidental telling.

[00:12:02] And I really found out at the age of 10 that I wasn't who I thought I was, which was a pretty seismic event in the life of an adoptee.

[00:12:12] And for nowadays of course the way people do it is to tell a baby from the get go so the child doesn't ever know, doesn't ever have a moment, doesn't have a red letter day.

[00:12:25] So that was required quite a lot of an adjustment, just kind of feeling that you didn't belong. I suppose that's one of the first feelings and I didn't really interrogate too much of the time about why. I actually was sort of ashamed of it.

[00:12:44] I didn't want people to know. And yet of course people did know. And I said to my uncles and aunts and grandparents they all knew, you know that I didn't want the kids to know because then they think I was less than them.

[00:12:57] That was how I figured it. Then I later turned that on its head being a precocious little boy. I said well, I'd learnt about the birds and the bees. And so I said, well my parents decided that was disgusting having sex. So your parents are pretty disgusting.

[00:13:17] My parents weren't like that. They went out and adopted me instead, which is quite a creative twist on that. Quite a creative twist. It didn't occur to me that somebody else must have had sex. So I got that kind of messed up.

[00:13:34] But at a certain point you just realised that it was the information was unavailable in South Africa. We had an adoption act in 1923, which preceded the UK actually preceded Scotland and Britain England. So we were quite early with that.

[00:13:54] But then the act was amended several times, but it was always that there was no disclosure. And so nobody knew anything. In fact, so you could never find out. When I did ask my dad when they told me when I was a teenager,

[00:14:11] and of course many adoptees will identify with not really wanting to talk about adoption with their adopted parents because they are scared they might hurt them. It might be a reminder of their infertility. You might seem like you don't love them or you are ungrateful or something.

[00:14:29] And gratitude is like a red flag word for adoptees as you all know. So then you just told that it was impossible to get that information. So you didn't have a story.

[00:14:43] You didn't have a story of why you had been put up for adoption, what was your story? Your story was different, your origin story. So you didn't have it. Well, you can't sit around moping forever if you just told that you can't ever know.

[00:15:01] And that's how it was in my life until I was about 38 when they changed the law in South Africa. And I think that they changed the law in 1983, but it was an only kind of came into effect in the about 86, 87.

[00:15:19] And it was probably because there was a justifiable argument presented by the lawmakers that, you know, there could be hereditary diseases and a child at least had that right to know that they might have or might pass on hereditary disease.

[00:15:38] So that made it possible then for me to do a trace. And by then I thought that it was like, you know, this was a, you know, this, you know, I was never going to find out so why worry about it?

[00:15:53] You know, they were never going to change the law. And actually if you think about it, it's quite outrageous. You know, the only person who doesn't know adoptive parents know your story, perhaps up to a point biological parents do but you don't.

[00:16:07] And you are the person who this is all about, you know, and so it's actually quite, you know, can make you very angry when you think about that. And then I had the opportunity to do a trace.

[00:16:21] But what's when we're getting around to healing, what, you know, finding my biological, my birth mother was a very healing experience because that did give me access to my origin story, the mystery of how it had happened, why it had happened,

[00:16:43] because, you know, I imagine most adoptees fantasize about this or wonder, you know, make up stories, make up a story. Well, maybe it happened like this, maybe it happened like that.

[00:16:55] Maybe you wake up the worst case scenarios as well to protect yourself just in case your mother was a lowdown hooker and your father was a drunk sailor, you know, then as long as you've prepared yourself for that you can't be shocked.

[00:17:09] Because I think some adoptees do have quite shocking experiences.

[00:17:14] But of the adoptees who I've known who were wanting to find out, no matter how horrible it was in the worst cases, they were glad that they at least knew that that that knowledge and I think that was a quite a healing thing.

[00:17:30] And I mean, that's not to I'm not criticizing adoptees who don't want to find out. I do know some people who say they're not interested. I'm not quite sure. I'm so curious that I can't imagine why not. But not everybody is like that.

[00:17:46] And maybe some people are scared of what they might find out and don't want to. But that was certainly a healing experience for me making contact.

[00:17:57] I was just reading that chapter from my book because it's going to be an excerpt is going to be published in a newspaper here online newspaper when the book hits the main bookstores early next month. And so I was writing about that particular moment.

[00:18:13] I mean, I was I was living in Amsterdam at the time. And I was persona non grata with the apartheid government so I wasn't allowed back into the country. And and then the law changed and I managed to correspond.

[00:18:29] I managed to find my mother, but I couldn't get on a plane and come and see her. But we did communicate and that was the beginning of certainly of the healing process for me. I think that, you know, healing can happen in all kinds of other ways.

[00:18:46] I think you possibly don't know to what extent adoption has affected you, apart from perhaps feeling angry or deprived that you don't know your origin story. But it does.

[00:19:04] And you know, there are other scars and it goes back because there's a lot of stuff that we internalize when we preverbal babies before we born even sometimes some psychologists have, you know, as preverbal babies.

[00:19:21] You know what happened to you when you didn't know what was that separation like. Well, if you don't know if you're not dead on the story.

[00:19:29] You don't know but it does leave it does leave marks and we we do live our life in a response to things that have happened to us. And so later I came to understand.

[00:19:43] Although I didn't know at the time how adopt being an adoptee had affected quite a lot of my behavior. For one thing, you know, we know about abandonment issues that adoptees are, you know, we were abandoned.

[00:20:02] However, Nancy very also writes about that whatever kind of gloss somebody might put on it is very hard for an adoptee not to feel, you know, whether the mother had the best intentions in the world and many did.

[00:20:17] You know, the child feels that kind of abandonment and that's something you carry forward or you can carry forward. And as it happened, I don't know if I'm still carry on in this but I realized that.

[00:20:35] Well I did when I dipped into the literature when I started reading some of the literature about adoption. I realized that of course it is a known fact that the divorce rate among adoptees is higher than among the, the, the general population. But why would that be.

[00:20:59] And it was quite interesting after I'd had a succession of, of failed relationships and marriages and some that had lasted quite a long time. And so by then we talked in the 1990s I was back in South Africa, just had another marriage that crashed and burnt.

[00:21:18] And I've eventually found myself in having some therapy with an alternative kind of therapist not your traditional Freudian type of an analyst but somebody who is a bit new agey and that sort of stuff. And I was desperate enough to try anything at the time.

[00:21:35] And it was quite a few kind of revelations came up and one of them was that that the, all the women that I'd chosen in my life were like my birth mother, who was somebody who abandoned me.

[00:21:52] And I had a wonderful reunionification like when I came back to South Africa in 1990. I met my birth mother, and I had a wonderful honeymoon relationship and it is, you know, but the mother and child meeting it is like a love affair.

[00:22:08] And so some of the aspects of that that can be quite fraught as well.

[00:22:12] But by the end of the 1990s came she abandoned me again she kind of broke off our relationship, which is pretty hectic and that happened at the same time that my, my adopted mother died, and my wife left me and we got divorced.

[00:22:34] When I, pardon, a triple woman. Yeah, exactly. And I just turned 50, you know, sucked that up as well.

[00:22:42] So I ended up talking to this counselor and she did point out to me she said, you know, all the women that you have chosen have been like your birth mother, although you didn't know it.

[00:22:56] And what I was always doing was choosing or being chosen by partners who were likely to abandon me.

[00:23:06] And that's what happened because I don't know if I'm not necessarily speaking on behalf of all the doctors but I was a kind of very faithful loyal or loyal type of person and maybe that was a need that that one had when you latched on to somebody you latched on to somebody so

[00:23:24] I mean, I'd like never broken up with a girlfriend. There's always been the girlfriend breaking up with me. And it was what another therapist or guy writing about adoption. I've got his name I can't find it called repetition compulsion. It's that you keep doing the same thing again.

[00:23:42] It's a bit like I was an iron son who said it's a thing of insanity you do the same thing again and you expect a different result except except you don't know you're doing the same thing again.

[00:23:52] You think, oh, this person I've met is so different from the last person but different in superficial ways perhaps but the underlying thing was was this that they were likely to abandon me.

[00:24:09] And and I think after I'd been through that counseling and I did quite a lot of work on myself. And I also stood up to my mother in fact, in fact it wasn't a kind of ultimatum that she she gave me in 1990 and her issue.

[00:24:28] I mean, it was it was really a control issue. She wanted to control me and she wanted to call the shots. It wasn't and she's a very nice person. She just had had a lot of damage herself, not least of having to give a child away for adoption.

[00:24:44] But she wanted to control me and she would have this. What I thought was rather ridiculous thing of she was very happy that I'd come back into her life.

[00:24:57] But she was a middle class woman from the middle class suburb in Cape Town, who didn't want everybody to know that she had had a child out of wedlock. I mean, that's ridiculous like 40 years before please you know but she didn't want to do this.

[00:25:16] She would was very selective about who she allowed to know and it was she who called the shots not me. So, you know, I was there because she had slept with my father before she was married. Otherwise I wouldn't have existed.

[00:25:32] But she would say to me don't tell anybody who you are. I mean just those words were actually very, very hurtful because why are you not allowed to be who you are?

[00:25:46] Because she wants somebody to think that she was a nice girl who hadn't had sex before marriage. I mean, you know, that's kind of disproportionate. So these were kind of issues that have been rubbing along. But I think it was a lot of it was a controlled issue.

[00:26:03] I later also got to understand that her father, my grandfather had been an alcoholic who a bad alcoholic at times, you know, wanted not just lost weekend but a lost two weeks sometimes and children of alcoholics do have behavioral issues as well understandably.

[00:26:24] And so I think that might have played into it. But at that particular point she said to me now, you know, I'm drawing a line in the sand. I don't want you. I'm making up the rules actually. That's what she was more or less saying.

[00:26:37] And I said, it's not good enough. I don't accept that. I don't accept that. And these are the rules that I'm making up and that brought an end to our relationship for a time being for a couple of years. And then there was a reconciliation.

[00:26:53] But in a way it was an important moment for me to have actually broken a pattern. I broke a pattern. So what was it? What did it feel like in that honeymoon period and what do you think? Because obviously that honeymoon period didn't last.

[00:27:21] So you could say kind of I guess you could say, well, the honeymoon period is a healing of. Yes, it's almost like an instant healing or but but then.

[00:27:34] But then when the rejection happens, does the does the healing, you know, is there are we back into are we back? We didn't know. No, I don't think so because, you know, some things were very important.

[00:27:50] And I was quite, you know, and stuff like this you've got to do. You've got to put in the work yourself. You've got to think about it. No kind of what you're doing. And maybe she wasn't doing that.

[00:28:00] The problem is that with a with an adoptee like us and at a birth mother who's had to give a child away when you have a reunion there are you coming into it with different expectations. A child is looking or an adopted person because we're not children.

[00:28:19] People often talk about adopted child, but it does infantilize us. You know, we are not, you know, you're not an adopted child when you 50 or 40 or 30. You know, the mother wants to get the baby back. And that's understandable.

[00:28:35] You know, it's tough when you get a man with a beard and a receding hairline and you were expecting to get your baby back. And I think for the, for me as well, I wasn't looking for another family.

[00:28:47] I mean, I had a very loving adoptive family that they did their best. You know, I mean, I can't fault them on anything, but well, I can. But and I did, you know, because, you know, you tend to act out a lot.

[00:29:04] But you know, that the important thing for me also was through her I had access to more information about myself. She was the one person obviously the mother who would know who my father was. I wanted to know who my father was. I wanted to know the story.

[00:29:23] I wanted to know, you know, what had happened. So finding all of that out filled in all those blank spaces and gave me an origin story, which was and it doesn't matter. Nobody can take that away from me.

[00:29:38] You know, if you know, I've had some difficult cousins just because what you realize adoptees we got to be kind of realistic about this week. And I think that, you know, without thinking about it that all people in biological families get on really well with biological siblings.

[00:29:58] Not true. We just think we don't get on with our adopted siblings because we come from a different family. You know, so we got to be a little bit kind of like realistic about that.

[00:30:09] No, I think it was and you know, there were moments that I was kind of conscious of things like this. I was born in a Salvation Army unmarried mothers home in Durban in South Africa. My mother came from Cape Town, which is 1000 miles away.

[00:30:24] She I discovered when I had spent three nine weeks with me, which was the policy of the Salvation Army in those days. And that's quite traumatic for a mother because she spent nine.

[00:30:37] She breastfed me and then she had to wean me and then she had to wait until one day I would be spirited away.

[00:30:45] And so when we had this reconciliation when I was back in South Africa, one of the very nice things where she came up from Cape Town to Durban. I was adopted parents, my parents.

[00:31:02] I didn't call them adoptive parents and we had I think my 41st birthday party and she was there. She came there and we traveled around together and we went into Durban and I found the building where I was born.

[00:31:17] It was it had been the unmarried mothers home for Salvation Army. It was now an after school after case play center for kids and I'd been there before done a recce. Spoken to the woman and child and said, can I come here with my mother, my birth mother?

[00:31:34] This is where I was born and I went there and she showed me around the place and took me into the room which was the labor room where I was born. I mean it upset her but it healed me.

[00:31:45] It did a lot for me just like so this is where it happened. It was kind of like that stuff. I like to do that stuff. Yeah, so one thing that's intriguing me here is the filling in the answers as you put it, the mystery solved.

[00:32:06] That sounds quite sort of heady stuff, like heady healing stuff. It's a resolving of questions. It's quite intellectual. Whereas there's another part coming here that's more about grounding, like certainty.

[00:32:36] How do those different aspects of that, sorry, how do those different aspects, the heady stuff and the heart stuff and the security stuff. How do those play for you in terms of what you think healing is about?

[00:32:57] Yeah, well I agree with you that knowing the story might be more on the intellectual side of it but being with say your birth mother, seeing somebody who looks like you.

[00:33:10] You know, I mean when people, when she'd say this is my son they'd say well I can see that. Despite the fact that she didn't have a beard presumably.

[00:33:22] Yeah, exactly. But you know like you can see it and I've never really looked like anybody except some girl in England thought I looked like David Bowie when I was a student and so I thought that was quite cool. Or Eric Clapton I think was the other.

[00:33:38] But you know maybe I've been checking out to see whether Eric Clapton was adopted because I also have Irish ancestry. Who knows maybe he's a brother, a long lost brother. But it was very, that was very important and I have a sister who was 18 years younger than me.

[00:33:55] And I'm very, very close to that sister. She lives around the corner from me in Johannesburg now. So that was you know there is a kind of thing with family that is you know it's good.

[00:34:09] And the strange thing is that you, you know you find out I mean I was at university without knowing it in lectures with my aunt, my mother's sister, my cousin was a student that I knew him.

[00:34:22] But I didn't know he was my first cousin. That's really quite weird you know when he obviously didn't look like me or I don't know but you know.

[00:34:31] But so that is that I think that's a very primal kind of thing it's a very emotional kind of thing being there you I felt very comfortable with the birth family you know me and like some of them were different from me obviously and it's kind of strange going to it

[00:34:48] are going into a home you've never been in before and yet you've got a certain kind of entitlement because you are the son.

[00:34:55] It's a strange, strange sort of thing. But I think you know these things were were part of that and you know for people who they are adoptees obviously will not be able to meet their parents because they're biological parents because they don't want to meet them etc.

[00:35:11] So it's not a it's not a thing that you have to have if you don't have that you're not going to heal because you can you can heal in many ways. It does it does help you to you know I found it very healing and helpful to have that information and that story.

[00:35:27] Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because it didn't it didn't you talked you talked about finding out when you were 10 accidentally and that's seismic for you.

[00:35:43] And I'm wondering how seismic the rejection you know when when she wouldn't play the yes she wouldn't play by the rules that you you sat down. You didn't that wasn't a seismic thing for you when she doesn't sound like it anyway.

[00:36:06] No, no, when she wouldn't play the game.

[00:36:09] No, I think that it got to a point where where I felt that you know the relationship was becoming difficult it was becoming quite quite difficult. And so, you know, I let it I let it drop in a way as I said you know it was almost like I said I broke up with my mother, you know like it was like I broken a pattern to but I'd left the door open I mean the letter I wrote to her in response I think it was I don't know whether

[00:36:38] whether that might have been emails in those days was I did leave that I did say look, you know, I can't pretend that I'm just a friend of yours. If you're not my mother, what kind of relationship do we have. And the doors always open.

[00:36:54] Now what happened was a few years later my birth, my biological system a younger sister was getting married.

[00:37:02] She wanted me to do the speech at the wedding. Now there was a problem, you know, how you got to. Yeah, you know so the mother and the the prodigal son so they broke it what what I think is called an intervention.

[00:37:20] And my brother-in-law to be did that and we, you know, we got back together we met up and all of that. But it was a bit like in faulty tires don't mention the war.

[00:37:33] Famous light of John don't mention the war. So we never talked about the war but then we we got on very well for you know she came to my 60th birthday party. You know, she was became part of my life again.

[00:37:48] Yeah, until she had a falling out with my sister and then I was eventually you know so there's not much help for that but I never turn my back on her and I was pleased that she was in my life and I have a lot of cousin I do have a double family, you know, like, I have a lot of cousins now who are related through biology and

[00:38:12] a very wonderful family through my adoption so I've got it like a double family.

[00:38:19] And that's, that's a healing that's a lovely thing. And you know also that the I've had such wonderful responses from my adoptive family reading my memoir because it's given them certain insights and they have kind of like they're even more proud to have me as a member of the family which

[00:38:39] is, which is a really nice thing to have you know that you feel that's really genuine they're not making an effort or anything like that.

[00:38:48] Which you sometimes always thought you were the outcast you know it's not it's, you would have a because because of course you know this is another thing that most adoptees, or they say it's textbook behavior that we act out quite badly as adolescents.

[00:39:08] We're far more rebellious than, than your than other general kids you know. And it's because when you're a teenager it's kind of like, you're trying to find out who you are you try to decide who you are.

[00:39:22] You're trying to, you know, you'll be doing your signature you want to know whether you want to be Tony or want to be Anthony or you and what are your role models also because you look at look to your dad and you might think he's not cool if I really had my real bad maybe you know, it'd be cool.

[00:39:37] What kind of role models that you look at film stars you're looking at this kind of stuff. And we tend to be very rebellious. And I was like that I got into a lot of into a lot of trouble and I didn't realize that that was in fact what happened with me I was sent to a boarding school.

[00:39:58] Based on the British, the great British public schools you know the eat and arrow type of places where children are abused. inverted comments. Yeah.

[00:40:09] Yeah, exactly. So I was sent and I was I acted out badly and I self sabotaged. That was my way of getting to you know they're going to lock me up here. Well, you know, I'm not going to work.

[00:40:22] I'm going to send me to an expensive school well you know that's beard on their heads because I don't like it here. And so I self sabotage which is rather which is self destructive, you know but adoptees can be kind of self destructive because I think you know, you almost like always thought you make it really bad for me I'll kill myself and you can see how you feel about that then.

[00:40:45] So, as a result I failed my ending my final exam at school and had to rewrite school. My my my we call it matriculation in this country equivalent to between oh and a levels in England.

[00:40:59] And, and I only realized, and I think it was, maybe it was Nancy various book as well that, in fact, at the age of 13 being taken out of the family, and put into an institution like a boarding school, where there were rules and fagging and

[00:41:20] childism, caning and everything was a second abandonment. It was. And that's why it was particularly traumatic I might not have been as bad had I been a day scholar sent to the school around the corner.

[00:41:35] So those are realizations I only kind of came to I thought, wow, I can't actually blame it all on the school. It wasn't only the school problem. It was, it was my problem but the problem that that I carried within as an adoptee. Yeah.

[00:41:51] So, to what extent you use that word realizations to what extent do you think realizations drive healing.

[00:42:00] I think so because I think you, you come to forgive yourself as well. And, and I think it gives you more confidence and more understanding of yourself. And you know there's a what are the important shift, because this is an interesting thing so I had a, I was seeing this therapist.

[00:42:24] I told you about. So we talking and I'm explaining all my relationship problems and all the things that whatever. And she says to me, so one point said, your problem is you have low self esteem.

[00:42:39] And I said, I didn't know what self esteem met actually. So I thought it was like having an opinion of myself and I said well look, I didn't really like blowing my own trumpet, but I'm actually quite good at what I do.

[00:42:55] And I've, I've got some awards to prove. She said that's not what I'm talking about. I said, Oh, what are you talking about? She said, if you don't have low self esteem, why did you let your wife treat you the way she did?

[00:43:08] And I just sat there. You know, I didn't have an answer. And then you realize that, you know, and that's that was a pattern, you know, and that I let my mother treat me that way because I had low self esteem and you actually have to do some work on that.

[00:43:22] I don't know. It's a kind of abstract thing how you get that self esteem back, but just got to it's something to do with realizing your worth, you know, that you have got worth and I think it's kind of deeply programmed in us perhaps because we've been discarded that we were worthless.

[00:43:40] And you've got to kind of convince yourself that you've got that worth because you need to have it to be worth something to somebody else as well. Yeah. I think I can just jump in there. I don't think it's convincing ourselves.

[00:43:59] I think it's a realization that convinces us. Yes, okay. You make the difference. I guess once you know, once you know that we can't make ourselves. Yes, we can't make ourselves. We can't make ourselves love ourselves. I had a little moment yesterday on this subject.

[00:44:25] And I was, I was swapping emails with with a birth mother called Laura Engel. She's been on the podcast. Lovely lady and she's coming back on them. We're going to do like a, she can be a co-host. She can interview some people that she knows about.

[00:44:49] And I was thinking, well, like, she, she, this lady we've really just hit it off right from the start.

[00:45:00] We've spoken, we're only spoken maybe three times now on Zoom. You know, once before the podcast, once for the interview or once again, like two, three years later last week I spoke to her and asked about this.

[00:45:12] And she said, she, I said, I have taught them something. She probably sees me at my best. And I guess, I guess she thinks that I'm a really nice guy. And I filled up.

[00:45:34] Because me thinking of myself as a nice guy isn't something that I do at all. So, you know, I don't think we can convince ourselves to love ourselves.

[00:45:52] What, what, what are you doing Simon? What are you doing for adoptees? You know, you are a nice guy. I mean, if you weren't a nice guy, you're not doing this for the money. I know that. No, no, no.

[00:46:07] But I want to talk about this thing because I think it's about realising rather than convincing it. Yes. And I put a post out that I've shared from last year and it said something like we're not born believing that we're not good enough. Yes.

[00:46:27] It's something that we pick up along the way. What if we could put it down? And I got a mixed bag of response, you know, and I meant it as a genuine question. What if?

[00:46:44] And I think it said what if you can put it down rather than we? And then somebody came in and said, well, I can't because so and so and so and so and so and so and so. And I'm just asking what if.

[00:46:58] Well, I'm just asking what if because there's a little bit of hope there. Yes. I'm not blaming, you know, I'm not saying it's easy to do that. Well, I think it's impossible to make ourselves change. I think realisations changes. We see something new. We, we, we, we.

[00:47:29] Reunite with our birth mother and we see something new. It helps us heal. Then we realise that our birth mother is it we realise that in your case, a tricky, tricky situation.

[00:47:44] And we something something occurred to you to say, right, I want to set some barriers down here and some conditions and and then you sat them down and it doesn't work. And you see something new.

[00:47:59] It's and then and then you look back and you think, oh, I was able to do that. You didn't. You didn't stand in front of the mirror every morning. No, while brushing your teeth, saying love yourself, heal.

[00:48:15] Just say the heal Anthony, heal, believe in yourself, love yourself, set some barriers. It wasn't it wasn't it wasn't a it wasn't a conscious action. It wasn't a choice.

[00:48:29] I am and this lady who said, you know, like it's all right for you to say what what if I can I well, I'm not blaming anybody. I'm not blaming anybody for not being able to do stuff because I don't think we can.

[00:48:46] I think insights come to us realizations come to us and you know, we see something new and and it convinces us and and a change happens within us. And that's why realizations are the greatest healers. It's not about, you know, a positive mindset to overcoming your adoption trauma.

[00:49:07] It's not what it is at all. I think the word realization, there's another word that flows from that because with realization comes understanding when you start to understand about something about yourself gives you that kind of insight.

[00:49:23] So realization and understanding that leads to a kind of insight because it was that conversation that I had when Lady told me about self esteem and I disagreed with them because I didn't know what she was talking about.

[00:49:36] And when she did it was one of those moments of realization. I wrote my book. I said it was like scales fell from my eyes. I suddenly started to realize what I'd been doing wrong.

[00:49:46] And when I realized that and understood that I kind of thought, well, I can I can change that I can change that and something happened inside me. It wasn't a conscious, you know, but I knew I was I teared up. I was kind of crying in the car.

[00:50:00] I was after that and I knew I was going to be better. And you're always going to be okay.

[00:50:06] And, you know, not long after that about a year or two after that I met the wife I'm being married to for 21 years now and we are so happy and so perfect.

[00:50:15] I had to be ready for her because, you know, by cat take my damage into a relationship. It's also, you know, it hasn't got much chance from the get go at starting off with, you know, with with a handicap. That's right.

[00:50:31] Yeah, I'm laid I'm first, you know, I'm I'm laboring this point really intentionally because I think you said it is about realization.

[00:50:45] And, you know, I teared up when I thought about myself as a nice guy, you know, like and to the tears wash the scales from the eye or something. But people in the general public people say, you know, time is the greatest healer.

[00:51:00] Well, it's not there's still adoptees really struggling, you know, older older age is not time isn't the greatest healer. What is the greatest healer are insights and that's why I try to mine the insights of the guests to say, you know, look, this is what's going on.

[00:51:24] What's helped Anthony. This is what's helped Laura. This is what's helped Sally Elizabeth. Can that insight help you? Can that catalyse a change within you?

[00:51:35] And that's why I do the podcast because I we don't hear enough about we don't hear enough about what what heals us right so people say, Well, I'm doing some I'm doing some somatic experiencing kind of a new different sort of therapy right.

[00:51:58] Right. It's about it's not the therapy or it's not the support group. It's what happens in the support group. Or you know, you talked about the healing power. You talked about I realized some stuff right in my book.

[00:52:13] Right. So you, you've said, you know, like real realising understanding a new awareness. It's like, where does hopefully listening to the thriving adoptees podcast right help somebody see something that somebody your your realization start starts a real realisation in somebody else.

[00:52:45] My realization that I share in the podcast sparks a realisation somebody else. Anyway, that's that's enough about me. But that's why I wanted to know that you know that realisation the understanding the insights does lead to a kind of empowerment.

[00:53:01] It's a buzzword. You know people are always talking about the department, but it does sort of empower you as well. Like in your inner being, you know. Yeah, for sure. That's it.

[00:53:14] And you know that the other thing that is I've also found very healing is exactly what you are doing. It's adoptees communicating with each other back in the 1990s.

[00:53:26] I was when I was back in South Africa and I was going to write a play for radio about my adoption experience. Well, not not the whole story because the story hadn't finished as it were.

[00:53:37] But I decided I'd go along to an adoptee support group to do research. You know, I didn't need support. You know, I mean I was cool. I didn't need any of that stuff.

[00:53:47] But it was and it was like once a week in the evening and it was such a healing experience to be in a room full of people who got you. You didn't have to explain anything about, you know, much about being adopted.

[00:54:02] You could share stories and it was and I'm still in contact with some of the people, you know, 25 years later or 30 years later.

[00:54:09] It is almost, you know, who are and there's a there's a wonderful kind of solidarity that they can be, you know, with adoptees among each, you know, we're a minority. We're a little group, you know, we're a select group.

[00:54:24] And and I think that's but then communicating and talking about our issues and how we hope we've resolved our issues of that together is such a meaningful thing in a way it's it's a special a special kind of group to belong to, you know, that's what I feel.

[00:54:43] And so I think, you know, hats off to you for for what you're doing, Simon. It's a fantastic initiative.

[00:54:50] Thank you. Thank you. And I feel that solidarity too. And I feel that connection to and that's why I do it to have it for the for the meaningful, the meaningful connections.

[00:55:07] And it's also for me about understanding the stuff that our birth mothers went through and adopted through. And just one point you kind of touched on it. I wanted to draw it out because he talks about expectations. I've heard a lot of people have mentioned this to me.

[00:55:26] Oh, you know, one person mentioned I can't remember who it was not years ago and said, like, as adoptees, we often go into reunion having done some work. And our birth mothers haven't.

[00:55:42] So they're still in the same space as they were. And we've moved, we've moved on a bit, you know, you said, you know, Mummy wants baby back. Well, she hasn't, she hasn't moved on.

[00:55:55] She hasn't, she hasn't moved on because she's been stuck in her trauma stuck in the secrecy. No, this is not blaming them. I'm just saying they haven't been in that.

[00:56:08] And this isn't by any means, everyone. But that underlying that as an expectation or as a thought, it helps us and have more empathy for our birth mothers if it gets tricky or when it gets tricky.

[00:56:30] I never, you know, whatever difficulties I had with my birth mother. And in the last years of her life, she wasn't talking to me or to my sister.

[00:56:42] It was almost a bit infantile like you'll be sorry when I'm dead. And then she did die. But we are the ones who buried her. We're the ones who took her and then turned her the grave of her parents that she loved so much etc.

[00:56:56] So I never rejected her or, or, you know, had lost wanting to understand what a feeling of compassion for her. I understood, I try to understand where she might not have, you know, wanted to make that particular effort with me.

[00:57:19] She would say you don't understand how I feel but I was doing my best to understand how she felt. But, you know, because she had had a trauma as well. And I, you know, I felt that I've kind of got over most of my issues.

[00:57:32] But I, you know, as you say it's like the story you said with the reunion the adoptees have usually put in the work before they get there. And quite often birth mothers haven't.

[00:57:45] I don't know how you would think that social workers would help to prepare them. But yeah, it's two different kinds of trauma, you know. Yeah.

[00:57:58] But the birth mothers, it's a bit like, sorry, the social, it's a bit like the social workers. Social workers in their, in the 50s for you or 60s for me. You know, those social workers were they didn't they didn't know because that's your very hadn't written the primal wound.

[00:58:19] That's a bandicoke hadn't published the body keeps a score. You know, the social workers didn't they didn't know because it wasn't it wasn't known. So, yeah, there was very, there was little knowledge about it.

[00:58:36] I speculate in my book about, you know, what would have happened if my parents had sent me to CSI college, which would have been very unlikely because I mean, you know, only only crazy people with psychology some 60s, you know, that kind of thing.

[00:58:52] But would decide what a therapist have had the, what a therapist have thought that adoption could remotely have been anything could have been an issue they would have looked at probably not.

[00:59:05] Probably not. I hear stories from much later than then where therapists don't investigate the story. And Zalee coming on the podcast soon who's a therapist and was a psychology lecturer in LA.

[00:59:26] And she, she was, I don't know, she got nothing to do with adoption, but she heard something and she thought, Oh, I wonder what she had something on the news.

[00:59:36] I wonder how big our, how a big our section is in now in our library for adoption and she found there's nothing there. So what she actually did, what she actually almost nothing what she did was she brought in she got in touch with some, some birth mother some adoptees and brought brought them in.

[00:59:58] And the people shared some of that stories with these students who you know, student psychiatrists or I think they were there was studying that sort of line of subject.

[01:00:11] So she brought it in she did something she did something about it she realized so it's still it's still catching up.

[01:00:20] You know, it's back to that. We're back to that 2000 years for most people to believe that they know the the earth goes around the sun and the sun and the earth.

[01:00:28] And the flat earth takes a long time. The internet stuff. So it's a little bit quicker these days but still people are slow to change and to shift in there, shift in their perceptions.

[01:00:40] I'm conscious with we've been on for a while is anything else that you'd like to talk about so you're going to put some links to your to book in show notes is anything else that I've not asked you about that you'd like to share.

[01:00:54] Not that I can think of offhand. No, it's you know one can carry on for hours and hours but I think we tend to do this. We do. Yes, that's a good thing.

[01:01:10] But talking is a good thing. Yes, yes, it's been a great pleasure to be in your company Simon. And yes, if there's a place where you can put some information, my books available everywhere through Amazon. So put the link in the show notes. Okay, fantastic.

[01:01:28] Is there anywhere that anybody can get in touch with? Have you got a website or social? What links would you like to include if people want to get in touch? You can. I'm on Facebook, but I don't have a website but you can also give my email address.

[01:01:44] Okay, I put one in the show notes. Yeah, I don't mind people writing to me if they want to communicate with me. Brilliant. Thanks a lot. The World Wide Web of Adopties. Indeed. And I'm thankful. You know, the second, maybe third South African we've had on the show.

[01:02:03] So I'm grateful for the little connections that are being made in that community. Yeah. Thank you Simon. Thanks a lot Anthony. Thanks, Lizsens. We'll speak to you later. Okay. Bye.