Processing Trauma To Heal With Liz DeBetta

[00:00:00] Hello everyone welcome to another episode of the thriving adoptees podcast. So today

[00:00:06] I would like to be joined by Liz. Liz DeBetta, welcome back onto the show Liz, looking for

[00:00:11] a discussion today. Yeah I'm so excited to be here again Simon thanks for having me and

[00:00:17] I'm excited to jump right in and get talking. Cool is to describe healing. So what does healing mean to you, Liz? So that's such a good question and it's been concentric circling in and around spirals of energy and emotion that I am working to process and release one step at a time. And so when there. And you talked about the one moment show being called Unmoved. Yeah. Now that's a hell of a powerful word just there, right? You just like you created this. Like sometimes we don't realize the power of, of, of, so I'll use un-mother it as an example of a healing moment. I mean, that I wrote that, it's a one woman show that I wrote as part of my dissertation work because that's when I started to get really interested

[00:06:43] I have a background as a theater artist, my undergraduate degree is in theater

[00:06:45] and I'm a member of both actors unions in the US.

[00:06:49] And I was like, it would be so cool if I could

[00:06:56] use my background as a theater artist

[00:07:00] and my background as a writer, a poet,

[00:08:05] around this work over time, but he's a voice

[00:08:11] and text professional, and he, one of the modalities

[00:08:15] that he is trained in is Fitzmorris voice work, and so which is a breath and body-based modality

[00:08:20] that is pretty trauma-informed when the right person

[00:09:24] piece because I'm, you know, rolling around on the floor and I'm moving around and doing all this like quasi dance based

[00:09:30] movement in conjunction with the text. And that was a little

[00:09:35] piece of it, but it'll look, but the bigger part of that was

[00:09:38] that my body was releasing the trauma through the words and And I mentioned it earlier is that we can use creative practices to help heal and process trauma. And part of that is the empathetic exchange of having your story witnessed, right? Not only just writing it, but also being able to tell it and have it be heard and witnessed by other people.

[00:11:01] And then, you know, so, and then also part of this process was entering into some really Or can you give an example of a particular moment? Like maybe you talked about the writing around on the floor. Or can you talk us through this in a bit of like a granular detail or around what she must have gone through, how she must have felt in the process of having to surrender me and, did that process increase or enlarge or develop your empathy for her? Had you thought a lot about her what she had to do. And I always had this deep intuition that if and when I had the opportunity to find her that she would want to know me. And so I think I've always held a in a sense, adopt, and then the separation that occurs for adoptees between the first mother and then also the separation with our adoptive mothers and the ways that adoption others, us, all.

[00:17:41] Yeah.

[00:17:43] You know?

[00:18:48] imagine what she was feeling, what she might have been feeling, what those moments might have been like for her in order to write these poems to fill in that part of my story, which

[00:18:54] at the time I didn't, I still didn't know.

[00:18:58] Yeah.

[00:19:00] And so then the writing is a practice of empathy as well, right? 10 that everything's okay when maybe it's not. What were you rewriting? So I use the term rewriting in the sense that I, you know, I got moved sort of starting with my entrance

[00:20:20] narrative, right, with the story that I had been told over

[00:20:23] and over and over as a kid about why I was adopted, you know, not true. Most of that was not true. And so I had this view of the teddy bear as an effing consolation prize. of emotion came faster at each other. One was huge empathy for her and then the other one was how on earth could I have had it so wrong in for 20 seconds. So thinking about it now, it has to be more 70s, right? Is that right? Yep. I was born in the 60s when there's perhaps even more, you know, like more pressure on them. been really disembodied, you know? I've spent so, but not knowing how to deal with it, right? And so then until I learned that I did hold all

[00:29:43] of that grief and that alternative was continued to feel like shit

[00:31:00] for the rest of my life and never find a pathway to healing.

[00:31:05] And so I, you know, that was sort of,

[00:31:07] I think that was a big, you're putting pre-tribble form, sorry, you're putting pre-verbal trauma into verbiage, into words. That's what the writing is all about. And then the next stage, you know, you talked about embodiment and you, I'm not in those circles, wouldn't I? Is there a proper word that's spoken? It's I would, I would categorize it as a choreo poem. Oh, okay. Yeah, because it's, there is so much movement connected to both

[00:33:40] the poetry and the narrative text And so that was part of the inspiration for that because it is so heavily rooted in my poetry, some of which was old poetry that I had, you know, excavated for the purpose of this project

[00:35:00] to really be able to start to look at myself

[00:35:03] and look for what my poems,

[00:35:06] the clues that my poems are the deepest parts of my soul, right? And that comes up a lot, actually, in un-mothering. Because of so much of my early writing, I had this deep connection. Like there's this part of myself, which I consider my soul, that has lots of darkness and lots probably look and see if there's a poem I've written because I probably do have a metaphor somewhere. Yeah. But... What does compromise me in this? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it's all of those things. It's the outside of this, right? But then those are things I had to hide, right? Those are things I. And as you were describing, you know, the Italian American family, I was thinking about the, you know, the other of un-loved, you know, who knows really. But that's that's the approximate number at this point, which I'm not I know this because it's something that's that is part of the script of my show. But then it means like one in 46 US citizens. So then or like the ways that we feel like a shadow self. So I'm just thinking about the numbers and I'll get back onto the law of emotional stuff. I'm thinking it's a small percent, but it's a big number.

[00:44:21] Yes.

[00:44:22] It's a small percent, when it's a blank trigger explosion, no damage. Right? So when we're shooting blanks, shooting. Healing in a metaphor. But let's get back to you instead of my theories. How has this changed your emotions or changed your emotions? I'm always going to be healing some aspect of myself. I'm always going to be thinking and rethinking what my healing looks like, knowing that

[00:48:20] there's not a specific endpoint, but knowing that if I am less activated, then that's that baby Liz, that small Liz didn't have. Big Liz has the words now. So big Liz can step in and do the work of taking care of all those little Lizs who didn't have the words, who didn't have the agency, who didn't have the same choices.

[00:49:42] Is it always easy?

[00:49:43] No, and this has been distinction between riding the waves and this guy from

[00:51:01] British history, or I don't know, mythology, right, called King your words. That made it the understanding the body's activities and the body's, yeah, the body's, the senses, the stuff that runs through our bodies. Understanding our feelings, mitigates,

[00:52:27] makes them less scary. me had dolls who were soldiers, you know, action man was a doll who was a soldier. We got, we were given guns with plastic bullets in that went out at about, you know, an island hour, you know, they couldn't do any harm. And we, you know, we, I to be what you're getting up, I think, when you talk about understanding emotions. They're not the things that you formerly didn't have words for and you're able to or to other people what I was feeling and just kind of suppressing it and suppressing it and pretending it wasn't there and then I had some panic attacks and I haven't had panic attacks in 15 years and that was my body going hey I get to spend holding space with and for other adult adoptees and guiding them through an emergent process of writing

[00:59:02] and tapping into some of the parts that still need nurturing is how I like to call it. and that they also can give themselves some grace around, you know, what they're still discovering. to ridicule, he actually used to ridicule me for having permission to sit with this hard because we do, right? If we're talking about being adopted, depending on who we're talking to, there's so much self-editing

[01:04:22] that happens for so much of our lives.

[01:04:25] And it's also the self-editing of like,

[01:05:32] think should be ignored, you know, and my process is very different from what most other

[01:05:38] adoptee writing is focused on, and there's places, you know, there's a place for all of the writing

[01:07:02] opportunities that are happening in the world, but what I'm conscious of time. Is there anything that you want to share Liz? Obviously, a listeners, as always, links to Liz's website and socials in the show notes. But is there anything that you want to share that I've not asked you about? I don't know.

[01:07:03] I'm just excited to be able to have continued conversations