Adoption Sensitivity: How To Understand What Your Child Is Feeling

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Welcome friend! This is the Living With Joy Renewed podcast, where adoptive families find healing for the present and hope for the future.

I'm Jeanette Nafziger, and I'm here to come alongside you on your parenting journey each week with tips, real-life stories, and encouragement to help your family find renewed joy at home.

Thanks for joining again today, I want to talk today about something that I just labeled adoption sensitivity. It's a term I've given recently to hang on, hang on, I gotta start over. Thanks for joining in today. I want to touch on a subject today that I have labeled adoption sensitivity. This actually has just recently come up, my oldest adopted daughter is 24. And my youngest is 19. So you know, we've raised our children. And I am still learning new things from them mostly about what it looks like and what it means to be an adoptee. And again, things I wish I had known back then, but I didn't. And my kids are so resilient, and they are learning along with me even as young adults. So I wouldn't be able to share with you some of these things, especially this subject of adoption sensitivity. Just recently, my 24 year old daughter, she had a heart to heart chat with her aunts, my my sisters. So my three, my three sisters and I are all very close. And my daughter this, my first adopted daughter was the first grandchild into the family. And let me tell you, this child has been doted on from day one. But she's getting married this fall. And as she thinks about getting married, having a family and all of that, she realizes there's just some things that she wants to share. Because she realized that they have given all this love to her. But often she was unresponsive to their love. Especially beginning in the middle school years, the high school years. She admits that she struggled to receive love. But at the same time, she has been able to come to an understanding of maybe why she struggled to receive love. And she wanted to share some of these things with him. But first, I want to go back a little bit and share a little bit more of her story. Our story with her. Like I mentioned, she was the first grandchild in the family, and she was our first child. No child could have been more loved. Like I said, this little girl has always been so very loved still is she's an amazing human being. And she was always treated as if she were naturally born right into our family. You would think that this is a good thing, right? Looking back that just treat her as if she was naturally born into our family. We always acknowledge she was adopted. She was always aware of what adoption is. But my husband and I never felt like it was a different relationship than with our birth son. And my extended family. Her aunt's especially never treated their relationships with her any different than the many other nieces and nephews that ended up coming along throughout the years. But my daughter would say that that's actually where the downfall was. When she was having this little heart to heart with her ads, she referenced a time when she posted something on social media about abortion, one of her aunts in a way that was meant to be totally loving and affirming mentioned and commented in on this social media post that my daughter was so lucky to have been adopted and not aborted. And this was many, many years ago. I didn't even know this happened. But unbeknownst to us, my daughter has thought about that statement almost every day since then. So on this day, that she was sharing with her aunts. I was so proud of her I was so proud that she has learned the art of putting her feelings to words, that she was brave enough to say those words out loud. And she began with this social media comment. She shared that the moment she read that comment she realized that no one really quite understood what was constantly going on in her head. She admits there was no reason to be upset about the comment because it was made in total love. But that day when she read it, she says that it shone a light on some things that she had not quite understood about herself. She felt a realized that her heart begins to feel heavy when someone tries to tell her that she is lucky. Because she would say really is she wouldn't have been more lucky or more of a blessing to have been wanted to have been nurtured and cared for by the woman whose womb she was in for nine months. These are the questions that she began to ask herself. She realized that she was asking herself these questions, but no one else really understood enough about what it felt like to be adopted to ask these questions themselves. In later podcasts, we will be talking about the constant vigilant activity that goes on in the brain of adopted child. This is part of what it means for those of us who have not been adopted to not quite understand what that constant thought activity feels like. She shared with her aunt's that day that she often sees the world in a different way than most people do. And that when in even innocence, night, naivete and love, we ignore the fact that adoption causes a different worldview. Because of a desire to protect her from feeling different. Even when we do that out of love, we are actually trying to make her fit into our world, instead of trying to enter her world, and understand who she is, and how she thinks. They this is what I mean, when I talk about the importance of adoption sensitivity. So often, we think that it is important to make sure our adopted children understand what adoption is, and that we are honest about their story and their history. But from there, we want to act like everything is the same, and they shouldn't feel different. We don't want them to feel different. But the reality is, they so often do feel different. And the more we ignore that, the harder it is for them to reconcile their story with a world they are living in. In my daughter's story, she knew she was loved. And so she felt like maybe she wasn't being fair to feel these, these feelings that she was feeling. When this happens, shame becomes a big factor, shame and guilt, that she shouldn't just be content and feel lucky. And shame leads to many other hard feelings. And all of those feelings of shame and guilt are on top of the original emotions that she's having of trying to figure out why she feels different. When everyone's telling her that she shouldn't. I hope I'm making sense here. The bottom line is that out of love, real deep love and compassion. We long for our adopted children to feel like they belong, that they feel as wanted as they really, truly are. And sometimes we do this by acknowledging the origins of their story. But not truly taking the time to understand how those origins sit in the memory part of their brain, and how every experience, every comment gets filtered through that memory. So by trying to make sure that they feel like they belong, and that they are in the right place. We are actually making them feel like an alien trying to fit into our world. And no matter how hard they try, there is always something in the back of their brains that say these people they really don't understand me, they love me. But they don't understand me, I should feel thankful this is what's going to go on in their heads. I should feel thankful. But I'm confused. And if I'm honest, like my daughter was actually able to eventually be, they would be saying, I'm starting to get a little bit angry and frustrated. And then we will begin to see behaviors and responses that show that anger and frustration without understanding where it's coming from. So how do we fix this? How do we do it differently? Those answers aren't easy. Number one, we learn. We seek out knowledge and we absorb it. We listen to adoptees, without judgment. And without trying to defend our positions that's huge. To be able to listen to our children or to other adoptees without defending ourselves and saying well, this is why I'm doing this I love you. I want you to feel this way I want you to have a successful life. So I'm this is why I did this or said that. Listen, don't always be quick to defend, truly hear what they're saying. Ask our kids, what are some things that I do or I say that make you feel like I don't quite understand what being adopted means to you, or what it feels like. When I asked this particular daughter my oldest adopted daughter these things she will share with me that

maybe I need need to be more willing to hear the hard stuff. Maybe to hear her say that being lucky might have meant being raised by birth parents that were stable and capable of loving and caring for her. Maybe I need to be more willing to hear her say that on her hardest days, she wonders if abortion might not have been the best answer. I can help her through these hard feelings. But I can't if I'm not a safe enough place for her to share them with me. And it took many, many years for me to actually understand to understand that being a safe placement, I needed to be willing to hear the hard stuff. Adoption sensitivity, it means not trying to make them fit into our world. But rather entering into theirs and being willing to truly understand what being adopted means to them. Maybe sometimes we avoid it because we're scared to hear some of the hard stuff and in a very non Mel Fish's way we went to love them so well that we believe they don't have to have the hard thoughts and feelings. But real love for an adopted child is to say we have chosen to enter your world and love you We make everything we have available to you we want to be a safe place for you to be yourself instead of trying to put on a mask that gives you access to our world. I have said it before and I will say it now again it takes the strongest of the strong to be an adoptive parent not because of the children but because of ourselves and the fears and the emotions or maybe I should say the fear of the emotions that can come from raising these precious ones. And also because of the the intense self awareness and mental well being that is necessary to work through all of these emotions. But together we can do this we can be the safe place our children need to heal, grow and prosper. We can be that place where they become resilient because of their story instead of just in spite of it. Thanks for listening!