CEO of the Post Institute for Family-Centered Therapy and Adoptee
INTERVIEWED BY TELEPHONE, JULY 16, 2013
When we as progressive practitioners, researchers, and society think about transracial adoption, so often we think about teaching parents and children how to navigate the racial terrain, which is critical. However, Bryan, I want to talk with you about the emotional impact on the child who has survived the traumas caused by foster care and adoption and how children and families can move through the emotional pitfalls successfully. What is it about adoption that can create such anxiety and trauma in a child?
It’s a multilayered answer, Rhonda. First and foremost it is important to look at the neurophysiologic experience of this infant. So what we know is that, as early as the fourth week after conception, the fetus is capable of hearing. As early as the second trimester the fetus is capable of physiological processing. Essentially from conception the fetus in the womb of the biological care figure is experiencing and processing all of the messages and communications that go along with placing a child for adoption. So the reality is that for a fetus, i.e., an infant, for the first nine months of their lives [they are] repeatedly exposed to messages in energy. It doesn’t take any words for the fetus to understand what is being communicated. It is energy. Even thoughts, Rhonda, create energy. This phenomenon has been measured in birth and prenatal studies. Just a thought from a mother can cause a fetus to have a reaction. So thoughts, feelings, as well as experiences—all of those are essentially being processed and internalized by the developing child. And what that does is that it stores the messages literally in that child’s DNA. And those are messages of abandonment and rejection at the core.
From a personal perspective, being adopted myself, I asked my biological mother, “At what point did you know you were going to have to place me for adoption?” She said, “When I was about three months pregnant.” I then said to her, “At what point did you really start to disconnect?” She said, “At about seven months into the pregnancy I knew that I was going to have to give you up, and I became depressed and I tried not to think about you being inside my stomach.”
Whoa.
As a developing child in my birth mother’s womb, I was essentially bathed in that negative experience. So I came into the world as a very sensitive infant, completely vulnerable, with all of this encoding already that essentially says that I am at risk in the world. I am not safe because I am not with the person who I have known all of this time. I have all of these messages of insecurity. I have anxiety of being abandoned. These messages get stored in the DNA. We, as the adopted child, cannot conceptualize the impact of that experience. Our adoptive parents cannot conceptualize the impact of that experience. Mental health professionals can’t do it. Physicians can’t do it. We as a society cannot even begin to feel what that is like for an infant, much less that infant that grows up as a child who has those messages that live within them. As a therapist myself, doing my own self-analysis and doing my own therapy, even at forty years of age I am still longing for things that are direct antecedents from my birth and from my in-utero period.
Let me stop you for a second. Are you saying, then, that once a child is birthed and immediately placed into a good adoptive home, that that child has already received an encoding saturated in fear and anxiety?
Yes, potentially irreparable damage. I am going to be blatantly honest with you. I don’t know if that gets repaired. I don’t know if that wound ever gets healed. I think that it becomes a part of that child’s personality.
This is so intense to wrap one’s arms around and understand. Still, today I talk with parents who have adopted and are adopting, particularly infants. Many of them speak in terms that convey that the slate is clean and the clock gets reset the moment these infants become a part of their family. And this is what they tell me they have derived from the information their adoption agency has shared with them in their adoption process and from the information that their agency omitted.
That is asinine. We are a whole decade beyond the decade of the brain. And for scientists and for therapists to continue [to] perpetuate this tragic myth upon these children and upon these families, it is just not okay.
I agree with you. It is not okay. What we have established so far is that the infant’s development is already occurring in the womb. So when we talk about ways to help, especially our adopted children, we have to recognize that there is an embedded history that is a part of each infant before he or she even comes to the adoptive family.
Yes—blueprints that will follow them for the rest of their life. We talked about the first layer of what creates trauma in an adopted child. The second layer that creates trauma for a child is the environmental/experiential part—after the child has been adopted. Think about it: the potential frequent moves that the child goes through being in foster care or just the learning the child must do, even if the child comes right into his or her adoptive family’s home, which is so unlikely [in] these days and times, is enormous. Just learning the new physiological sensations of the new environment is overwhelming for the child. Many people don’t realize that moving is one of the top five most stressful events that we ever encounter in life. Imagine what that must feel like for completely helpless infants. The reason why moving is so traumatic and so difficult, especially to the adopted child, is because the child has to adjust all of his or her sensory system to a new environment, to new people, to new sounds, to new temperatures. All of that is different. So you have an infant who has spent nine months where the womb has been their world; it is their sole experience. All of a sudden they are now in a completely different environment. Everything has changed. That is trauma number 2, in addition to the emotional experiences that the child has had in utero. Trauma number 3 are the terrors that the adoptive parents feel when bringing a child home and the rippling effect that has on the child.
For instance my parents really struggled especially with my [younger] sister. They were not able to have biological children themselves. I refer to my adoptive parents as my parents because they raised me. They really struggled. My sister had in utero exposure. She came to them crying. They were completely helpless. They didn’t know what to do. It was probably a day after they adopted my sister that they had left me with my mom’s parents, my grandma and grandpa, so that they could go off and buy stuff. That is all fine and well. That doesn’t seem harmful. But when you have an adopted child, those intricate moments, they all become potentially traumatic experiences. From the beginning I was connected to a biological figure, and all of a sudden that person is gone. And now here I am with another stranger. So from the point that that infant comes into the adoptive home, whatever that infant or child has experienced before he or she has come into the home matters and will have an impact. Rhonda, the point I am making is that children of all ranges and ages get adopted, so there is the gamut of experiences that go into the making of a child before the child ever comes into the home.
Thank you for addressing this. It is huge. I think that this is a piece that does not get talked about, much less thoroughly, on the grassroots level and in the trenches within adoptive communities. Without question this dialogue is absent in mainstream settings. I do know that there are books, like The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child by Nancy Verrier, that touch on this subject, but, Bryan, you are the only one that I know and have talked with who can break this trauma phenomenon down clearly for me as an adoptee. Bryan, I just talked with a parent who adopted two kids from Haiti. And they cannot understand why the kids are acting up. To them they are providing their children love, their own bedroom, and vacations. They should be happy, they said to me. And all I am thinking about is that these children are living in a remote, predominately white farm community.
You know what? We are woefully ignorant. It is beyond my ability to fathom how we can continue to allow parents to bring kids into their homes without any or adequate education.
I know, and that is why it is important to talk with you here. Parents need support and guidance, especially when their kids are going through trauma. We are fixin’ to go on a roller-coaster ride in our discussion.
What personal experiences catapulted you into the work that you do for children and families?
I was adopted as an infant. Now that I know this information, I like to always include it because it is a part of who I am. My biological mother and father were two young individuals that fell in love. My biological mother was already in a relationship. She had three small kids, ages three, two, and one, when she became pregnant with me. Her husband was in Germany, enlisted in the army. He had told her that he was not coming back. She had met my biological father and they fell in love. It turned out that my biological father left her pregnant. Well, she was faced with the choice of basically not knowing if my biological father was going to be available to be a dad—he was only eighteen years of age at the time—or [whether she was going to be] . . . a single parent with four kids. She talked with her husband and he told her to have an abortion. This was in Oklahoma in 1970. It was not a good position to be in. So other than having an abortion, which everybody except for her sister thought my biological mother did, my biological mother made the decision to come to full term with me and place me for adoption. I spent a few months in foster care as an infant, and then I was adopted into my adoptive family. A year after my parents adopted me, they adopted another child. And that was my home growing up.
My adoptive father was a Vietnam veteran. He had posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Both my mom and my dad were children of alcoholic parents. They were both the oldest of sibling units of ten and nine. My mother was the oldest girl of all of her siblings. My father was the oldest boy of all of his siblings. So they were both very “parentified,” hyperresponsible individuals. And so here they are, bringing in these two babies to raise. It just didn’t go well. Parenting was a challenge for them. I was a challenge, not so much that I know of as an infant or toddler, but as I got older I had behavioral issues. My sister was a challenge for my parents from the very beginning. As I said earlier she had sensory integration challenges from the beginning that they had no idea about how that really affected their relationship with her. My entire life growing up was kind of like World War III. You have the kid who is crying all the time, the mother who feels completely helpless, and the father who is triggered by his PTSD. On top of that they practiced old-school parenting. They knew how to yell, whip, isolate, shame, and threaten. That was my life growing up. They did the best that they could as parents. They did what they thought they were supposed to do. Bless their hearts, they even asked for help. I remember having a counselor come over to take my sister out for ice cream. My parents tried. That was back in the late 1970s, early 1980s. It is unfortunate that not much has changed for adoptive parents since then. Adoptive parents today continue to face the same issues and struggles. That is what compelled me to do the work that I have done over the years to try to educate adoptive parents, first and foremost about themselves and their own reaction patterns and then, secondly, to help them understand their adopted children, their struggles and behavioral challenges. It is personal. That has been the crux of my work. I have been helping adoptive parents help their children to get through this fear of living and to create more loving environments.
You touched on what seems to be a common theme, which is that much has not changed for adoptive parents and children compared to thirty or forty years ago. How is your therapeutic approach to parenting different and how does it yield a better result for children and families?
If people are not educated, they simply don’t know. They are just going for a ride, making assumptions about their kid without education. The basis of my teaching is education, which is helping people understand the dynamics of adoption, trauma, and stress. I teach them to understand the dynamics of family roles and how each member’s role in the family is impacted by their own history. And then from there I teach people how to learn different parenting approaches to not create more stress and fear for their children and instead create love and more oxytocin-rich opportunities. This way parents in particular can help their child’s brain heal and develop along a trajectory that will help their child to understand more about themselves as they become an adult. A big piece of what I do is really helping parents create an environment where their children grow up having some self-understanding of their own struggles. If I could have had just the beginning of understanding that revealed how stressed I was as a child or how fearful I was or how sensitive to rejection and abandonment I was as a child, I could have grown up into that knowledge in a way that I would have more control over my emotional reactions and my patterns and behaviors into adulthood. So I really spend a lot of time helping to create that framework for parents.
Here is a scenario: There is a child of color who has been adopted into a white family. Let’s say this family is also living in a predominately white neighborhood. This new environment is different than what the child knows. He starts acting out. He throws temper tantrums. He throws dishes and toys at anything or anyone that moves. He even starts physically hurting the cat. How do you as a professional intervene in that kind of stressful situation?
First I want the parents to stop putting so much focus on the fact that this child is of a different race and in a different culture, because his resistance to relationships is rooted in that. I want to get the parents out of that mind-set. Let me be clearer: I want the parents to be aware of the child’s culture and race and all of those important matters, but I want them to place their relationship with their child above and beyond everything else. It gets them to a place where they love that child as parents love their children. And it has nothing to do with race. It has nothing to do with the culture. I don’t want race and culture to be the first handicap. A lot of times with transracial adoption, the parents want to use that as the first area for relationships. For example, “Oh, we are having these issues with our fifteen-year-old black son. He is in this school with all white kids. You know, he is the only black child in the family. He has all of these identity issues. He is listening to rap music and dressing weird.” This is the first thing that they want to do, make it about race. But the reality is that the child is rejected at a core level. The child does not feel accepted in the core unit of the family. And so when the child does not feel accepted at the core unit of the family, it doesn’t matter how many black churches you take him to. It doesn’t matter how many black friends he has. He does not feel accepted.
I want to move beyond that place of being arrested in a relationship and get back to just connecting with this child as a child. This child is stressed out. He is overwhelmed. The central way that I like to say that is “A child who is acting out is a child who is stressed out. Where you got an acting-out, stressed-out child, you’ve got acting-out, stressed-out parents.” First of all, what I want the parents to do is get themselves calm, pull themselves together, and look at what some of their reactionary patterns are and then start thinking about how they can create more soothing and more calmness in their relationship with the child.
How do parents calm themselves down when their child is throwing things and acting up?
The first step is to just sit down and take a deep breath. And shut the hell up.
Wow! I got it.
It is that simple, Rhonda. Shut. The. Hell. Up! Sit down! Stop being so scared and so overwhelmed. Don’t worry about that kid in the moment. Just calm the hell down. You know, it is not that difficult but we make it so hard. We make it so hard. We want to get all technical, theoretical, and psychological. It is just not that serious.
Once parents have calmed themselves down, how do they then discipline the child? It can be so easy to turn the volume back up. I remember my African American godmother, Myrtle, at times looked at me with that eye when I was beginning to get out of control. Part of that had to do with the cultural differences of how she was raised to parent, compared to how I was allowed to act freely or wild within my adoptive family. Myrtle intuitively was able to discipline me effectively, but there were a few times when she would get upset with me and give me that look. If I still acted up (which did not happen often) she would make a gesture, like she was going to take off her shoe and throw it in my direction. It definitely put a fear in me to stop my nonsense immediately. What would be a better approach?
You have to rule by modeling, teaching, and discipline. And discipline means to be an effective disciple. So you have to discipline from a heart and a spirit of love as opposed to one of fear. You can’t just threaten, hit, yell, and scream and expect the kid to do anything different. Kids don’t understand anything different. With your example, once your godmother calmed down she could have said, “Rhonda! Come over here and sit down.” She doesn’t have to be in a good mood to say it. And as she was getting herself calm, she could have said, “Girl, what is wrong with you? What is going on?” Then it is not coming from a sphere of trying to shame you. I don’t believe that parents need to be fake. I believe in parents being just as real as they possibly can. If you are upset, you’re upset. When I say, “Calm down,” really what I am talking about is the brain. When you are stressed, your thinking becomes confused and distorted, and your short-term memory is suppressed. When I talk about calm[ing] down, I am just talking about getting to a place where you can think clearly without being completely overwhelmed and therefore completely overwhelming your child. It is that simple. Then you can be in a place where it all comes back to teaching. That’s when you can teach your child what she can do differently. You can tell your child to stop doing something, but then you can tell them how to stop doing it or how to do it in a more effective way.
Bryan, I would describe myself as hyperresponsible. I have always had a lot of responsibility, even when I was a child. And so anytime anything happened in my family growing up, where there was a huge forced transition, all of a sudden my breathing increased drastically into short breaths, and my anxiety took over. I always felt that I had to fix the problem to survive. So after the parent has calmed themselves down, how do they then help the child to start breathing in a normal, calm way?
Here is the magic of our neurophysiologic communication processes: The moment the parent starts calming down, they then start communicating and sending the vibrations to begin calming down the child.
Tell me more about the neurophysiologic process.
Just the process is interesting. It’s called a neurophysiologic feedback group. It’s basically made up of these energetic feedback groups that get created by these vibration loops. And it is really the communication of each person’s amygdala. It is your alarm system in your brain. It is where stress originates. When a child is agitated and escalated, they are sending off a stressful signal, which alarms the parent’s brain to start to react in kind. The parent has to be able to calm their brain down to send a countersignal back to the child that doesn’t amplify the child’s stress response. Here is the counterdynamic. I should be writing this out on a diagram. But the counterdynamic is the very process of the parent calming themselves down and therefore activating a hormone within their brain called oxytocin. Oxytocin is the brain’s antistress hormone. It is also called the hormone that makes love and relationship possible. So when the parent is calming themselves down, actually what they are doing is turning on their oxytocin response. While they are turning on their oxytocin response, they start to trigger the oxytocin response of their child. And when that oxytocin response has occurred in their child, the child cannot continue to escalate. It is physiologically impossible that a child escalate in the presence of a calming parent. A child can only escalate in the presence of an escalating parent. It is so simple, Rhonda, but it is so not easy because the exchange at the growing base level is literally painful. The reason being: the moment the child escalates and amplifies, it jacks the parent’s brain up. And depending on what happens, what that parent brings to the table, what their experiences have been, what their parenting interactions have been, and what their blueprints were like, that is what is going to drive their own reaction. When that child’s brain gets amplified, it amplifies the parent’s brain and from there it is kind of on. For me, if my brain was jacked and my daddy’s brain got jacked, then the next thing that is going to happen is that I am going to get yelled at or I am going to get whipped. And there is not a lot of variedness in response. However, for my own children, if their brain gets jacked and my brain starts to get jacked, I have learned to teach myself to calm myself down a little bit and turn my oxytocin response down a little bit to be able to step away from the environment, to be able to create less stimulation for myself in that moment, so I might have to move my kid away from me to create some more soothing for myself. And then actually through that process, I can start calming the child’s brain down. I am no longer escalating their brain. And then I can go back to my kid and say, “Look, we can do better than this. I don’t know what is going on right here, but we need to work through this situation.”
That makes sense but it is heavy. I can visualize what you are saying. I can clearly see why you focus on the education piece with the families you work with, because it is so easy in the heat of the moment for our brains to turn off and behaviors get escalated.
There you go. It escalates on both sides of the relationship. The parent’s behavior escalation doesn’t look like the child’s behavioral escalation because the child is not well equipped to suppress their energy the way a parent does. But that vibration that kid is sending off is huge. That’s why your godmother could give you the evil eye, and it felt like you had been whipped.
True. It was all in her eyes and in the strong vibrations she sent my way.
Oh, yes, she could feel your vibration and tell your brain, “Girl, you better back up!”
Let’s talk about bonding. Why do some children not bond with their parents, even if the child has been adopted into a family as an infant?
Think about it as attachment and bonding. Attachment is the behavior of the child to the parent. Bonding is the behavior of the parent to the child. It is a two-way street. Children have a difficult time attaching when they come from perennial environments that say attachment and connection are not safe; attachment and connection lead to pain; attachment and connection breed insecurity and anxiety. And they have all of these experiences in their brain that tell them that the first human connection that they had was not good. Essentially their brain is automatically wired to have a fear reaction in the midst of an addiction of attachment. We have that. Then we have the parents. This is what I realized early in my career. Nobody was talking about it. You have parents who bring their own history to the table. The moment that child is crying, it is dropping that parent right back into the mix of what that parent experienced as a child. For that parent their window of tolerance of how much stress they can handle starts to wear out. Pretty soon they are not thinking of their physiological environment or bonding with their child. They are not creating or providing a physiological environment for the child to attach to. I used to say in my lectures: “Kids don’t want ugly parents. Kids want pretty parents.” What I meant by that is kids want parents who are emotionally attractive: Parents who are fun, parents who are loving, and parents who are understanding. That’s what kids are attracted to. They don’t like a parent who is negative, mean, and always critical. There are not opportunities for secure attachment to happen in those situations.
And so does that emotional reality carry into adulthood for a child who has struggled with attachment issues with their guardians, and, if so, how does that look in adult relationships?
Absolutely. It looks no different than it did in childhood. It looks exactly the same. I remember interviewing Marti Glenn, who is the founder of the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute in California and a longtime prenatal and perinatal professional. And I asked him, “Marti, how do attachment challenges and disruptions show up in adulthood?” He told me, “Bryan, they show up the same way they did in childhood.” People are afraid of relationships. They are afraid of vulnerability. They are afraid of intimacy. They are afraid of rejection. They are afraid of abandonment. They get anxiety around all of those issues. They get fearful, and when they get fearful they can’t communicate, and they act out in an attempt to soothe themselves. I would not be surprised if adoptees disproportionately experienced divorces, acted out, and suffered with sexual dysfunction and substance abuse more than those who are not adopted. I think, all around, adoptees have more challenges. In general I think that adoptees are doing the best that they can based on what they have experienced throughout their lives.
Sadly I would argue that for most adult transracial adoptees who are struggling in the areas of trauma, stress, and anxiety, they most likely do not know where to access strategic help from someone who also understands the deep-rooted complexities of their life experiences because of adoption and transracial adoption.
No, they don’t have a clue because they have not been educated. Their parents have not been educated. Professionals aren’t educated. Yes, there are some professionals that are doing some great work like yourself, but when you are no longer a child, when you are an adult, there are not many places to turn to. To be honest with you, some of the places that are out there for adult adoptees to turn to, Rhonda, they are some nasty places. There are some online “resources” even offered by adult adoptees who have had bad experiences and do nothing to offer support and consolation and understanding. It’s like they are feeding the negativity. I know because I have gone on a few of these sites. I used to run into that same thing in my work with children diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder. It’s like where there was a child diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder, you would find ten parents who would gather and say nasty, negative things about that child. There is no healing in that. You cannot get better in that dynamic. And I have had to stop having interactions with these kinds of people on the Internet.
I think for adult adoptees who especially have not dealt with their issues—if for no other reason than we weren’t taught how to do it—we can get so desperate that we will reach out for anything or anyone that will promise us relief, even if it is not healthy. Many of us are walking wounded. How do we as adult adoptees learn to pause, discern, and make better decisions for ourselves?
The first step in that is to realize that what they may be struggling with and the challenges of their struggle are directly related to them being adopted.
That is a hard realization to arrive to. Many of us are taught adoption is love. So often we don’t get the other side of the story. Even in my upbringing, my family and I did not talk about the loss that also comes with an adoption. To my parents’ credit they were not taught that piece. Any learning they did was by trial by fire. It certainly did not come from a social worker or a mental health professional.
Absolutely. The child, now an adult, can give themselves permission to say, “Wow! Maybe this adoption is not the rosiest thing in the world.” I think for the adoptee it is important to do a little investigation about what their life was like before they were adopted and then for them to honor those experiences. To me, Rhonda, I believe that there are really some very core challenges the adult adoptee struggles with. And I believe at the basis of those are rejection and abandonment anxieties. I think so many of our struggles are rooted in that—that need for approval and to be good enough. And we try to be good enough to prevent feelings of rejection and anxiety from happening. But it is happening again because it is like we are stuck in a perpetual cycle of trying to be accepted. We are stuck in a perpetual cycle of trying to be okay. We are trying to be good enough to bring healing to a wounded person in us. I just believe within me that that is the crux of the challenges we adoptees face.
And in that mix we must rise. So how do you build a healthy self-esteem with all of the inherent challenges that we are talking about?
What you are talking about, Rhonda, is a lifelong process. Building one’s self-esteem is not something that occurs in a three-day intensive workshop. What happens is that you begin the process of self-understanding. You move from the process of self-understanding to the process of self-processing. So now that you are at the point of seeking to understand yourself, you begin to process the challenges, the pains, and the feelings within you. And then you move into a place of self-acceptance. You cycle between those three stages all of the time. Really, that is the process of growth. As adult adoptees we have to understand that we have a fiber moving inside of us that needs attention, honoring, mindfulness, and sensitivity. When I say sensitivity, I mean that there are some kids born with autism. Some kids are born with spina bifida. And many were adopted. In my opinion the undercurrent of challenges that an adoptee faces can be viewed in a way like a disability. You have to grow up with it. You have to learn how to adapt to it without allowing it to take over your life like some negative baggage. Instead it is not baggage at all. The emotions that each person faces because of their adoption and the underlining realities make each one of us unique and special. It is what sets us up to do great things. There are quite a few remarkable people who have been adopted. Some of the richest people in the world have been adopted. He has passed on now, but Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was adopted. Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas was adopted. Former president Bill Clinton was adopted. The list goes on—their woundedness, depending on who they were and what they experienced early in their lives, led them to accomplish great things.
Okay, so now that the adoptee is practicing the three steps toward a healthy self-esteem: self-understanding, self-processing, and self-acceptance, how does the adoptee continue their growth if they are operating within a family system that suppresses it?
You know what? We cannot be held hostage by any institution, by any person, or any culture. If we choose to do that, then we have embraced a victim’s mentality. We have to be committed to our own growth. And assuming the more love that we can generate within ourselves, the more other people are going to be okay. They are going to be okay however they’re going to be okay. You are not responsible for how other people feel. You just have to do the best that you can.
For some adoptees there is the fear of the “what if”: What if I take control of my own growth and my parents feel uncomfortable? Bryan, for many they have already been abandoned at least once and then to rock the boat as it relates to our adoptive families is a huge risk. I have spoken with adult adoptees who have said to me that if they go against the grain in their families, or don’t show that they are grateful enough, they fear that they may be kicked out of the family, will or not be viewed as a full-class citizen within their family tree—
If getting kicked out of the family or not receiving any trust fund money is directly connected to you getting better and being okay and being a whole person, then that is a family that you didn’t need to be in anyway. That family has done their job. And that is money that you don’t need anyway. That is dirty money.
Good point. We as adoptees deserve to be whole people and thrive! Anything less, I am learning, is not acceptable. In your book From Fear to Love you talk about two major emotions that all behavior falls under, which is fear or love.
That’s it.
Let’s say I am arguing with my spouse and filled with anxiety, ready to walk away—that reaction comes from a place of fear?
Yes. That is it. Again, it is very simple. People might want to call it “up high in the sky.” But the truth is, love is patient, love is kind. There is always trust, there is always hope, and there is always truth; outside of that is fear. It is as simple as that. The best we can do is try to be the most loving somebody that we can be in any given moment. And when we are not in a loving place, the best that we can do is try to get back to it just as soon as we can.
I love that. Yes.
Nobody is perfect, Rhonda. We are all doing the best that we can. People have to understand that about one another. Parents need to understand that about their children. In those moments of strife and struggle, that child, just like that parent, is doing the best that they can. If they could do something different, for the better, they would. They are not equipped. They don’t have the understanding. They don’t have the knowledge. It is not there. If it was there, they would be doing something different.
What is your best guess why some potential parents make the decision to adopt a child of color without gaining education and understanding of the child’s racial and ethnic background or history?
You don’t know what you don’t know. If the professionals don’t know, we sure can’t expect the very parent who has love in their heart and desire in their heart to be a parent and to create a loving place in their home for a child to know.
Bryan, how did you change your course as a social worker and therapist focusing on children and families from a traditional model of behavior analysis to where you are now?
I changed my course through constant questioning, first and foremost. I questioned all of the sacred cows and I asked myself, “What makes that true?” I questioned it and questioned it until I came to an internal understanding of why that was true or why it was bullshit. If it was bullshit, I came up with a new answer, a new understanding. My knowledge and my experiences stand on the shoulders of a lot of great people before me who have done a lot of amazing research. Rhonda, you are one of them. Before you came along, Rhonda, I don’t think that I gave five seconds of thought to transracial adoption. I grew up in a transracial environment. I was one of very few black kids in a predominately white town. My family was black, but we were the only black family in the whole town of white people. Your work is very useful to me.
Thank you. That means a lot to me.
What legacy do you want to leave your children?
At its core I want to leave to my children that it is okay to be happy. It is okay to be the most loving person that you can possibly be. And it is okay to take responsibility for your life. As my kids lie back and think about me, my ultimate example is for them to say, “Dad may not have been a lot of things, but Dad is all about showing us that it is okay to be happy. Dad is all about showing us the importance of taking responsibility [for] our life and showing us the importance of being loving people.” Rhonda, if I can do that for my kids, to me that will encompass everything.
I know you mentioned to me that your adoptive father passed away eight years ago. What would you want to tell him about who you are as a person if he was here today?
I would like to tell my dad that I am proud of who I am. I am proud of what I have learned. I am proud of the lessons he taught me. I don’t have any regrets.
Thank you, Bryan. I really enjoyed talking with you and learned a lot in this conversation!