I used to think I was broken and defective. It stemmed from me buying into the belief that I couldn’t fit in and never belonged, always searching for home because I was adopted at birth.
My parents wanted a baby girl so much—they ordered me special delivery. As family lore had it, the lawyer walked with me from St. John’s Hospital to the nearby Temple in Tulsa, Oklahoma for my naming.
He placed me in my mother’s arms as Dad stood next to her proudly. My two brothers, ten and eleven years older than me were elated about their new sister. I was a completion to the family. None of them saw me as different, though at times I wished they acknowledged that I was.
“More than anything, I wanted a little girl,” my mother told me. “I wanted you so much. It wasn’t because I couldn’t give birth, because I could. I wanted to adopt. More than anything in the world I wanted someone special as a child – extra special.”
She always told me this, even though at times, as I grew up, I kept her at a distance. She sometimes didn’t know what to do with my emotions. I expressed myself so differently.
Mom said I wasn’t like my brothers, who she understood innately. Marty and Russ came from my mother. She intuited what they needed before they used words. But she said she never knew how to help me. Instead, she threw her hands up into the air.
I had the same coloring as my father and brothers, dark hair, dark eyes and prominent noses. It always surprised those who knew our family when I blurted out that I was adopted. Mom would be embarrassed at my need to acknowledge this. I felt like an outsider at times and publicly struggled from not knowing where I came from.
When I was growing up, my family treated me as if I wasn’t adopted, but still my inner-beliefs found a way to make me believe I was separate.
My adoption wasn’t kept a secret. I was told as early as I could remember. But I carried the story for many years that I’d always be abandoned rather than loved and accepted.
Even though I was given the most amazing family who loved me beyond belief, I kept holding onto the story that I was abandoned all the way into adulthood. This story unconsciously formed how I viewed my relationships with men.
When I felt rejected by a man, my reactions were larger than necessary. Based on this false story, I thought it meant something about me, that I wasn’t good enough, loveable or worthy. In fact, the story I carried caused me to choose relationships with unavailable men just to perpetuate my feelings about myself.
It took me decades, lots of therapy and many unfortunate, painful break-ups to stop reacting from this early wound to realize the story wasn’t true. It was a lie my inner-beliefs were telling me.
When I learned to identify and then drop the story attached to my deep feeling of abandonment, I slowly stopped buying into all the negative thoughts of what it meant about me as an adoptee. It was uncanny how much it ran me without me even realizing it.
So, I’m curious. Is there a lie from your past destroying your present? Are you carrying a story that if identified and dropped your suffering could vanish?
It’s wild how beliefs we picked up from childhood can secretly control us without us knowing it from deep within our unconscious.
Once you see it and know it, you will be set free!!!
Wishing you freedom from all suffering!
