Storytelling as Healing: Dr. Liz DeBetta on Adoption, Trauma & Finding Wholeness

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1:03We live fragmented. We live divided. But we were designed. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Hoh. Because leadership without wholeness fractures under pressure. The CJ money waste show.

2:06How you doing, Doc? I'm doing great. How are you? I'm doing good. So, Doc, let's jump into this for a second. Identity and origins. Let's start with your story as an adoptee and creative. How has this changed your journey? How has your journey been and reclaiming your voice? Well, my whole journey has been about reclaiming my voice. As an adopted person, I spent the first 40 years of my life not having any in real information about my origins, about the family that I came from or what my ethnicity was or who my biological relatives were. And so, for just about the first almost four decades of my life, I didn't really have a deep sense of connection to myself. And so, a big part of my journey has been about reclaiming my identity through the act of storytelling,

3:06being able to figure out what my story was and to be able to tell it on. And one of the ways that I did that when I went back to school in 2016 was to finish my master's degree after a really big break in my education because of a lot of life. It was suggested to me that I take a class in autobiographical writing. And I had been writing my whole life and I had done a ton of academic writing, but I had never taken a formal creative writing class. And I thought, okay, that sounds interesting. I'll take that class and I didn't need to take that class. I just needed to finish my two independent study credits, but it sounded like a good idea. Well, it was a good idea because what that class did for me was it invited me to think about my story. It invited me for the first time. My professor suggested that I write about being adopted after I had this little bit of a breakdown in class one night because I was listening to a classmate tell, read her story about growing up with her sister and how much they looked like twins

4:08and how everybody mistook them for twins and all the similarities that they had. And I just sat there crying. It hit me that I had no idea who I looked like. I had no idea if I had siblings out in the world. I had no idea who my first mother was or she thought about me or if she was still alive, even, you know, and it struck a nerve. And my professor said, you know, what's going on? And I said, well, I'm adopted. I have no idea who I look like. And it's amazing to me. I'm so fascinated when I hear about people's stories of their similarities with siblings or parents or other relatives. And even like when I see people, I'm always like, oh my God, I can totally see that's a mother and a son or, you know, a brother and a sister. But I don't have that experience. And she said, well, why don't you write about that? And they said, what being adopted? And she said, yeah, why don't you write about that?

5:08And I said, well, I don't know anything. What am I going to write about? And she said, well, just think about it. And I said, okay, I'll think about it. And I ended up really struggling through the process of writing that story because for the first couple of attempts at drafts, I was telling the story that I had been handed my whole life in sort of adoption, culture. We all kind of know the terminology of entrance narrative. And it's the story that adopts us are told about why they were adopted, what their place in the family is, often it's connected to why, what the parent's story is. And for me, that was very true. Like it was this story about my parents' infertility and how they always wanted to have kids and they knew they would adopt. And so when I first started to try to tell my story, I was telling their story. And my professor kept saying, you know, that's not your story. You've got to tell your story.

6:08And it took me a while to figure it out, but the act of struggling through telling my story for the first time was really powerful and transformative for me because it taught me that I did have the story to tell. It mattered and that it was a story that other people needed to hear as well. And so a couple of years later, as I continued on into my PhD work, I got really invested in the idea of storytelling and identity because I needed to know who I was and sort of concurrently at the same time I was able to get a copy of my original birth certificate, which then cracked open a whole lot of things because then I knew who my first mother was and I, for the first time, started to feel like a real person that I had come from somewhere that I didn't just show up one day. So let me ask you, Doc, you know, I'll listen to your story. First, how old were you when you found out that you were adopted? I don't remember not knowing.

7:09I have known since I was very small. It was not a secret, which is a good thing. There's been research done in subsequent years that tells us that it's important to tell children very early on that they are adopted so that they can integrate that into their identities and it's not a surprise or a secret later in life and disruptive in terms of the developmental stages. So I always knew the problem was that it was closed adoption which is true for many people and closed adoption is when you don't have any access to records and many states still have closed adoption practices which seals the records. It amends people's birth certificates and makes it look as if the adoptive parents are the actual parents. And then there is no ability to access any health history or records about biological origins which is the thing that really leads to a disconnected and disjointed sense of identity for adopted people.

8:10Certainly that's true in my case and it is very true for all the people that it work with now. And that I know as friends and people in the adoption community. So let me ask you, Doc. You say that you found out who your adopted mother was and it cracked open the whole lot of stuff. Have you met your, by I was a cook mother? Yeah, so funny. Another interesting twisty turn of the universe. I got the copy of my original birth certificate on my 40th birthday. And so that was the like happy birthday from the university or should birth certificate. And it had her name on it, her name is Mary. And I was able to pretty quickly after getting that information be able to find her because of the internet and Facebook and all of those tools that we now have that I didn't have 20 years prior when I first started to think about looking for her. So this was in 2017, the beginning of 2017. And it took me a couple of weeks to figure out

9:12what I was going to say to her and send her a message. And then I waited and waited to see if she would get back to me. And I sent her a message on Facebook and I also wrote the same message in a handwritten note and put it in the mail in the event that she didn't check her Facebook messages, but she did write back to me. And she said, I've been waiting for this day for 40 years. And I'm so glad you reached out to me. And so we've been in reunion now since 2017. And it's a slowly progressing relationship, but it's a good one. She's, we have a lot of things, a lot of similar personality traits and a lot of similar thought processes. So we have an easy time talking with one another, which is really nice. Yeah, that's cool. That's cool. Well, sometimes I guess in life, about you being a doctor and going to get your PhD, I know the story, like you say, didn't have an identity and everything. Sometimes something's happened for a reason, I guess.

10:13Because we'll say that we'll be talking to Dr. Liz, the better right now, you know, things with the other way. So I'm pretty sure your mother squared it out because there are things that sometimes we don't know about why somebody did something or why this happened. I want to get it to that way. Like you said, life gets in the way of certain things. And unless you're in the fight, you know, sometimes even as kids, you know, when you've grown up in a household with your parents, and you know, parents can be going through something like financially or whatever. But sometimes the kids sheltered from that. And they don't even know what a mother or father get a divorce. And sometimes you take sides, but you really don't know the full story or the full backdrop of, you know, saying what actually happened. So I'm glad you and your mother, you know, amending that relationship. So let me ask you, Doc, what inspired the name of menagerating tourist holdness and how does that concept reflect your own life? Yeah, that's a such a good question.

11:14So migrating toward holdness really is a reflection of my journey. What it's about is this journey toward a sense of greater sense of wholeness and completeness that I have been on for my whole life, but really definitely for the last 10 years since that first experience of writing about my story as an adopted person and starting to piece together of coherent narrative. So the concept of migrating toward holdness is about finding a greater sense of self by being able to break silences around things that, you know, I didn't, wasn't able to talk about for a lot of years. You know, like I said, I always knew that I was adopted, but at some point in my, you know, or, you know, not my like middle school years, sometime between the age of probably like 10 or 12, we just kind of stopped talking about it. And then it became a thing I couldn't talk about. And so when I was in grad school,

12:15working toward my PhD, I took a classical poetry and healing. And I learned that there was this whole field of therapeutic writing that you could use poetry and expressive writing as tools to heal trauma. And I was like, this is so interesting. And also this is the thing that I've been doing my whole life without knowing that I was helping myself. And so that exploration led me to writing and performing my award-winning solo show on Mother which was originally part of my dissertation work. And that was the first iteration I will say of this concept of migrating toward wholeness because that was me making myself the subject of the research and taking this idea of how, how can I use, how can we, as adopted people, use poetry and expressive writing to tell truthful personal stories that help us to create a coherent storyline and process

13:17and heal some of the embodied trauma because trauma lives in the body. And when we don't do something with it, when we don't give it an expression that is outside of ourselves, we can get sick. And that's physical ailments and physical illnesses as well as significant mental health struggles, which is another part of my experience. Having lived with a significant amount of anxiety that went undiagnosed that was related to my unprocessed trauma. And so being able to write and perform my story and figure out how to use that to migrate toward wholeness for myself then developed into what became the original pilot program for migrating toward wholeness which was run in collaboration with the right adoption research program in 2021. And then they reached out to me and they were like, we're really interested in this writing and healing stuff that you're doing and we want, we want you to do something for us. And it was during COVID and it was on, you know, an online experience. And I said, well, what if I start a writing group

14:19with another group of adulta.ds and do this work and figure out what it is? And that was a really transformative experience both for me and the group. It helped me figure out and then name migrating toward wholeness. It was the thing I had been doing that had not had a name yet and then it became the migrating toward wholeness process which then developed into the five part process wheel and as it is connected to the seven parts of trauma healing as I define them. And that framework is the foundation of some really powerful and transformational healing work that I get to do now with other adoptees because I am done in myself first. Let me ask you, I didn't have this on the list, but I'm listening to you. So at what point in your life did you decide, you know, I wanted to be a doctor first and did, you know, the thing like as you're talking about the trauma and the things that you was going through is that something that pushed you towards that avenue,

15:20you know, saying to find a deeper and a personal self, you know, and try to heal from what you were dealing with. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to say a couple things about this. The first is that school has always been my coping mechanism. I have always been a really good student. I have always been really interested in learning in school. So I secretly always thought, oh, maybe I would like to get a PhD, but I never really considered it. I never really thought that I would do it. Until I left New York in 2016, my partner and I moved to Utah and I returned to teaching. I had begun my career as a high school teacher in New York City many years before and then did a lot of other things in between. And then we moved to Utah and I returned to teaching in higher ed and I realized I loved teaching

16:21and I wanted to keep doing it. And I thought, well, if I want to stay in higher ed it might be a good idea for me to get my PhD. And I came home a night and I sent to my partner. I think I want to get a PhD and he was like, yeah, go for it. And I started that degree at 40. I did not have a traditional path by any means. And I think that in part due to the many disruptions in my life and the many times that I made decisions that maybe were not the best for me. And so when I made the decision to get my PhD, it was really at the same time that I was also starting to figure out the pieces of my story as an adopted person and trying to start to figure out who I hadn't yet met my first mom but then a couple of months after I started about, you know, in the middle of the first year of my PhD work is when I met her.

17:23And when I started the program, I had already started on my own journey of reading all of the research about the psychology of adoption and all the books that had been suggested that I had never thought I needed to read. So things like the primal wound and journey of the adopted self and being adopted the lifelong search for self. Like these are all these books that were written in the 80s and 90s that had never really been on my radar because I thought I was fine. Like I thought I didn't have any problems until I realized, you know, right before I finished the last two credits of my master's degree, which I talked about a little while ago, I had to hit a point in my life where I felt stuck. And so for me, school was always the way to like do something, move forward. So it made sense to me that school, again, was gonna be the next thing

18:23to help me get to whatever was next in my life. And then when I ended up unfolding there was that while I was studying, it became really clear to me that becoming a resource in any healing resource in the adoption community was the path that I needed to be on. And that's what ended up happening because then it took me through this whole amazing journey of writing and performing my one woman show, piloting the migrating toward wholeness group, developing that program and that process and now building, you know, building my business and the rest of my career out of it. Yeah, I like that. Got a lot going on. Got a lot going on with that. So let me actually talk about the books and everything. So let's get into your own book, writing as healing as you've been explaining to us, your book, adult adoptee and writing to heal this deeply personal and academic. How does creative writing unlock healing

19:25for others, especially adoptees? Yeah, thank you. That's such a good question. So creative, right? I mean, really any creative pursuit is integral in healing trauma because creativity helps us to create a container for the trauma. And so specifically writing is a really great tool for helping people who've experienced trauma heal from things because it allows us to attach language for adoptees, it's particularly powerful because our trauma is pre-verbal. So it's a trauma that happens before we have words to explain it because it happens when we're separated from our mothers or shortly after birth or in the case of kids who are removed from families in the first, you know, one to three years of their life. It's the same kind of maternal separation disruption and we don't have language, enough language at the time

20:28to attach words to the experience. And so what ends up happening is our nervous systems take in that information and our brains get rewired. And then we spend a lifetime in the state of hyper arousal, constantly like on high alert for any kind of danger, any kind of thing that makes us feel the same way as that original separation did. But we don't have words for it. And so that translates into a lot of anxiety. For me, it was translated into a lot of nightmares, recurring nightmares for the first like 35 plus years of my life. And I don't sleep very well. Adopted people don't sleep very well. It's because we're always on the lookout for danger. And so creative writing, particularly the process that I've developed with migrating toward wholeness, is a really powerful tool because it allows adoptees to begin to put language to those pre-verbal experiences and to articulate them in truthful ways

21:30in order to create a deeper understanding of the internal experience that they're having of themselves, that we're having of ourselves, and then be able to talk about it more with other people. And so we use a couple different types of writing. Poetry is a really great container because of the emotional availability of the language. Poems become really good emotional containers for things that can feel really overwhelming. Part of my process of writing and performing on mother, I went to back through a lot of my original poetry from when I was a teenager in my 20s. And I used a lot of that as the narrative blue or the emotional blue of the narrative. And then I also wrote a series of new poems to fill in parts of my experience, to speak to things that I needed to name out loud. And so the poems become the containers for really big overwhelming emotions. They help us to make sense of them. And also to attach language and imagery

22:32to what are previously really difficult things to talk about. It gives us a way to talk about them. And just the act of expressive writing is about breaking silences and many adopted people and many people who have histories of trauma are basically conditioned to be silent about their experiences because people don't like to talk about uncomfortable things. People don't like to hear about trauma. But if we don't break those silences and we don't give those experiences expression, as I said, they can make us sick. And so the creative writing is a way to literally take the things that you've been holding in your body and that maybe have been like spinning around in your brain and put them on paper and give them a place to live outside of yourself. The maps app that came with your phone? It's fine. If you enjoy waiting and guessing and inefficient routes or you could use MapQuest. MapQuest is back with live directions, real-time traffic, and faster routes. It moves when you move.

23:33Best of all, no prints are needed, no paper, no more misterns, just you and the app. Get there fast with MapQuest. Download the MapQuest app on the app store or visit mapquest.com. MapQuest, still getting you there. Hey, I'm Josh Speagle, host of the podcast, Luna Tick in the Newsroom. If you enjoy journalism that drifts into mild panic, wild overthinking and a guaranteed nervous breakdown, Luna Tick in the Newsroom is for you. It's news like you've never heard before. The only newsroom with a panic button. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and gasp and horror as the show spirals completely out of control. It's not just news, it's emotionally unstable. Luna Tick in the Newsroom, listen today. So that you can then objectively reread it and look at what it's telling you and start to learn about yourself and the parts of yourself that still need care and attention. And be able to do that work for yourselves.

24:34Check out the movement. Family real quick. Lean in. If you're listening to this right now, then you already know the money weighing just the podcast. It's a movement. So make sure you tap into everything we've built in. Yeah, it's a money way moving music. New tracks dropping every week. Insta CJ moneyway show. Global range. Purpose driven voices. Moneyway mindset. Daily inspiration. Real talk. No fluff. You can find it all right now. Instagram, YouTube, and everywhere you stream. Just search out some moneyway. That's what purpose lives. That's what the next level starts. And that's what we leveling up. Together. Now let's get back to the show. You know, uh, before I get to your unmothered, I'm glad you clarified that to me because I think I said,

25:36um, and other color. You got the dashes in that side. Okay. I didn't know what it was. Let me ask you a question, Doc. I was just talking to my wife. Prior before me and you got on the call and, you know, we were talking about kids. And I was telling her like when a baby, when you're a baby and, you know, you're the mother and, uh, you know, father and the baby is trusting you. You know, they're trusting you. You know, you spend in that time. What they looking at you. You feed them. You change. And they diapers and things of that nature. That's that building trust within the parent. What a child deals that trust, you know, and that, you know, I love you. I, I, I, I, I joked with my mother, my wife all the time. Love you, my, my, my God. We got a 14 year old service. I bet it's what I like that all the time. But so what I'm asking is help me clarify this. When you go through something, the trauma, like, you know, ordeal as you and some of the others has been through. The trust issue, the trust factor. Is it hard to trust people? You don't say even in relationships, friends, things of that nature.

26:38How to trust factor with dealing with something like that? Uh, it's incredibly difficult to trust. I mean, that's been one of the biggest parts of my journey. Was learning to be able to trust people, to trust myself. Because when you have that early attachment disruption, right? When you are detached from the only safe place you ever knew, which is the mother who gave birth to you, right? And you're put in a new environment where things smell different, things sound different, things feel different. And you're not with the person you're supposed to be with. And you're somewhere else. And so again, that nervous system gets into a lifelong trauma response of like, I'm not safe. These people aren't safe. No, but nothing is safe, right? And so that's where the inability to trust comes in. It's because there's this preverbal felt sense that it's not safe to trust.

27:40It's not safe to attach to people. Because if I do, they might leave me again, right? And so for me, in my experience, and what ended up kicking off all the things that I have been able to develop as my work and my purpose in the world, I realized that I had this really bad pattern of unhealthy relationships with people, like, and for years. And I realized that if I didn't figure out why I was doing that, I was never going to move forward in my life. I was never going to get better. And it was because I didn't trust myself, right? So I was listening to all of the external messages that I was getting about who I should be, what I should do, what decisions and choices I should make because I didn't feel safe enough in myself to make my own choices and my own decisions. And I also didn't trust other people, you know?

28:42And so it takes a lot of work to undo those patterns, but you have to see them first. And a lot of adopted people have a lot of trouble with intimacy and relationships because it's really hard to trust. It's really hard to trust that this person is going to stay around, right? And it's also like, it leapt up in that our feelings of self-worth, right? Because like, whether it's true or not, the implicit message is that the person who is supposed to love and care for us the most our mothers have given us away. And so there must be something wrong with us, there must be something that makes us not worthy of being kept. And so that becomes a pattern for the rest of life until you break it. You know, I asked you that because, you know, as you was talking about the adoptees and we were talking about trust, you know, because of something like absentee parent as well, you know, as far as maybe the father wasn't around. And like we said before, sometimes we don't know the things that, you know,

29:44that transpired between mother and father and why the situation happened the way that it did. And so earlier you said that during your mother since 2017 have been trying to build a relationship and trying to talk and not ask that because I know that because as we talked about not too long ago, the early parts of your life, the baby stage where I get to trust. And although, you know, I might have met my father, I'm just hypothetically speaking. I might have met my father when I was 30 or 40. And, you know, I want to have a relationship with him but that trust factor, you know, said because he wasn't there, you know, when I was coming up and was a kid. You know what I'm saying? I want to know who my father is. I want to know who my mother is. But I know that it's that, but what we call it, it's a wedge there. You know, because internally, you know, that you still feel, as you were saying earlier, your self-worth and, you know, why did they give me away or why did this have,

30:44you know, still internally, still feel some type of weight, you know what I'm saying? Like, I'm on it here, you out. And things of that nature, why this happened? But I would take it and I'm just asking you, you know, because you've experienced it. I would take it that I hear what you saying, and you know, it might take me a while to get over what you're saying because for years, I have held this inside of me. And this is what I've become, you know, as they say, we may forget something, but we won't forget, you know what I'm saying? It's like, yeah, but I can't forget all the trauma that I've been through my whole life, you know? Yeah, and trauma's one of those things that like, it's not a one-size-fits-all experience. And it can show up in lots of different ways over time and across a lifespan. And like I said, it shows up in patterns and it shows up in choices and it shows up in like physical manifestations. Like, I used to get really, really bad headaches also because of all this unresolved stuff

31:46that was just my body kept recycling and that's also where the nightmares came from. And any kind of disruption of a parental or caregiver relationship is damaging to people. And it's not like the trauma Olympics, right? Like, we're not like, my trauma's not better than yours, right? But we all have to like recognize that we're all holding some kind of trauma because of these disruptions in connections. And for me, when I met my first mom and she told me her story, I had a lot of empathy because partly I had always had the sense that I just always knew that if I reached out to her, if I was ever able to find her, I just knew that she would want to know me, that she would want that. And that's what ended up being true with that when I reached out to her and I contacted her and she said, oh, my God, I've been waiting for this for 40 years. And I want to tell you everything. And then when she started telling me her story

32:47and I understood that she actually had very little choice, you know? And like a choice made in the absence of choices, not a choice. She did not have the option to keep me. And she said, I wanted to keep you. I did not want to do this. I could not make a different decision because I had no support. Her family would not support her. She had started dating somebody else and the person that she was dating and then eventually married refused to raise another man's child. And so then there's all these sort of cultural statements around all of this that get, you know, layered into this experience. And so I can say that, you know, meeting her at 40, I think was a good thing because I had already developed enough of a sense of self and was already on this healing journey that I could hold a lot of space that I had had enough of my own life experience

33:48to be able to sit in community with her and really, you know, as a woman, understand what she had been through. And understand that as a person who had also been through an abusive marriage and then like recognizing like how many our life patterns were so similar, even though she did not raise me was a really interesting thing too. And so it helps. It has helped me to reconcile that part, you know, that untrue messaging around that I wasn't wanted because she told me that I was. That's what you needed to hear at that time. Like you say, you had already matured, you was already on your, on your journey. And you know, and it's something that you said and I thought about it. I think it's something that we talked about earlier. A lot of times we don't know the situation. You know, like you said, she didn't want to but she had no other choice.

34:50You know, family didn't want to support her. The man that she wind up marrying did want to raise another man's child. You know, so these are things that until you talk to her and found this out, these are things for 40 years that you always wondered about, you know, said, because we have all kinds of things running through our minds, this and that. And then when you got the clarification of how your mother really felt, you know, like you said, it ease some things where I had empathy for her. And now, you know, it can get that stumbling block out the way. Now we can try to build upon this and you know, say and move for it. So I mean, I wish you guys the best of luck in your reconciliation. So let me ask you, Doc, in your one-women show and mother, you tackle a lot of issues as far as adoption and things of that nature. Why was the performance the right medium for that message? Yeah. I began, you know, my first degree is in theater and I worked as an actor

35:52as my first jobs right out of college. And I always wanted to be an actor. I thought that was going to be my career path. And I spent a lot of time telling other people stories. And honestly, at the time, you know, through my teens and 20s and even early 30s, a theater was a lifeline. Being able to perform other people's stories gave me the opportunity, you know, in addition to writing, right? We already talked about how important the writing is. And I had always been writing. I started writing at 14 years old. And it was a very secret, but I was doing a lot of this personal, you know, writing all these poems. And I was also doing community theater for a long time. And then, and then I went to college for theater and I did, I did work professionally for a time. And being able to do that really helped me to manage all the unprocessed grief and unacknowledged loss that I was carrying, right? That I was still kind of unaware was attached to all of my adoption related trauma.

36:53And so I do believe that being able to be a performer in that way for those years was some, it kept me alive because adopted people have significantly higher rates of attempting and dying by suicide than non-adopted people because we don't get the appropriate mental health support. And instinctively, many of us turn to the arts and other creative practices. And that's certainly what I did. So then when I figured out that I was going to write a one-woman show as part of my dissertation, I realized that that's what I needed to do, that it needed to be a piece of solo performance because I needed to break a lot of silences for myself. It was a time in my life and in my journey where there were so many things that I had been conditioned to be silent about, that I had questions that I hadn't been able to ask. Things that I hadn't really deeply thought about

37:54until those that time. And so it became really important for me to figure out how to tell that story. And the reason that I chose theater until performance in particular is because of the ability for theater to help build empathy and open up conversation around difficult subjects. And I felt like if I'm gonna tell a story about the internal experience of being adopted and how trauma manifests itself over the lifespan and how the intersections of adoption and patriarchy are really problematic, I need to do it in a way that's going to be accessible for people, right? So there's an empathetic exchange that happens when I as the performer get on stage and the audience is sitting in the same room and we're breathing the same air and they're feeling my energy and they're feeling my emotions. And they're getting a different understanding of that story as I am telling it then they wouldn't any other way. Because when you're reading something

38:56you have your own internal filter and your own lens through which you're interpreting the information and so that's a different way of taking in information. Theater in and of itself is a much more emotional and sensory experience. And that's why it was really important for me to use that as a medium. It's partly a tool for social change that I wanted people to weave feeling and thinking differently than when they had stepped into that space. Oh man, that's cool. Let me ask you, your adopted parents, you talked about theater. Was theater something that you decided to do on your own or was it something that they kind of like moved you in that direction and you took a liking to it and things that nature so how did coming into theater come about? Yeah, so it actually is something that I grew up around. Both my parents were English and theater teachers when I was a kid. So I remember growing up like when I was real small when my dad would direct the plays at the high school

39:57that he taught at and go to rehearsals with him and then when he moved on into other jobs my mom still taught and she would direct the plays at the high school that she taught at and I was always kind of part of that process. And you know because I grew up in New York City we were going to theater all the time. Like we were going to Broadway from the time I was probably like five or six years old. Like it was just the thing we did as a family and it was something that I was always interested in that was fun that I felt connected to. And I think also like in some ways it probably helped me to have a connection to my parents. Like if we liked the same thing, right? If we were interested in the same thing then like that was a point of connection and the point of safety for me that like we could we could have something in common. Even though my internal sense of disconnection was still very much present although I couldn't have articulated that you know at the time as a child and a young person. And so yeah so theater was always a part of my life

40:58and then when I got into high school I was you know really like I wanted to do more and my high school did not have a theater program. And so I kind of believed my mom a little bit into letting me start auditioning for a community theater and you know I just kept doing it because I was good at it. And like that's you know I think partly my adoptee superpower too besides empathy my other adoptee superpower is being able to really step into other people's lives and other people's shoes and have a deep understanding of the human experience. And so like I've always been a really good actor because I understand people and emotions and I also had an excess of emotions that I needed to put somewhere. You know I was listening to you and you say you know like you find something that you know your parents have a common interest in as you know as far as you know a kid you want to have

42:00a common interest with your parents made me think like nowadays like my son we both interested in sports. You know kids nowadays they you know on a phone with a friend they want to do what they do but it does feel good when your child wants to come out and hang out with you watch the game or I guess they came out wanting to watch the draft and things like you like to say common thing just to have that connection. But then I'm hoping that the audience can hear how your story which is very very interesting was peace together because you know you say you had the trauma and things that now your parents they were teachers and just being into this family that God blessed you to be into and it opened up everything else for you to do what you're doing now. The unmother you don't say the things to release what was inside of you I'm just listening like wow this is you know this is powerful. It's powerful how everything came full circle

43:03and sometimes you know the things that we don't know how he's working it out for us because just saying if you didn't have the parents that was in the drama and into theater and the things that nature this was the very outlet that got you to the point where you are today. Man God is good I tell you. We don't know but he knows. And so before we get out of here I got a game that I like to play quick fire around a game ask you five questions and give me first thing to come to your mind before I get there though. Tell us what we can find your book at. Where can we watch your performance of the one woman show unmother? The book is available on Amazon it's called the Delta Docties and Writing to Heel. You can also access that right through my website listabeta.com and you can also read about unmothered on my website and if you want to see unmothered then you have to contact me and book a performance in at your college or university or in your community and I'll come and I'll perform

44:04and I will do workshop as well and it's an engaged learning experience so that people can learn not only from the performance itself but from the act of participating in a workshop about shared storytelling and developing personal agency by telling our own stories. She's a travel and show ladies and gentlemen she will come to your community and do a show wherever you want her to come to as long as she's getting paid. Hey, so Doc, let's get a quick fight. No, don't forget that part. I ain't coming for free, but long not getting paid, you know. So Doc, you ready for this quick fire round? Yeah. All right, don't be scared. Lot of my guests, they get a little nervous. They don't know what's coming. Yeah, go ahead, drink that water. All right, first question. One word to describe your healing journey. Transformative. Hmm, good one. The book that changed your life.

45:04The prime wound. The one that you said that you avoided for a long time. Performance or writing? Which do you prefer? Oh. That's a tough one. That is a tough one. Hmm, I don't know that I can make a choice. Hmm, we're going to say 50, 50, 50 on that. 50, 50. What's one truth about adoption that needs to be said louder? Oh, OK, one truth about adoption that needs to be said louder, that it is a traumatic lifelong experience and that we need better mental health support. Better mental health support. What does holdness looks like to you? Holdness for me is about authenticity. It's about being able to show up as myself all the time, unapologetically, and to be able to speak my own truth.

46:06Hmm, speak your own truth, ladies and gentlemen. If you heard it from Dr. Liz, the better. Thank you for sharing your truth, as you were saying, your wisdom, and your mission. Your work is a testament to the power of story and an importance of owning who you are. As you said, unapologetically, I'm not apologizing for who I am. To our listeners, it's today's episode stir something in you. Don't ignore it. Your story matters. You're healing matters. Don't forget to follow the CJ Moneyway Show. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and be sure to follow along with our bigger mission through CJ Moneyway Entertainment and G.I. The States Capitol that added made a series with purpose coming soon. Hey, this your boy CJ Moneyway. With Dr. Liz, we outta here. Peace. Hey.

47:06Hey. Before you go, let me leave you with this. Every story shed here. It's never mind that your story matters to me. Keep your face sharp, keep your focus steady. Keep your vision clear And if this episode gave you wisdom, hope or push forward Share it with somebody you love Tap in with me on all platforms at your moneyway And stay locked into the movement Because God's not done writing your chapter This is the CJ Moneyway Show Brick by brick And always

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49:16Thank you for watching