Adoptees in 3: Connecting Mind, Heart and Action – Episode 1: Sara Easterly
Adoptees in 3: Connecting Mind, Heart, and Action is a video interview series produced by Boston Post Adoption Resources. In each episode, an adoptee/clinician asks a guest three enlightening questions about the current state of their adoptee journey and how it’s sitting in their mind, heart, and giving new purpose or meaning to their life.
Our hope is that these stories can impact the adoption community and start to open the doors of deeper consciousness for adoptees, as well as their family, friends, partners and therapists!
Episode 1: Sara Easterly
Video length: 27:49
In Episode 1 of the Adoptees in 3: Connecting Mind, Heart, and Action interview series, guest Sara Easterly, an adoptee, a writer, an author, and the founder of Adoptee Voices, a writing group and online storytelling community, shares insights about her adoptee journey with host LC Coppola, who is an adoptee and an adoption trauma-informed therapist.
In this episode, Sara and LC talk about:
- The author experience and the importance of persistence in submitting our work
- Advice I would give to my younger self
- How it feels to speak our truths
- The importance of safe spaces for adoptees
- Adoptee grief and the lens of attachment and separation trauma
Episode Transcript
Voiceover
00:00
The Voices Unheard program at Boston Post Adoption Resources is designed to empower adult adoptees in expressing their personal stories and to expand public knowledge and awareness around lived adoptee experiences. Program goals are accomplished through adoptee-centered writing workshops, adoptee-created blogs and other online material, use of Voices Unheard: A Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees, and Voices Unheard: Real Adoptee Stories, which is our annual live speakers’ forum designed to educate the Greater Boston community through creative expression and storytelling.
LC Coppola
00:49
Hello! Welcome to Adoptees in 3: Connecting Mind, Heart, and Action. This is our very first installment of the new Interview series that's produced by Boston Post Adoption Resources, specifically within the Voices Unheard program. In this series, we're going to be asking adoptees three enlightening questions about the current state of their adoptive journey and how it's sitting in their mind and heart. We are going to be enquiring into the meaning and purpose their activisms brought to their life, and we hope to have a wide variety of backgrounds, ages and types of adoptees on the show. I'm LC Coppola, an adoptee myself, and program director of Voices Unheard. And I'm an adoption trauma-informed therapist, and I'm very excited to bring you our first guest this morning, Sara Easterly. Hi, Sara!
Sara Easterly
01:48
Hey? Thanks for having me.
LC Coppola
01:50
Yes, we're so glad you're here. Sara is an adoptee advocate, educator, speaker, and so much more. She's the founder of adoption—Adoptee Voices, which is a writing group and online story telling community. She's the author of many articles and essays, as well as her illuminating and multi-award-winning memoir, Searching for Mom.
Recently she co-authored Adoption Unfiltered: Revelations from Adoptees, Birth Parents, Adoptive Parents, and Allies along with a birth mother, and adoptive mother. Sara is a trained course facilitator in attachment with the Newfield Institute, which teaches—they teach an attachment based developmental approach to child development. She's also a podcast host of Adoption Unfiltered—video, podcast and last, but not least she's the narrator of both her audio books, but in addition would be, she's also the author of the Newsweek article that came out yesterday that I saw last night. that's so awesome. The article’s called. “I Told my mom I Wanted to Find My Birth Mother. It Blindsided Her.” I’ve been seeing that all over social media the past 24 hours. Yeah.
So, I've been following you for years now. It's really good to meet you, and I'm seeing you all—you know, your book Adoption Unfiltered. I'm seeing you, you know, traveling and doing talks and how have you been holding up through this book journey?
Sara Easterly
03:26
Oh, my gosh, well, thank you; I know and I've been seeing you everywhere and I just want to give a plug that you wrote a piece that that's how I first, I guess, “met you” met you. Was that you wrote something for Adoptee Voices for a blog, and I have your book, your beautiful book, your Voices Unheard. So, thank you for writing this this journal. Yeah, and yeah, it's roller coaster. It's you know, it's, it's really exciting to have—just be—feel a part of this momentum, because I do feel like people are starting to listen to adoptee voices like outside of our, of our circles. And so it's really exciting. You know, it feels like the voices are not unheard, you know, like they're getting heard now, you know, more and more. I still feel like we have headway, but it does feel like a real honor to be a part of this wave. And Newsweek was great. I will just share, you know, that—that essay that I wrote was hard to get published. You know, I didn't—I didn’t—I found I've been working on getting that piece published since the fall and I was going to just kind of give up. And, and then I was so—someone told me about Newsweek, and I was like, “Oh, I hadn't thought of Newsweek,” and so I pitched it to Newsweek, and—and they accepted it. So, you know, it's like there's a lot of highs and lows and in this work of getting your work out there and trying to be heard. And so there were lots of moments where I did feel unheard. And then then you get heard. So, it's just persistence is so important.
LC Coppola:
05:02
That’s a good message. I need to hear that message. Trust me. Yeah, yeah, it's hard. It's, you know, you submit to so many places and yeah. And there's a lot of you know, I think that people are scared still to touch on the—the darker, sadder parts of adoption. So, I think it's like—sometimes I forget, because we're so immersed in this world, like, I'll meet someone new, and I guess I kind of put my—my thoughts on them or my opinion on them. Like, I'll just assume that, you know, this new friend, like, totally gets adoption trauma and then I'm like, “Oh, yeah, they really still don't.”
Sara Easterly
05:42
Yeah, on both sides. I have that, too, and—and, you know, I do get hopeful, because when I talk to friends, and if you know I do, I have to kind of zip it sometimes. It's—I just want to talk adoption all the time. But when I talk to friends who, like, I—I'm getting non-adopted friends, understanding. They do get it when you—they—they interest—when you explain. They're like, “Oh, wow! I never thought of that”, but it's just still the dominant narrative on all sides of politics and just the mainstream culture is that adoption’s this wonderful “win-win” thing. And there's no—not—a not really a lot of scrutiny, of the hardship that goes along with it.
LC Coppola
06:23
Right, right . . . but it does seem like things are changing, and there's plenty of ways to, like, for people to tune in and learn now. Especially, I mean your book, for example . . . but podcasts, and I guess social media has really been blowing things up so . . .
Sara Easterly
06:42
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
LC Coppola
06:44
Alright, so we'll jump into these questions. We try to make these, we're—the plan is to make these interviews, you know, digestible in about 20 min, so, well, I'll try to keep us on track. So, the first question, which is the “Mind” part of “Mind, Heart, and Action.” If you were to make a movie about your adoption journey, maybe your current adoption journey, what would you title your movie and why?
Sara Easterly
07:12
I love this question! It’s a hard question and I don’t feel like I’m a very good—I’m not very good at titles I will just say. So, I was like, “Oh my gosh! I could feel my perfectionism, like, rearing up, like, “Oh, I have to come up with the perfect title for this question you asked.” And, you know, part of me was like, “Oh, well, it would just be Searching for Mom,” you know, that's my book. Like, a part of me, is like, “Oh, it’s done! I did that one”, you know. And I think it's just, you know, I think so many authors . . .
LC Coppola
07:38
“Searching for Mom: The Movie.”
Sara Easterly
07:41
Yeah, yeah, right, not just the memoir. Yeah, just the author thing of wanting to see, you know, wanting your book to become a film. I think that's, you know, just knowing all my author friends, I think that's a pretty common thing that we, the dream that we all—we all kind of hold on to. But the thing with that, though, is my memoir, is just a snippet of time, you know; like my, if this is about my entire adoption journey that's a piece of the journey, but, you know, my—you know, you hit the end, and the story continues. You know, there's new ways you’re always processing adoption. So, I guess I—something about resilience, maybe? Like, toward radical resilience, or I don't know. I came up with something like that, just continuing to be resilient, and to adapt and to grow.
LC Coppola
08:29
That is so much of what it is about is the resiliency. You know. . . finding the—the silver linings, I guess. And I say that, knowing full well that, like, we're always pressured to find the silver linings. But, there's something about can you hold the pain? Can you hold the pain, and—and acknowledge the pain and not suppress it, and also be able to see how the pain may have brought some beauty in. I feel so nervous saying that, but you know, that's been kind of my—my—maybe my experience with it.
Sara Easterly
09:07
That's been my experience, too. I love how you just worded that—that was really well put. And I think it's on our terms, you know, and I think that we can have some resistance to doing that because it feels like the expectation, but when it's on our terms…
LC Coppola
09:20
Right?
Sara Easterly
09:21
And that's the—that's the distinguishing piece for me, is we are doing it for us, for our healing, not because it is expected. But it does like, I think, holding that pain like you said, like, that for me, I found when I could get to that, then I could—I could also feel the—feel that beauty and feel the joys cause otherwise I was just flat lined, you know. I mean, I couldn't—couldn't get there for either.
LC Coppola
09:47
Yeah, you’re just kind of like, I mean, god. It’s—it’s like, detaching from all of it or feeling all of it, you know. It's . . .
Sara Easterly
09:57
Yeah, yeah . . .
LC Coppola
10:01
. . . hard. Alright, so we'll move into the next one, “Heart.” So, what advice would you give a younger version of yourself? But it can be any age. There's no requirement specifically. But is there a specific age that really needed, of—of a younger version of yourself that really needed to hear something from this more resilient version.
Sara Easterly
10:27
I would probably go back to my early kind of, early years and early, you know, elementary school years. I was painfully shy. It was, you know, just hard to even be seen. I just, oh, I just wanted so badly to just blend in, and I think that's a common adoptee experience of just wanting to—the wanting to belong and fit in. But I didn't even want to be seen. I just wanted to kind of hide. And I would. . . and—and I continued, you know, in lots of different ways, you know, I got good at putting up kind of facades and—and checking that off. But I —but it still was there, and maybe it's still there, you know, that's still kind of shy, shy person, you know, being afraid to be her full self. But I would give her, you know, I would give her the advice to—that you're going to find your voice and you're going to use it. And it's going to feel so good to do so. And really, that's kind of, I think, what drives me to with adoptive voices. To—to let other—other adoptees find their voices and use their voices. It's so powerful, I mean, I can't tell you how powerful it was to finish my memoir and to write my truth, and probably the most powerful part was realizing . . . I mean I sent the Beta Reader versions out to my family—birth family, and adoptive family, and that—that time while they were reading it and processing it . . . and it was a lot for them to process.
LC Coppola
12:08
Like, how nerv—like, what was that like for you?
Sara Easterly
12:13
Terrifying. It was terrifying. And my dad, my adopted dad took the longest, and I was sure that was it, like I was sure I'm losing all of them, and it really was like facing me, and just so much separation that I wrote my truth, and they can't handle it. And it's over like I'm disowned, I’m out, you know. I really thought that would happen, and it didn't happen. I feel really, really lucky for that experience. But I was like, “Okay, they stayed.” And it really kind of proved wrong, my life thing that if I tell the truth, if I speak my voice, the people close to me are going to go away. They didn't. And so. . . and even if they had like, even if they had, I told my truth. So, you know, there were multiple things in there that I was ordering myself. I didn't go away. So, there were multiple layers to that. That . . .
LC Coppola
13:07
You’re not going to leave yourself.
Sara Easterly
13:09
Right! Yeah, I'm here for you. I—you can—you can share your truth. And so, I—it's—that's a big one. And I wish I had known that. I mean that that took me a long time to get there, and I wish I had known that but even I will just say, like you mentioned the Newsweek article. I went through it yesterday. I sent my dad a link to the article, and he didn't reply till today. And I'm like, “Oh, my God! That's it”, like I said too much, you know, like, and nothing I said in there was new. But it's my brain does that, you know, like he's going to go away. But, and, I have to go through it every time like this. Kind of “No, it's okay. I have permission”, you know. I had to self-talk yesterday like, “I did—I told my truth. Nothing in there is mean, it's not malicious. It's my truth”.
LC Coppola
13:52
It's amazing how you went from like this young girl who just wanted to hide, to like, being so brave, to be able to continue to tell your truth over and over. And, like, it's inspiring, you know, I'm—I'm definitely, like, terrified of—of my, if my memoir comes out someday. I—it's you know, that idea of like being too much, and you know, talking too much about it. And it's yeah . . . it's really inspiring to, like, talk to other adoptee memoirists who have been able to do it. And you're still going strong. And it's actually been—it's been good. Do you feel like you're closer with some of your family now, or?
Sara Easterly
14:39
I definitely feel like I'm closer with some of my family. I think, you know, my mom passed, which is a big pivotal piece of my memoir, but I—we—we gained closeness through her death, which is a lot of what's in the memoir. But I'll share an example that my dad . . . so my dad. . . you know, I grew up in, you know . . . I was adopted at the tail end of the baby scoop era, and so it was a closed adoption. And it was closed in the house like we didn't really talk about adoption, and my dad is of the era where you don't talk about your emotions very much. And, you know, there just isn't—wasn't how he was raised. You know, he came from a ranching family, and you know, just a lot of—this just wasn't the family culture, either. So . . . but he has so mu—so much emotion and—and it's really sweet. But—but, you have to know the—what you're looking for cause. It doesn't. It's not always outward. But he—this is my point is, he came to my event in Denver for adoption unfiltered, and that's where, you know, that's—I'm from Colorado. So, he—he was at the event, and so was my sister and her family, and my dad's new wife. And I was doing the same reading I did in all the cities, and it was about it—it was about, you know, family and claiming family, you know, chosen or otherwise or choosing them, not because of adoption, but choosing them. And it felt like I had written those words, but it felt like this public truly claiming my family, my adoptive family. And so, I started crying. And it was just a really emotional night, and—and it was emotional from the beginning. As soon as my dad walked in, he was crying. And my dad just, like I said, he doesn't cry like . . .
LC Coppola
16:31
So, that's just like . . .
Sara Easterly
16:35
Yeah, yeah. And then I will get a hold of this letter. He sent me this long 2-page letter pouring his heart out.
LC Coppola
16:42
Oh my god, save that forever.
Sara Easterly
16:45
Yeah, it’s like I’m keeping it right here. And, so, it's so deep. And—and so, you know, just going through our entire life together and how proud he is of me and—and that, and proud of my advocacy, and proud that I'm helping other adoptees. And it was just like, “Oh, my gosh!” Like I, you know, back to the—I never would have imagined that as a little, little girl I wouldn't have imagined it 10 years ago. Or even 5 years ago. Even right before the book came out. I kind of accepted, you know this is my work, and I don't know if my family really ca—pays attention or needs to; It's fine. But, but yeah, there's yeah; so it's—it's really meaningful, you know, just to, you know, my—my journey is still unfolding all the time.
LC Coppola
17:29
I'm imagining like that . . .
Sara Easterly
17:29
[Cut off] Sorry
LC Coppola
17:32
I'm imagining that—no, no . . . I’m imaging that little girl just seeing that scene of like, your dad, you know, showing up, and I mean she would be so impressed with you, you know. That's so cool.
Sara Easterly
17:47
Wow.
LC Coppola
17:49
That seems like one of those days that's, like, a, you know, a day that you'll always remember?
Sara Easterly
17:54
Sure, yeah, yeah, for sure.
LC Coppola
17:58
Alright, so, we'll move into the “Action part” of the questions, which is just, how are you healing today? Like, what are you doing to help yourself heal today? What works for you?
I know that you do a lot of inner work and outer work at advocacy. What helps?
Sara Easterly
18:22
You know, I think it's interesting for me because realizing this is in “The Action”, this—my answer might go—belong in the heart, with the heart question. And—because, the biggest thing is the grief and feeling, the—feeling the sadness, and—and—and it doesn't need to be specific to adoption. It can just be feeling my—any feelings, but taking time and pausing to feel. So, there's all the action and I do think that's a big part of my healing, too. But like taking pauses from the action and cause, I can distract myself with the action. You know, it can—it can be healing, and I know I'm helping others. But then, if I'm doing too much action, then I'm not pausing to feel my feelings. It's—it's just my ongoing temptation. I, like, work is my addiction, and it is the—the way I flee from feeling. So, I have to build in pauses. And we were talking before we started recording about horses. I do spend a lot of time with horses, and it's sometimes even just it doesn't even need to be like real long. But I just had a recent experience. My, my, this was also, I have animals. So, the animals help me to feel, because we have so many animals that there's always someone passing. And we had one of my really sweet guinea pig died a couple of weeks ago, and I was just heartbroken. It was a really beautiful death, though I got—I held her and it—it was a beautiful death and just deeply meaningful to be there holding her on her way out. But I was really sad, and I, you know she was an older guinea pig. So there’d been so much elder care and a lot of just busyness taking care of her needs. And, but I was sad, and, you know I’m in my fifties now, and you know, it's not something that's necessarily socially acceptable always, which I don't like to, you know, I have my—I have specific friends and places I can talk to, but some people think you're just a little over-sensitive, and you share about your guinea pig, and how sad! You know, I'm still grieving my guinea pig, you know I still am. But I told the horse. Yeah, I told the horse.
LC Coppola
20:31
[Cuts off]
Yeah, I know; you told the horse.
Sara Easterly:
20:37
Yeah, I know, but I told the horse, you know, and I was at the barn, and I was just like, I’m really sad today. My—my guinea pig just died, and I just started crying, and I just felt like, “I'm really safe”, like, though, like, you know, sometimes people judge, and—but horses don't judge, or other animals don't judge. And so, I just felt that sometimes it's just quick, and I left, and I was like, “Oh, my gosh! I needed to get that out”, like, I needed to speak that out loud in a safe space, and today it was the horse, you know, and—and now I'm saying it now, and I feel like I can. I'm tearing up again, you know it's—but it's pausing to do that and doing that—that heart work. But remembering, you know, remembering to do that and I want to give one more plug for your journal. I—I haven't had the time to dive in and do this work, but I am so planning to, because it's the pausing and the reflecting. It's just crucial to being able to—to heal, and also then to do the action and to do the action well, I think. And the actions have been part of it. I mean, it's really healing, knowing that other people are inspired to, you know, to tell their stories and to use their voices too, and like with Adoption Unfiltered, like, my big driver was I wanted to normalize “us” to each other like into other people. The diagnoses that we get, you know, I grew up in isolation. So, I just always thought I was crazy. And then you always hear people talking about their adoptees who have reactive attachment disorder or this, or that. You know, it's like. I started studying attachment. I'm like, “No, we're just responding like we're supposed to”. we're human beings, you know. And so, this is human dynamics with all the separation we face like, I just I wanted to normalize that. So, it's—it is really healing to speak that out loud again and again, and to like rewrite that story that I thought something was so wrong with me, and it's like, “No, nothing was wrong with me”. I was reacting like my brain was wired. My brain was wired to do.
LC Coppola
22:36
Yeah, your stress response system was traumatized and it shaped that way, you know, because early loss. I mean, and there's no pre-trauma, you know, depending on how old you were, like, if the younger, there's no pre-trauma self and usually even old, you know, if you're adopted at older, there's still no pre-trauma self to get back to. So, it's—we're starting from there. Yeah, I know. I wrote—I'm so, like, a lot of us, you know, clinicians at BPAR. It's the diagnosis is often prolonged grief disorder, you know or complicated grief or something along those lines, because co-complex PTSD isn't an official diagnosis yet. Hopefully it will happen at some point. But that's really what it is.
Sara Easterly
23:31
Yeah, yeah, yeah I do—yeah really resonate with everything you just said with the complicated grief or the prolonged grief and the complex PTSD, absolutely. Yeah.
LC Coppola
23:45
And when you lose, like any loss, I think triggers that, like, real deep initial loss. I remember I was doing some EMDR work. Have you ever done, EMDR?
Sara Easterly
24:00
I have not. No.
LC Coppola
24:01
It—it's kind of like, it's like, you go into, like, a—the really deep, hard feelings but in a way where you're doing certain movements, or you're watching a light, and it actually makes it so you're in the really deep, deep, hard feelings, but kind of relaxed. (Similarly to going in the cold water while trying to relax like we were talking about.) But, one of the things you have to do is you have to create a safe space with the therapists, like, your perfect safe space before you even get into the work. So, my safe space, and I didn't realize what it was for the first, like 2 sessions; and then it hit me, but my safe space I was like I wanted to be like salt crystal, like those pink salt crystal, you know, lamps, but surrounding me completely, and I want to be surrounded in this like ray of—of light that's like from the top. But I want to be like looking like that. But just like almost floating. And I'm like, “Oh, I'm in the womb.” I'm like—I'm in the, right like . . .
Sara Easterly
25:01
WOW
LC Coppola
25:02
—That space that I chose. I didn't even put together that it was that. Cause, that was really the last, maybe safe space before the trauma for so many of us.
Sara Easterly
25:11
Oh, wow! Oh, that’s really moving, that’s—that’s deep, yeah. Oh beautiful.
LC Coppola
25:20
I really—Chapter 21? The chapter where you give the advice. I think it's the advice, you know, for care takers. Yeah, “Supporting Adoptee Maturation: Advice for Parents and Other Caregivers,” you know . . .
Sara Easterly
25:39
Yeah.
LC Coppola
25:40
There's so much good stuff in here and also, like, it just—it hits on every theme, you know, every—you know, we all have these different stories, but we have this—these things that are similar for all of us, this, like, hyper-vigilance. It comes out in different ways. Some people might avoid, some people might cling; just all the different things that are talked about. It's all in here, and what I love too is that there's a lot of science in here. There's a lot of, like, pointing towards you know, you talk about Bruce Perry, you—you talk about a lot of the—the people that are talking about the architecture of the brain and how it's formed. And so, it's not—you know, It's a great mix between, just like the qualitative interviews and research combined with, like, science to show, like, you know; I have a lot of people will prove the—prove separation trauma. Well, I think the book, did I—I really do. I feel like the book proves separation trauma, you know. . . . So, thank you for writing.
Sara Easterly
26:47
Aw, thank you. Thank you for—for reflecting that back, and—and thank you for reading it. And I really appreciate that. That means a lot. And yeah, yeah, especially with all of your expertise. It just yeah, really feels good.
LC Coppola
27:02
Aw. . . . Alright, well, before we wrap up, if people want to learn more about you, where do they go?
Sara Easterly
27:10
Yeah, probably the best is just my website: saraeasterly.com. That's probably the best starting point. And I have a lot of stuff on the adoptionunfiltered.com website as well. We have resources there, and a book, club discussion guide and—and everything. But you can, just for easy memory, saraeasterly.com and that links all my socials too.
LC Coppola
27:34
Nice. Well, thank you, Sara, and we'll definitely keep tuning into the podcast as well. And—and for our audience stay tuned for our next Adoptees in 3: Mind, Heart, and Action, which will hopefully be coming up sometime soon.
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About Lisa Coppola, M.Ed, LMHC
LC Coppola, LMHC, was a clinician at Boston Post Adoption Resources.