Birth Families and Family Systems

        I kinda disassociate when I'm by the adoptee group meetings because what people say is so deep and painful. Such as when the Asian adoptee cried about how her adoptive parents said screw you to her when she wanted to search, and all her life she thought they loved her but she was just a pawn to make them feel good about themselves. Then they said how adoptive parents many times seem like the type of people that need to adopt to feel good about themselves because infertility makes them feel worthless, and they use the adoptees as people to make them feel good. It hurts to think about. I do not understand it.

         I was also shocked by how one woman was talking about how when she visited her birth family, she felt loved for herself for the first time, like she didn't have to do anything to figure out how to belong. It reminded me of how I feel, always trying to fit in places but never quite feeling so. And how I did feel that belonging a bit with meeting my true family. But it is still not perfect, and they don't understand my pain. Even though they don't get me, being with birth family still makes me feel more grounded and real. There is a energy field in the family systems so they must feel it. I guess it takes times to get used to, because things are shifting and people are scared of change. Another adoptee, male, was saying how he felt this crushing pain one day and had no idea why, and thought he was going crazy. He was so thankful when he found out his birth mother had died, because then he knew he was not crazy. It awed me, because I feel weird shifts of pain out of nowhere too sometimes and wonder what was going on with my family.

         The funny thing is I was always scared of rejection, and now that is being activated even more in the fear of my birth family not liking me. But knowing that I will always belong there, even if they don't outwardly show it, helps me feel better. All these changes are scaring me, because of the old enemy of rejection and feeling unworthy. It is a shift for my reality too- accepting that I am accepted and worthy. For so many years I was gas-lighted to thinking that my adoptee angst was made up by me and it didn't exist, and I was truly flawed, and now it is coming full force the opposite truth. Ahhh.