FEP83 Adoption Trauma & Healing with Charlene Briggs
Show Notes:
Joining us to talk about the energetics of adoption trauma and healing with flower essences is Charlene Briggs of Botanical Energetics. As a Flower Essence Practitioner since 1999, Charlene specializes in working with adoptees and helps clients frame and recalibrate from the many losses associated with relinquishment, adoption, and subsequent adaption.
According to Charlene, adoption is hard on everyone. For the adoptee it’s an energetic fracture and a lifetime of recalibration. For the first mothers it’s heartbreak, and for the adoptive parents it’s an unspoken debt that often comes due when the adoptee reaches the limit of their pain.
This debt is not just imposed on the family but on society. No matter how much we manipulate nature to satisfy our needs and wants, it’s nature’s job to return to itself. “If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies, and so a man”. —HD Thoreau.
Adoptees are plants ripped from their roots and this energetic fracture at their core ripples throughout families and time. Transformation of this fracture lives in nature’s ability to restore order, productivity, creativity and peace.
Flower essences can be:
- offered to first mothers for clarity in their decision and in anticipation of relinquishment
- applied to the wrists of lost newborns to help them regulate the rupture
- kept on hand for the relinquished person’s painful journey back to their root
- shared with the adoptive parents to help them with their unique challenges.
Gifts from nature, flower essences offer hope to everyone caught in the adoption triangle.
Audio:
Video:
Flower Essences discussed during the show:
- Centaury – Bach/Healing Herbs
- Star of Bethlehem – Bach/Healing Herbs
- Borage – FES, Delta Gardens
- Bleeding Heart – FES
- Montana Rhodochrosite – Alaskan Essences
Resources:
Charlene’s Website: www.BotanicalEnergetics.com
Charlene’s Facebook: Facebook.com/BotanicaEnergetics
Nancy Verier – The Primal Wound
Show Transcript
Rochana Felde: Welcome back, flower essence friends and enthusiasts. We have a great topic and special guest to introduce to you today. We’ll be diving into an area we haven’t yet explored on the podcast, and it’s about the energetics of adoption trauma and healing with flower essences. This is close to home for me as I have a parent who’s an adoptee, and she never got to meet her birth parents, and my other parent was fostered for several years as a young child before eventually being reunited with his birth parents. So, many of you listening probably know someone or have a family member with a similar story. And I think this will help us all become more adoption trauma-informed in our practices and general awareness.
Kathleen Aspenns: And before we dive into this really fabulous topic, I’m so glad that we found somebody so wonderful to talk about it and to be able to share with our listeners. We wanted to let you know also that we have Mentoring Groups getting started at Flower Essence Studies. Go ahead and check out all of our offerings over at Flower Essence Studies Mentoring Groups. We have divided out our offerings. We have separate groups for practitioners, for self-care, for animals, and for business development. And we have all of those groups available as a suite, or you can get them individually. So, we are having a really good response from people who really just kind of wanted to focus on particular areas of their practice and wanted to be able to serve you all. So go ahead and give it a checkout. The first groups are starting in beginning of February, and we hope to see you there.
Rochana Felde: Yeah, we’re really excited to begin these groups, so I hope that you check it out. And if any of them resonate, come join us. We love talking to you.
Okay, so our guest today is Charlene Briggs, who’s a registered Bach Flower Practitioner and has been practicing flower essence therapy since 1999. She’s completed training with the Bach Foundation, the Flower Essence Society, and Alaskan Essences. She holds advanced degrees in environmental science and education, has worked as an environmental scientist, and is currently on the board of directors of a watershed association working on land preservation and water quality. She’s also taught flower essence therapy in the Integrative Medicine department at West Chester University and university seminars at Temple University when she was a professor of Sustainable Community Design. And she teaches foraging and is the president of the American Herbalist Guild, Pennsylvania Chapter, bringing herbalists together to serve their communities in times of need.
In her private flower essence practice, she’s an adoption trauma-informed practitioner who helps clients frame and recalibrate from the many losses associated with relinquishment, adoption, and subsequent adaption. In this work, she draws from her own adoption adaption liberation journey, and she’s created protocols for transcending the energetics of adoption for adoptees. We’re so excited to talk to you today, Charlene. Welcome to the podcast.
Charlene Briggs: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m really excited to be here to bring this subject to light with you. It’s a topic that’s not often discussed in the field, and flower essences are such a powerful tool in this world of adoption. So, I’m very happy to be here with you today, and I love the work that you do, bringing flower essence therapy into the fore and educating so many people with your flower essence courses. So, thank you.
Kathleen Aspenns: Well, thank you for being here with us. Would you start off by telling us a little bit about your journey with adoption trauma and how you got interested in this very specific field?
Charlene Briggs: Oh, sure. Well, I was adopted at birth. My first mother was in a coma for eight days. So, when she came out of the coma, she signed the papers, and I went home with my parents. It was a closed adoption, and that means she never saw me, and I never knew anything about her or my origins, so my family of origin, my heritage, medical history, whatever. It was closed. So, I grew up as an only child, and I soon became my daddy’s little girl.
My dad was a naturalist. We spent lots of time in the woods. He taught me the language of nature, and we went fishing at night in the summer in Pennypack Creek. We went hiking in the woods in the winter and skiing. He grew our food. And my father was really the light of my life, and I was his. He was kind and patient and funny. And everything good that I’ve done, really, in my life, has really been inspired by him, my work as an environmental scientist and my work as a flower essence practitioner, because he sensitized me to nature and listening.
My mom was more strict, and she ran a tight ship. In terms of the adoption, she made it very clear that I wasn’t supposed to talk about it with her or my father. So, I grew up not knowing anything at all about my origins. And I just assumed that their lack of discussion about it was their way of protecting me from something that was probably shameful. So, shame gets integrated into our experience, and it informs our decisions. So that was my journey. Because of a lot of those decisions, I’ve had to dig deep for my dignity. And in that process, I found flower essences, and was just amazed at how profound their impact was on aligning me with my truth. And I decided I wanted to help others do the same.
Rochana Felde: Yeah, I spoke with my mom a little bit before this episode to ask her a little bit about her experience, and she was telling me about how she had this sense of guilt kind of her whole life without any real reason, but that there is a sort of underlying feeling that she did something wrong or that there was something bad about her. I don’t think she realized that wasn’t normal, that that was something that most people didn’t just experience for no reason. And so, when did you start to realize that it was affecting you, the not knowing, and maybe the assumptions or the feeling of not knowing?
Charlene Briggs: Well, I think it’s always in the background. I mean, it’s very hard for a child to understand how their mother could give them away and why no one really wants to talk about it. The process of evolution is slow with us. I mean, adoption is this happy event, right? I mean, the couple gets a baby to love. The baby gets to go home with two parents, with advantages it normally wouldn’t have, and the mother gets to move on, but the adopters are never told that their baby is neurologically broken. The mother who just relinquished her child is never told that her child will live in her cells and her psyche indefinitely. And the child goes home with this lifetime of neurological dysregulation from the trauma that will take about five or six decades to figure out.
So, figuring it out and having it dawn on you is a very long process for us because we spend our lives trying to fit in. And if we look at what Brené Brown talks about, fitting in is really the opposite of belonging, because to fit in, you really have to not belong to yourself. And we are on this long, long journey of learning what it feels like to belong to ourselves when we don’t know who we were as who we started out with. And the premise for adoption is that we were blank slates, but we were there.
And when you take a baby from their mother, the baby suffers a structural neurological damage, and this damage is recorded somatically. So, we know at that level always. Science knows it, medicine knows it, and every institution that supports adoption knows it, but we’re left on our own to figure it out. So that timeline is different for all of us, but we all typically are kind of dealing with this on our own because our parents aren’t aware of our pain, and we don’t want to hurt their feelings. They’re trying to raise us. They took us in. It was the rescue. So, we suffer that in our own ways, and we see it come out in our relationships.
So, for me, I saw this shame, I saw this neurological rupture in my psyche manifesting in my relationships until I realized they were painful enough. And I just started doing digging, and when I found the essences, that’s when I started healing. The essences really helped me align with truth, and it’s the truth that we know inside of ourselves, but we don’t see it reflected back anywhere. So, we really have to dig underneath this toxic waste dump of other people’s unfinished business that we live underneath, not necessarily intentionally, but it’s like we carry the burden. For a lot of people, the guilt is common because we realized that we were an inconvenience. Our birth wasn’t celebrated. It was somebody’s tragedy. And that’s shameful. And also, we take the burden for that on because it’s like, obviously, our existence ruined somebody’s life, at least temporarily.
So, yeah, there’s not enough in our culture to help people going through this process, and that’s why I’m really hopeful that flower essence practitioners will kind of become more adoption-informed and reach out, because this is the work, it works so effectively because it hits us at the somatic level where we record everything in the energetic architecture. So, it’s a long process.
Kathleen Aspenns: I really appreciate that this is a work of a lifetime. And here I am hoping that through this more awareness, we, as a group of flower essence practitioners, can offer earlier– intervention is kind of a therapeutic term, but on some level, it’s like, how soon would be ideal to be helping someone who is an adoptee, or it sounds like you mentioned the birth parent is also suffering. And what would be your goal to see more people aware at that very, very early stage, or what do you see as really important points for those who are experiencing that adoption process?
Charlene Briggs: That’s a great question. We do know what’s going on as babies. We know we’re programmed neurologically to recognize our mothers. We know her rhythm, her sound, her taste, her smell. We recognize her face. And when the mother doesn’t show up, we learn we have no agency in the world. We are in hypervigilance. So, there’s no too early stage. Even when the first mother is contemplating relinquishing her child, there’s emotions that are going through her that are passing through the baby.
And the first mother has a lot of emotions that could be addressed before she delivers. I’m sure there’s remorse and guilt and fear, and there’s a lot going on with her. So, we never ask what precipitated this woman relinquishing her baby, and what situations maybe coerced her into that. Saving Our Sisters is a group that’s working now to help women keep their children outside of the welfare system, find ways. So, yeah, the birth mother, or the first mother, as I call her, she’s suffering, and that does get translated to the baby. But when we launch into the world, and we start crying, a minute is an eternity to a baby. And if the mother doesn’t come back, we break. So, intervention needs to start right away. It needs to start with trauma relief.
And as we know, anybody can take flower essences without any side effects in the physiology. It’s going to help reorient, it’s going to help ground. So many people in this field that I’ve talked to, in this culture of adoption say, “I don’t feel like I’m even in my body. I’m somewhere hovering.” So, try to raise children when you’re hovering. You have to really struggle to get back in your body to protect them. So, we want to diminish the hovering. We want to ground, and that can’t start too soon.
Rochana Felde: Yeah, we found out the story of my mom’s first mother through eventual DNA testing and finding other members of the family. My mom was born during World War II, and her mother wasn’t yet married to the father, and he went off to war, so she had no way to take care of a baby and work. And we had to piece together that story. But finally, in my mom’s life, she realized that all her lifelong feelings of guilt absolutely came from the feelings that her mother was having during her gestation, knowing that she had to give the baby away, because the first mother, my birth grandmother, she ended up– the grandfather came back from the war, and they ended up getting married and having two more children. So, it is quite an amazing story because we were able to meet one of them and all his kids, and it was kind of out of a TV show, where are the cameras, everybody meeting for the first time. It was a really amazing experience, but it wasn’t until just the last couple of years. So, she had a lifetime of not knowing and working through those feelings of guilt. And then when we found out the story, it made so much sense that that guilt, she just internalized it completely from what she picked up from her birth mother. So, I really appreciate what you’re saying. I mean, this is going to be true regardless if someone is adopted or not, that it’s really important to pay attention to what’s happening with the birth mother when pregnant and all of the influences that are happening and the emotional situation and the scene around her, because I think it does make a really big impact into the child’s psyche. And so, where would you start? You talked about a protocol for adoptees or for working through this. And where would you start with that, if someone was to come to see you?
Charlene Briggs: Okay, as an adult, I mean, obviously, we sit and we talk and look at the constellation of emotions that are presenting. Everyone’s adoption is different, but there are commonalities. One essence that is pretty central is Centaury, because, as you know, the plant Centaury is this beautiful, little plant that just spreads all over the ground, and it’s not like the Tiger Lily saying, here I am, here I am. We blend into the woodwork as adoptive people. We fit in as much as we can because we don’t want to be given away again. We grow up as good girls and good boys, and we do what we’re told. And we don’t necessarily learn to say yes when we mean yes, no when we mean no. And the whole act of being relinquished is an imposition of will upon us. And as Dr. Bach said, the root cause of disease is when one person imposes their will upon another against their wishes. So, we have this will force that has shrunk and contracted. And when we finally start to realize that we really deserve to know who our ancestors are, I deserve to know who lives in my bones. Adoption is not a once-and-done event. It’s an energetic event because we store this experience in our energetic architecture. So, we experience the adoption and all of its fallout physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, but underneath our biochemistry, we’re atomic structure, and that’s where the resonance of this experience gets stored. And until we do something energetically to shift that so that it can be transformed, it’s going to resonate there and affect everything in our lives.
So, I’m looking at what is someone experiencing as a result of these effects. And Centaury is one of the core essences because it activates that will force and that sense of, I am. And we don’t feel like we are. We’re starting off before we began in our lives. We had a life before we were born. And adoption, like I said, assumes that we didn’t exist before the adoption. We’re not blank slates. So, we spend our lives getting out of everybody else’s way, like the Centaury just kind of spreading all over the floor of the landscape. But Centaury helps people come into that place where their dignity is non-negotiable. It helps them stake their claim to themselves. And do you want me to go into more essences, talk about—?
Kathleen Aspenns: We can definitely talk about a few essences. I mean, I love that choice. That’s such an important essence probably in every practice, but I can really see how it would completely relate in this context because you grow up just trying to fit in and trying not to stick out as much as possible. Under any circumstances, you don’t want to be a bother. You’re just like, what can I do? You’re just putting out so much energy, and so that’s such a foundational nervous system state that I can definitely see how that essence would be really primary. Do you also look at some of these more shock-related essences. You’re talking about the nervous system being fractured so early on, so like Star of Bethlehem, Rock Rose, some of those really primary essences.
Charlene Briggs: Yes, and that’s exactly what I was going to mention next is Star of Bethlehem for that. It’s really, truly a bottomless well of sorrow and loss that we absorb and we hold that alone. When I was 25—I was married at the time, so I was not living at home—I received a letter from my first mother. And I remember just sitting at the kitchen table, just with this fountain of tears that just wouldn’t stop, written in this beautiful gray stationery and beautiful handwriting by this woman who was a phantom to me, with my hands shaking, not because of what she said, but because she came back. And we wait forever for her to come back. Even if we know she can, we still wait. Something’s frozen in us waiting for her to come back. And the irony of it is, even after we meet her and there’s reunion, that doesn’t go away, that feeling doesn’t go away because when we needed her, she was dead to us. And that’s our psyche processing this. So, this sorrow is something we live with for a lifetime. Even after reunion, it’s nice to know our story. It was a great story, it was much better than the one I conjured up in my head, but the sorrow just doesn’t go away. So, yeah, the shock, the trauma, the sorrow, and Star of Bethlehem transforms that sorrow that we live into comfort. There is no container for the sorrow that we carry. There just isn’t one. So, Star of Bethlehem is definitely indicated right off the bat. Babies should get that when they’re born.
Rochana Felde: I’m a little bit overcome with emotion by hearing this. And it’s something I can see, too, in my family and really relate with on that level of it just being in the energy field, I guess you could say, even though it didn’t happen to me personally. Do you work with Mariposa Lily? And how do you see that in your protocol?
Charlene Briggs: Mariposa Lily is key in the protocol. I mean, I have an interesting story about Mariposa Lily, if I can share that with you. After my father died, like I said, he was the light of my life, and the light went out when he died. So, I cleared up the estate, and I took the seats out of the back of my SUV, and I lived in my car, traveling across the country for a summer. Put a cook stove and a YETI and a cot in there and processing. And my goal was to connect with the flowers that helped those of us who’ve lost our mothers, our parents, at birth.
And I was hiking up in the Rockies by myself, and Mariposa Lily was there calling to me. I’d been speaking with somebody in town that day, and he just randomly said, oh, by the way, the Mariposa Lilies are blooming now in the Rockies. So, I hiked up there, and I was hiking into the woods. I was by myself. And a woman came out. She said, are you looking for the flowers? I said, I am. And she said, what are you looking for? I said, Mariposa Lily. She said, oh, I know where they are. They’re very hard to find. And she took me to the Mariposa Lilies. So, as Robin Wall Kimmerer says in The Honorable Harvest, and we all know, you ask first. So, I asked, and the answer was no. No, not us, not me. Go farther in. So, I did. So, I went farther in and hiked and didn’t see anybody else that day. And I found a patch. I asked them, and they said yes.
And so, I took my crystal bowl out, and my spring water, and I picked one flower and was making the essence and meditating in miles and miles of woods. And as I was meditating, I felt someone watching me. And so, I came back in, and I listened, and I heard a rustle behind me. And I stood up and turned around, and there was a bear, 75 ft from me, looking at me with his ears up and its big eyes, around the corner of a tree, like it had never seen a human before. And I don’t remember leaving. It didn’t alarm me. I just quietly got my stuff and left. I don’t remember doing that, but I did. And the bear is the protector of her cubs. She is fiercely protective. And when we lose our mothers, we lose our protection. And the Mariposa Lily not just helps us fill that void with motherly love within ourselves, but it helps us realize that we can protect ourselves. It brings that sense of protection into us because I typically just used Mariposa Lily for finding that deep place within us where our mother was lost and filling that void ourselves. But after this experience, I realized that, oh, Mariposa Lily brings this protective energy to us so we can feel like, okay, we’re safe because we don’t feel safe when we’re born, and our mother doesn’t show up. We have to learn how to do that ourselves. So, yeah, she’s very important for getting out of that void left by our mother’s disappearance.
Kathleen Aspenns: Thank you for sharing that aspect of Mariposa Lily. It’s not an angle that I’d really considered, or that wasn’t in my awareness until just now, so thank you for adding one more piece to this absolutely pivotal essence that we use so much. I’m going to have to file that away under new data. Thanks.
And I’m going to refer back to something that Ro said, and I think will relate to your story as well. You were saying, Ro, that this didn’t happen to you; it happened to your mother. But doesn’t it travel through the line? I mean, Charlene, you mentioned that part of when you became really aware that you weren’t, I’m going to use giant air bunny quotes of “normal”, like my nervous system isn’t the way everybody else’s is, as part of your having your own children and part of needing to heal that wound as we move forward in time into a new generation.
Charlene Briggs: Well, it was my trauma, and it was her trauma. Our traumas were different and the same. So, she lost her child; I lost my mother. So, her energetic response to this loss lives in me just as my energetic response to loss lives in my children. This is not a once-and-done event. Adoption isn’t just a thing that happens to us, and we get over it. I think it’s beyond epigenetics. It’s epi-energetics because the energetic template that I hold in me is where my children bake in that oven, and they carry that energetic template within them, and then they’re– it’s something that really needs to be viewed from a broader perspective. It’s not just a child losing their first parents and then adapting to new parents and new situations, new identity. This is an energetic rupture in the continuum of life. I’m the future that my ancestors dreamed. I found my great, great grandfather’s grave down south last year, and I put roses on it. I had the honor.
Jeremiah Moore emigrated from Ireland when he was 16 years old because he refused to be colonized by the British. And he survived the 12-week journey where one-third of the people were buried at sea. And likewise, that template gets passed on for better and for worse. I refuse to be colonized by a system that is dependent upon my erasure. And I was erased. I have another identity that I was born with. Luckily, my first mother found me and gave me that information. And it’s a great story, but the psychology is overlaid upon the energy, and the real healing happens energetically. The real story happens energetically, and the real transition and transformation happens energetically. Just like sunlight is transformed into glucose through the process of photosynthesis, we can transform these templates with energy medicine like flower essence therapy. But we have to work at that template because it will get passed on.
And there’s no research on this. We’re guinea pigs. There’s 6 million of us in this country. I was taken from the Baby Scoop Era. End of World War II, the late 1940s through early 1970s, the Baby Scoop Era, hundreds of thousands of children were scooped up by the system that said, we have a solution to social correction for illegitimacy. Before then, families took the babies in. So, the social correction is a psychological overlay, but the real damage is the rupture in our energetic architecture, and that rupture doesn’t get repaired unless we do something like flower essence therapy to repair it. We can’t talk it away. We can’t feel it away. We can’t cover it up away. It’s there, and it’s real. Our fears, our angers, our emotions are just as real as our physiology. And I may have gone off on a tangent on that, but it is what I call epi-energetic. These templates are going to get passed on, and we too much focus on the genetics and the material world, but the material world is a function of the energetic world.
Rochana Felde: Absolutely. For women, we get all of our eggs when we’re in the womb, that we have for our entire life. So, from a kind of technical perspective, I could even say that I was in my grandmother’s womb and feeling that as well. So, when I learned about that, that was kind of an eye-opener. But even not with that cellular epigenetic ancestry, what you’re saying really resonates. It makes a lot of sense.
And with my mom, she ended up having a spiritual catharsis during her spiritual practice, and she found herself crying uncontrollably like a baby, like a baby wanting her mother during this experience that she had as an adult. And she realized, it was like releasing all of the emotions of what she must have felt as a baby crying for her mother. Before she was actually adopted, she was in a home for a month, a nursery. They used to have nurseries when babies were waiting for adoption. So, I must have tapped into that time and really channeled that emotion, and then was able, in a spiritual process, to release it. So, when you’re working with clients, I would imagine there’s going to be a lot of emotions that come up. There’s probably going to be a lot of crying and grief and just a release. And the flower essences are so lovely, as you say, to help with that. And what are some others that you might look to? I mean, coming to my mind is Borage for just the grief and the courage to get through the process. What are some others that you might pull in in this scenario, working with these really devastating emotions that need to come out in a way that somebody can handle?
Charlene Briggs: Yes, definitely. Definitely Borage and Bleeding Heart. But I’d like to first mention a gem from the Alaskan line, and that’s Montana Rhodochrosite, because Montana Rhodochrosite holds the heart open so the vital life force energy can do the healing. We live– again at birth, after birth, our system goes into hyper vigilance, and we live in that place on the shore where the wave is cresting and crashing constantly. That is our baseline. We can handle a lot of stress. The essences bring us to that place where the wave is fanning out, and the little clams are peeking out and digging holes and the sandpipers run. But we live in a place that we’re trained, our nervous system is trained to be hypervigilant. And as a result of that, a lot of things get in that shouldn’t. So, when we’re trying to stabilize, what I love about the gems is that they hold the vibration. They’re geometric patterns that hold the vibration for you. It’s like, nope, you’re going to stay here. It’s like Montana Rhodochrosite’s for like, I use it a lot when somebody’s had a monkey wrench thrown into their heart center. They’re living with a narcissist that’s constantly turning the story around onto them, or the people are accepting the responsibility for things that don’t belong to them, like that Pine sense, but it’s also chaos, some reason that there’s chaos in the heart center.
So, we can’t make sense of why our mother’s not there. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. And even as a child, we can’t make sense of why she would give us away. And we learn to live with what is familiar and make that comfortable when it’s not. So, Montana Rhodochrosite helps sort that out. It comes and strengthens the heart center. And it’s like the, I gotcha. And I shouldn’t use that term because a lot of people celebrate adoption with Gotcha Day, which can be very painful because to be got, you need to be given away. So, Montana Rhodochrosite really helps stabilize the energetic architecture so that the other essences can have their play within that space.
But certainly, as you mentioned, Borage is very important because it supports and uplifts the heart. It’s sad. We are heartbroken. We literally are heartbroken. We lost our mother, and nobody in the culture recognizes it. When anybody’s mother dies, people come to the rescue. They say, oh, I’m so sorry about your mother. We have to pretend we’re grateful that we’re in this new place. We never get to talk about her. At least in my generation and the closed adoptions, we can’t talk about our mother, and we don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings by doing so. And Bleeding Heart is definitely indicated for that longing for her. We knew her. For a little while, we knew her, and the absence of the one who we knew and that emptiness that just lives perpetually in the corner of our heart reserved just for her, it helps us be more buoyant and march forward, so. I could go on.
Kathleen Aspenns: Oh, I know, and I feel like there’s just such a need for more discussion on this topic. And it’s like we’re in this space right now where there’s so much that you can offer, and I’m so excited that you’re bringing this whole area of expertise to our listeners. I really, really appreciate that you’ve been able to join us today because I know that there’s so much richness here and so much awareness that really does need to be brought. And we, as flower essence practitioners, are so well placed to co-support people in their healing journey. And I would love to hear maybe a few references for some reading material for those who’d like to become more adoption-trauma aware, a few things. And we will totally put all of these, listeners, in the show notes so that you don’t have to scribble madly if you’re driving or whatever. But, yeah, a few ideas for people to get more educated on this topic.
Charlene Briggs: Sure. I have a friend. He’s an adoptee, he’s an adoption-trained therapist. He’s written literature. Robert Hafetz, H-A-F-E-T-Z, is his name. So, he had a 30-year practice helping people in the world of adoption. He has literature online. Betty Jean Lifton. Nancy Verrier is a researcher. She wrote The Primal Wound. Anybody who adopts a child, anyone who’s adopted should read Betty Jean Lifton, of course, but Nancy Verrier’s book, The Primal Wound. It’s all about coming home to the self. It’s all about the neurological damage that a child incurs. But Nancy Verrier is a birth mother. She’s had her own child. She did not relinquish her child. She has an adopted child, and she has her own child of biological origins. So, she’s done her research. We need to hear more from adopted people. We need to hear their experiences. We need to see the journey they’re taking. Shane Bouel, he has wonderful, brilliant documents on Medium. You can find him on the social media page, Medium. Very up to date and very thought-provoking. And there’s not a lot of good literature out there. This isn’t something we want to psychologicalize, and we’re not going to heal through the means of psychology. This is an energetic, this is a somatic experience, and that’s our way into health and healing and transformation.
Rochana Felde: Yeah, I wanted to ask, what would you say about those who’ve been through the open adoption process, which is supposed to be “better,” and know who their birth parents are from, usually from the day they’re born, and the idea is to continue a relationship of some kind with that birth parent. But what’s really going on? What would you say about that, and how they are still affected in some way?
Charlene Briggs: What’s really going on is the same process as those of us in a closed adoption in terms of the loss. We recognize that our first mother is gone, and we go into that neurological dysfunction. It is a structural dysfunction. So, her coming and going gives us information. I know from both sides, from the first mother side and the child side, it’s like a death happening all over again. They’re here. Oh, they’re back. They’re gone. They’re dead. It’s like knowing that your child is out there in the world. You’re not raising your child. Sometimes it’s a really good experience seeing them. Sometimes it’s not. And it’s hard to mesh the journeys because now you’ve got two people going through their journeys together.
I met my first mother when I was 25, and we both went through both of our divorces with each other. We both kind of supported each other, but we each had our own journey through the process. And we’re very close. It’s not always that way with people. So, whether it’s open or closed, the basic fact is, the child who is separated from their mother suffers for a lifetime until we can help them transmute and transform the energetic constructs that are stuck in them. The coming and going of a mother in an open adoption solves one problem, can create more. Really, every one of us is so individual in the way we experience it. There’s statistics out there, and Bob Hafetz will quote this, it’s quoted in his book, “4 out of 10 people in the United States who are adopted attempt suicide.” We’re overrepresented in psychological rehab. We’re overrepresented as givers and receivers of psychology. We’re the caretakers. There’s not enough data on us because we have been assimilated, but we’re never assimilated inside.
So, to answer your question, there are so many variables to that equation, but I think we go back to the bottom line is, what is the system that is taking away our original identity? You get some of that with an open adoption, but the rupture that happens is in the original way we present ourselves in this dimension in atomic structure. Underneath our biochemistry, we’re atomic structure, like everything else. And that’s the area where we need to address the healing, no matter what the external circumstances are.
Rochana Felde: Yeah, it makes so much sense as you’re speaking, and I can really see the need for more stories and for more adoptees to talk about their experience. And I think why we haven’t heard a lot is because what I can see is, in both scenarios, closed adoption and open adoption, there is the feeling that I need to be grateful for the people who took me in, that I got a good family or a better life than I would have had, and that closes off the ability to speak about the difficulties of that emotional process and that deservability. And I think that’s the case because usually a person who’s adopting another child is doing so to give them– I mean, not all the time, but to give them a life that maybe they wouldn’t have been able to have in being born in a situation that wasn’t going to work out for the original parents. And so, I can see that real feeling of not having the right or feeling the right to complain, right? And then that burrows in to be this like, not feeling like you have a right to take up space in the world. And all of the things that you’re saying about being assimilated is really interesting. I’m really glad we’re having this conversation. Thank you so much for bringing this to us, Charlene.
Charlene Briggs: Thank you for being open to this conversation. I think it’s really one that is very important for a lot of people. There’s 6 million of us in the country, you know?
Kathleen Aspenns: And as we come to a close, we’ve been really focusing on the child, and I just want to express the compassion for the birth mother, because I cannot imagine what that process would be like, the pain of relinquishing a child, and the horrible circumstances that must have been that create that circumstance. So, I really appreciate that you do work to help reduce that as much as you can, but also just open-hearted compassion for all of the women who’ve given up children in hopes of them having a better life than they could provide, and that offering essences, like essences all around. Everybody deserves the compassion of the essences and the love of nature to heal that wound because there’s wounding on every side of this equation.
Charlene Briggs: Exactly. And I appreciate that perspective. Everyone is trying to do the best that they can, and loyalty is a huge piece of our equation as adoptive people. We don’t want to violate the goodwill of our parents. We don’t understand what our story is. So, I just really want to emphasize, the adopted person is carrying the burden from both of their parents, and it comes around maybe five or six decades into the experience where we’re really getting what’s going on. So, I really think it’s important that we have– we don’t want to use the word intervention, but that we offer opportunities for people to heal early in the process, and that is a function of awareness. So, my job is to bring awareness without blame, without anger. Just, this is the situation that we’re dealing with. How can we best help people?
And the power of the flower essences, I’ve been practicing 30 years, thousands of clients, and you both are flower essence practitioners, you see how powerful these beautiful aspects of the world are to help heal people’s hearts. So, in this vein, I think adoption really needs to take more of a front stage in our culture, in our discussions, and to make room for people to speak out. It’s very, very difficult for us to speak about it because we live in that fracture zone, that gap between our experience and the unadopted. And it’s very, almost impossible for unadopted people to imagine what it’s like to not know your mother. But we have to try, so. Thank you.
Kathleen Aspenns: Thank you for being here with us. How would somebody reach out to you? Would you be so kind, and of course, we’ll have these in the show notes, too, but for anybody who’s interested in learning more about your work and learning more about what you do, please give us–
Charlene Briggs: Sure. They can contact me on my website, botanicalenergetics.com. There’s contact information there.
Rochana Felde: Wonderful. Thank you again, Charlene.
Charlene Briggs: Thank you.
Rochana Felde: Yeah, this has just been an incredible conversation, at least for me personally, and I hope for our listeners to really get some insight into this area that is not discussed very often. And the pieces of it have so many applications into all sorts of birth trauma and any form of disruption in that process, in that time period, but to have that insight to this particular population is really valuable, and I definitely appreciate it. So, thanks, and take care.
Charlene Briggs: You too. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Take care.
