The act of reclamation comes with loss.
There was a time before coming out of the fog, I was vividly aware I was in the fog. I stood on the precipice frightened of what laid before me. I knew I had work to do. I knew if I continued to ignore what was going on inside me it would eat me alive or that I would drown in my own hyperactivity of denial.
I knew that reclaiming my voice would require change, hard work, and loss. It wouldn’t just affect me. It would affect my relationships, my coping skills, my children, my hobbies, my body. The choice to reclaim left me paralyzed and frightened. Because I was scared if I spoke, if I reclaimed who I am, I would be rejected all over again.
I am a few years out of the fog.
I’m still scared as hell.
I did experience rejection.
I lost several friends whose own traumas didn’t make room for my change.
The second I reclaimed my voice in my adoption story, one parent rejected me, dismissing their roll in my trauma or subsequent 17 years of unhealthy relationship.
I’m becoming less connected with my adoptive parents. A process that happens for most in their teens or 20s, I am just now doing.
I’m becoming less co-dependant in my marriage which means redefining rolls, expectations, and being scared as hell he won’t like who I am becoming and will leave me too.
Reclaiming means letting go of some coping mechanisms, many which appeared healthy, productive or were praised as strengths.
Reclaiming means facing rejection, an adoptee’s largest fear, and facing it head on engages our innate self-sabatoging instinct. It’s not always joyful or positive. It’s hard, deep, thick, grueling work for adoptees. It’s going to get way worse before it gets better.
Reclamation means risking everything to find ourselves.
And that’s what pushed me out of the fog.
Because becoming who I was created by God to be was worth the risk.
Reclamation
