Category: Adopted

Big Adoptee Feelings, Learning to Feel the Feels While Coming Out of the Fog

Published on by Pamela A. Karanova6 Comments

I remember back to the earlier days of my life, particularly in my pre-teen years, and I was so angry about my birth mother never coming back to get me; I just wanted to die. I hated the world and, I hated everyone in it. And most of all, I hated myself. For me, this means my self-love was non-existent. Nothing could console me and I didn’t feel connected to anyone or anything.

I was a trainwreck.

During the beginning of my life, I developed the fantasy that she was coming back. I dreamed and fantasized of the day that she would change her mind and decide her love for me was so great, she decided to come back and get me. After all, I dreamed she wanted me back because who could actually give their baby away and genuinely mean it?

During my teen years and childhood, as many times as I saw therapists ( I saw a lot!), adoption was never addressed or discussed. Because of this, I didn’t start working on any adoptee-related problems or issues I was holding deep down until the later part of my 30’s which is when I consider the beginning of my process of coming out of the fog about adoption.

In the years that passed, adoption-related thoughts plagued my mind, but there was no help for me. I learned to keep things tucked inside, never sharing my thoughts with the world for fear. Fear of what? Fear of shattering my adoptive mother’s dream come true to be a mother. Fear of upsetting her or being abandoned once again. I never talked about it, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about it. It honestly never left my mind. I was obsessed with finding HER, my biological mother.

Who would have ever known that my internal dialog with myself was one of ultimate torture? What adults in my life would have understood this dynamic played out as an adopted child? I wasn’t acting out until I was in my pre-teens.

But even then, once I started acting out, no one ever acknowledged that being adopted could play a role in my behaviors. Even running away, locked in drug and alcohol treatment, being in group homes, detention, breaking the law, fighting, stealing, unplanned pregnancy, and even a burglary at 15 – Not even my adoptive parents. So I am here to tell you that not one person in all the contact I had with adults, made the connection that “Wow, this girl is adopted. Maybe that brings some root issues for her we need to bring to the table?”

Once I reached my 30’s I lived many years as an everyday drinker, trying to raise three kids as a single mom, work, pay the bills, and not think about my adoptee reality. Alcohol was the escape, so was partying. I didn’t know how to process the pain from relinquishment, nor did I ever make the connection that my drinking was a symptom of a much bigger cause – ADOPTION TRAUMA AND RELINQUISHMENT TRAUMA.

Once I learned that I have always had every reason to act out and be angry, the fog began to lift. It’s taken over 10+ years working on myself. I have learned that my feelings were so EXTREME and SEVERE because not only was I keeping things tucked inside, but sharing my real feelings about my adoption experience was IMPOSSIBLE because I had never done it.

Not only had I not shared feelings, but I was emotionally abused and gaslit my entire life that adoption was a wonderful thing. I made my adoptive parent’s dreams come true to be parents. I was also told that my birth mother loved me so much; she wanted me to have a better life with a loving two-parent home that she couldn’t provide. Too bad my adoptive parents divorced a year later, and I was raised in an abusive home with a mentally ill and narcissistic adoptive mother I never bonded with!

From a very young age, I learned that I must put everyone’s feelings ahead of my own and that my feelings weren’t significant compared to everyone else’s. Of course, I internalized this, and it only magnified my feelings of grief, loss, anger, rage, and self-hate. I was also forced to pretend that my adoptive parents were my only parents. I knew they were not, but I had to go along with the fantasy because I didn’t know who my biological parents were or how to find them. I was forbidden that information, and it was kept a secret from me.

No Truth, No Healing

The reality that I have made it out of this complete nightmare is nothing short of a miracle. This is why I keep sharing my story because it’s a miracle I am alive to do it. The reason I am saying this is because my issues were so deep. I spent the majority of my youth wanting to die. I tried several times to take my own life (no one even noticed), and I would entice others in hopes that they would kill me. Sounds ludicrous, right? Well, it is, but that’s how dark my sorrow and sadness were. I just wanted out of my misery, and at that time, I was hopeless I would ever “feel alive.” So it’s easy for me to understand why so many adoptees choose to leave the world.

The world has failed adoptees.

When I hit 2010, I found my first adoptee online via the Twitter platform named Jessenia Arias. Jessenia is now Jessenia Arias Parmer, and her website is I Am Adopted. I will never forget this beautiful soul, who I consider one of the most amazing lights to adoptees and anyone in the adoption world. I love you, Jessenia! I remember like it was yesterday, reading her tweets and how so many of them resonated with me.

After spending 2010 and 2011 trying to heal from adoption and relinquishment trauma with alcohol in my everyday life, I finally decided that I could not heal while using substances. Instead, it made my problems worse because I wasn’t genuinely feeling my feelings, I was mixing alcohol with raw emotions, and it was indeed a recipe for disaster!

On my earthly birthday, August 13, 2012, I decided to throw in the towel on my drinking, and this was the last day I ever drank alcohol. Why? Because I desperately wanted to heal, and I wanted my kids to have a better mom than what I had. Even when I was in shambles on the inside, I wanted to get better for my kids. And eventually, for myself. Removing alcohol from my life, I had to get honest with myself. Then, all the feelings I had been running from my whole life showed up at my front door.

BIG ADOPTEE FEELINGS!

Frankly, adoptee feelings have been the biggest and most complex feelings I’ve ever had, even experiencing other traumatic events. Slowly, I started sharing my feelings online, but I was scared to my core that if anyone knew how I felt, something terrible would happen. So I began to write online under an alias, and I wasn’t strong enough to share my feelings from my true authentic self. This was when Adoptee in Recovery was born. It protected me.

I wrote many years under this alias, but one day into my healing journey, the lights flipped on, and I realized I was coming out of the fog, but I wasn’t being true to myself in the process. I wrote under an alias, making me feel phony and not legit. So I stepped into a new phase around 2015 of welcoming the real true me into my website and online adoptee world. This was a liberating experience, but it took years to get up enough courage and strength to get here. I finally didn’t feel invisible. I felt more real than I ever had. I was strong and ready to share my story with the world, from the real true me and not just a piece of me.

 ALL OF ME.

No more hiding behind an alias, but it was lifesaving for a time in my life where I was operating out of paralyzing fear. Adoptees have a lot to lose when they share their real feelings. For me, it was worth the risk, especially knowing I could validate the sentiments of my fellow adoptees if I poured my heart and soul out into my articles.

We must recognize that every person who experiences separation trauma from their biological mother has trauma memories stored in their subconscious memory. This trauma can cause many issues that might not be brought to light. They come out later in life, and adoptees usually have to learn about this independently by experiencing triggers.

While many adoptees feel conditioned to be thankful from the beginning of life, we learn to internalize our thoughts and feelings about our adoption experiences. We go most of our childhood for some of us without ever letting the words from our emotions come out of our mouths. However, just because you don’t hear an adoptee sharing heartbreak or sadness doesn’t mean it’s not there. Most of the time, if they know the whole truth of their adoption, it’s there.

I will never forget the first time I started to share feelings about my birth mother. After 27 years of a love affair with alcohol (so I didn’t have to feel), I stopped drinking alcohol in 2012 at 38 years old and made my way to Celebrate Recovery. I was sitting in a circle of women, and I started sharing about my birth mother, and tears started to flow. I began to cry; my cry turned into a sob. The next thing I knew, I started whaling with my cry and tears, snot started slanging. Suddenly, I realized this was the very first time in my whole life I had shared about the loss of my birth mother. I was 38 years old at the time. 38!!!! Suddenly, an adoptive mom interrupted me, who was in the group. She said, “I’m sorry, but you don’t know adoption like I know adoption! I adopted two kids from foster care, and the experience those kids had gone through before we adopted them has been a nightmare!”

Of course, I was silenced. I shut down. I couldn’t even finish my sentence. How many adoptees who are reading have gotten this sort of treatment in your life?

I got up, and I left…

I walked out of Celebrate Recovery, and that was the moment that I knew if adoptees wanted to heal from a space like this, that is supposed to be safe to share, we would have to create our adoptee centric space because I knew we would be silenced if we didn’t! This was when I knew Adoptees Connect, Inc. was so needed!

So you see, the one time I get up enough courage to share my real feelings, I get silenced and shut down. So I left, and I was hopeless after this. To be transparent, if I were suicidal at this time, I would have taken my own life. I needed and wanted help so desperately, but there was no place I could even share my adoptee feelings freely without being silenced. By this time, I had given up therapy. I couldn’t bear to therapy another therapist.

News Flash: This is the treatment most adoptees get in life! We aren’t only silenced and shut down; we are emotionally and mentally abused and gaslit regularly. Yet, we choose to keep our feelings to ourselves for fear of more emotional abuse.

When I started to come out of the fog and share my truth, I feared that my adoptive family would read my feelings? What if my biological family reads my feelings? Will they all leave me too? Will they stop talking to me? Will they be mad at me?

Despite all these internal fears, I stepped out, and I started to share anyway. After a while, I learned to put myself first and not care what anyone thinks. Finally, after a lifetime of being silenced,  being true to myself and sharing my truth loudly became a priority. Unfortunately, many adoptees never get to this point. Instead, they internalize things so long that they lose the battle at life.

They choose not to go on.

I want those reading that aren’t adopted to consider acknowledging and understanding that their role in an adopted person’s life could potentially be a role that sends an adoptee over the edge. What they say to us is a significant piece of our journey. Do you realize I will never forget the way this adoptive mom treated me and how she silenced me?

Let me share that this experience has been the launching pad for everything I have done for adoptees in creating adoptee-centric spaces all over the world? Unfortunately, not all adoptees will have this courage and strength because we are simply tired! We can’t take more gaslighting and abuse from the world that celebrates our trauma. (adoption) We are tired of being treated like second-class citizens to everyone else’s feelings.

If I ever have the opportunity to speak to an adoptive parent, I always share that the sooner the truth is revealed to the adoptee, the better. I would seek emotional support and therapy from an ADOPTEE competent therapist to know when to share the truth, specifically at age-appropriate times. If I had started to identify with grief, loss, and sadness early on, my healing would have started earlier. I might not have depended on alcohol to numb my pain for 27 years of my life.

The thing about adoptees being young and healing are that we need our adoptive parents, counselors, therapists, and adults in our lives to help us find the words to identify the feelings and also spark conversations that will help create a dialogue. As kids, we don’t know how to do this without help.

Before any adopted child begins to share feelings about being adopted, we need our adoptive parents to research and learn as much as possible and acknowledge and accept that adoption always begins with loss. And we need them to recognize that anytime a mother and a child is separated, a trauma occurs. Once they come to a place of acceptance that their adopted child could struggle with these things, then they can know how to hold space for difficult conversations to be sparked at age-appropriate times.

It’s taken me 10+ years to learn how to process my adoptee feelings in healthy ways, and I am 47 years old. My life is over half over if I’m lucky. Adoption has stolen so much from my fellow adoptees and me, but it doesn’t have to keep stealing so much.

Today, I take my time to respond to uncomfortable feelings, and I have learned that all my emotions are valid and legitimate. If no one has ever told you, so are yours! I sit with them when they come, and I am no longer numbing myself with substances, so I don’t have to feel. My tears have gone from being hard as a rock to flowing freely. Now, I have cried so much the last 10+ years as an attempt to feel and heal that my tears are finally starting to dry up.

This is what I call getting honest with myself, and sitting with my sorrow and sadness, and learning that it’s okay to feel these ways. I remember days when I couldn’t feel at all!

 I have also accepted the pain is here to stay, which was one of the most prominent healing dynamics of my journey and life. I spent so much time trying to be completely healed in my past! But after running many rat races, I learned that it was all a hoax, and this pain is here to stay. I’m not saying I won’t heal because I am healing daily, but adoption’s painful parts will always revisit. I will never be completely whole, and that’s okay. I have accepted it, and it’s easier for me to believe this than run a rat race for 100 years TRYING TO BE FULLY HEALED. This reality in itself has helped me tremendously. They will revisit future generations and my children when they aren’t revisiting me. The key is not running from it but embracing it, sharing it, and feeling it.

Today, I am thankful for the ability to feel because I remember when I was a teenager, my heart, soul, and entire being felt so hallow, dark, and empty inside. Because of all the blood, sweat, and tears, I’ve put into my journey, not today.

Today I am full of life, and I have joy in the little things. I hope the same for my fellow adoptees.

Adoptees, What has the process been like to identify with your adoptee feelings? Have you struggled with this? Do you have any advice for your fellow adoptees or tips and tricks you recommend when it comes to processing and feeling adoptee feelings? Have your adoptee feelings been the biggest feelings you’ve ever had? How has your healing journey been? What helped you the most?

Don’t forget this article along with all my other articles are available in audio for your convenience, just look up Pamela A. Karanova Podcast on Google Podcasts, iTunes , Spotify. and Amazon Music. Interested in treating me with a coffee, to add fuel to my fire? Click here. Many thanks in advance to my supporters!

Thank you for reading,

Love, Love

*The views and opinions expressed in this article are that of the author, Pamela A. Karanova. Reproduction of the material contained in this publication may be made only with the written permission of Pamela A. Karanova

My Friend Has an Adopted Child, and They Don’t Have Any Issues With Being Adopted

Published on by Pamela A. Karanova23 Comments

“Well, Joan is a close friend of mine from church, and she adopted two daughters from overseas in the 1980s, and they don’t seem to have any of the issues you are speaking about. On the contrary, they seem pretty thankful and happy that they are adopted.”

I can’t even express how many times I’ve heard this in my life from people who likely mean well. But, unfortunately, it’s usually when I share something that is not in alignment with the popular narrative of how adoption is viewed, and/or I share some of the heartache and pain many adoptees (including myself) experience in their journey.

Before every adoption takes place, the separation from one’s biological mother is a traumatic experience, and it goes unrecognized most of the time. But, unfortunately, this is sometimes the most significant trauma of the adopted person’s life, and it can and does impact us for our entire lifetimes. So, how can an adoptee heal when our trauma is celebrated worldwide?

 Once adopted, those layers only add to the layer of trauma from maternal separation from our biological mothers. I feel confident in sharing that I genuinely think most people have no idea about the impacts of maternal separation and how the complexities can echo in the adopted individual’s life for years to come. It not only impacts the adoptee’s life for years to come, but it impacts future generations as well. But once you know the truth, you can’t unknow the truth. Of course, you can choose to ignore it, but that has long-term consequences for the adopted individuals in your life.

When someone knows of a “well-rounded” adoptee, they feel the need to speak up and share that they know ONE adoptee who doesn’t have any issues with being adopted. I look at this type of comment as a silencer statement. In other words, when someone says this to an adoptee or about an adoptee, they know I feel their knowledge sharing is meant to trump whatever painful piece to the adoptee experience I am sharing.

I will be candid. I can’t speak for all adoptees, but I can say that by building relationships with hundreds, if not thousands of adoptees worldwide for 10+ years, I have yet to meet an adopted adult who has ZERO issues with being adopted. They are why I keep writing and why I keep sharing, it’s for them.

Most of the time, when I communicate with adoptees, they share that they have never let their adoptive parents or family know how they truly feel because the risk is too consequential. However, we also have to consider that if the adopted person is a child or someone who’s not “out of the fog,” the information shared on their behalf isn’t necessarily accurate. Children can’t tap into sharing feelings about separation trauma, and they don’t know how to articulate feelings they are having that are so complex. They need the adults in their life to help them, but that is an impossible feat as long as all the adults in their life are convinced “Little Johnny and Jane are fine, just fine with being adopted.”

Adults in contact with the adopted child are responsible for researching separation trauma and coming to a space of acceptance that it exists. This is the ONLY way the adopted child will express feelings of grief, loss, and sadness. I have said for many years that every adoptive parent should become a specialist in how to help children process grief, and I recommend the grief recovery method. Why? Because the sooner we start to process the grief from all of the loss of our biological connections and history, the sooner we begin to heal. The only way this will happen is if every adoptive parent chooses to step out of denial that maybe “Johnny and Jane aren’t fine, just fine.” I completely recognize how difficult this might be as a parent; however, if you want to save your adopted child’s life, you will start to learn more about helping them grieve before it’s too late. Trust me when I tell you, I know so many adoptees who have spent their lives just wanting to DIE because they don’t have a way to process the pain; the world won’t listen. They think dying would be easier than living with the neverending doom of sadness that separation trauma, compacted by adoption trauma, brings.

One of the first things I recommend is that all parties do extensive research on how important the bond is between a biological mother and her child. Then, read, read and read more. Look up attachment disruption and learn as much as you can. This has helped me understand what I lost and what has always been missing from my life.

Without this knowledge, I would have never known. One of the books that helped me understand how impactful the bond between a mother and a baby is Babies Remember Birth by David Chamberlain.

Searching the internet, you can find many articles about attachment disruption and the consequences that follow that have lifelong implications. For example, read The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier.

But, let me also share, you cannot guarantee that a child will attach and bond with the adoptive mother. I know hundreds of adoptees who have never bonded with their adoptive mothers, and the mother wound x2 causes immeasurable damage to the adopted person and lasts a lifetime.

We must recognize that the separation trauma exists, whether the adopted person “seems like they are fine, just fine” or not. Unfortunately, one of the most horrendous things that the adoption agencies and adoption officials have done is normalize maternal separation as if the trauma of this life-altering event doesn’t even exist. Not only are they ignoring it exists, but they aren’t providing the adoptive parents with resources on how to navigate the waters. It’s honestly offensive and monstrous because these agencies and adoption officials are often familiar with these dynamics. Still, they choose to turn a blind eye because they profit from separating mothers and babies.

For all those who continue to share the narrative that “My Friend Has an Adopted Child, and They Don’t Have Any Issues With Being Adopted,” I ask you to please get to know more adult adoptees. (not adopted children)

Please attempt to sit down with them and listen to their stories. Consider that your friend’s adopted child likely wouldn’t tell their adoptive parents how they feel. Ponder that a child can’t usually find the complex language that aligns with the multi-faceted layers of the adoptee experience. Think about the very nature of them being adopted and how it is celebrated worldwide. How could they tap into real feelings when they have been conditioned to be grateful they were adopted?

And how many adoptees do you know that seem to have no issues with it? One or two, you say? Well, I suggest you try to hear the stories from anywhere from five to ten adoptees, and then let’s see if you have the same opinions. As I already shared, I’ve gotten to know adoptees personally all over the world, and not one of them has said they are “fine, just fine” with being adopted.

It’s not even as much about the one adoptee who’s “fine just fine” with being adopted as society at large does not know how to acknowledge and accept the fact that they have been sold an award-winning LIE when it comes to adoption. That’s where people get uncomfortable.  

Well, let me make a declaration for 2022 and share that we’re tired of hearing you say, “your friend adopted a child, and they are fine, just fine.” It minimizes the real adoptee experience, and let’s be completely honest. You have no idea what that adoptee feels, so please stop saying these things to adoptees you meet in life. It’s harmful, and it’s hurtful. If you insist on speaking for adoptees, at least consider putting in the work and sitting down and having a real heart to heart and hearing the absolute truth from an adult adoptee and not just one or two. Talk to many. Learn to be comfortable with difficult conversations. Then and maybe then will you have a truthful opinion that might be valid to share?

Thank you for reading.

Don’t forget this article along with all my other articles are available in audio for your convenience, just look up Pamela A. Karanova Podcast on Google Podcasts, iTunes , Spotify. and Amazon Music. Interested in treating me with a coffee, to add fuel to my fire? Click here. Many thanks in advance to my supporters!

*The views and opinions expressed in this article are that of the author, Pamela A. Karanova. Reproduction of the material contained in this publication may be made only with the written permission of Pamela A. Karanova

Dear Non-Adopted Friends & Family Members

Published on by Pamela A. Karanova8 Comments

I will do my best to share from a place of grace because a lot is on the line here, but I also refuse to sugarcoat things to make them comfortable for anyone who reads this article. Hopefully, I can reach a middle ground that relays the message yet shares what is at stake in an upfront way. 

The lives of adopted individuals are in a crisis, and there is no time to wait in sharing this truth or to ponder on those who might take this article as a slap in the face or offensive. 

First things first, this article is for anyone who knows and loves an adopted individual and for those who can step into their shoes to try to gain a level of understanding that adoption might not be all you have known it to be. 

Do you have the emotional and mental capacity to do that? 

Are you open-minded and can see that other perspectives are entirely possible? 

If the answer is “YES,” Please continue. 

If you can’t do that, don’t bother reading any further.

Your time will be wasted. 

This information is for those who want to learn and those who can see beyond their own level of experience, knowledge, and understanding. 

My entire life, I’ve been silenced, shut down, and ridiculed by non-adopted individuals, and I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of seeing my fellow adoptees treated this way, and I can’t help but wonder if people understand the depts of their words and actions? Do they know their responses to us sharing feelings could be a life or death response from the adoptee? 

Adoptees are DYING!

I can’t help but give some of these people the benefit of the doubt that it’s not just adopted people they treat this way, but all people because they never learned the actual value of acknowledging someone’s feelings, sitting with others in their sadness, and also having empathy for others and trying to understand their viewpoints. I have learned the hard way, this is a gift, and not everyone has it. 

I have recently seen an adoptee share a meme (see below) on a social media post, and a long-time friend & family member decided to post a comment on the meme. This is what they said, “I don’t get it. Would you have rather grown up in an orphanage or foster care?” This reminds me of all the times we get, “Would you rather have been aborted?” or the infamous “You should be thankful you were adopted!” 

I couldn’t help but jump in and go to the defense of this young lady, who is a fellow adoptee, because his comment struck a chord with me. Even when the meme said, “Adoptees are 4x more likely to attempt suicide – Listen before its too late,” and he still didn’t have the common sense that it was OBVIOUS that the adoptee shared this for very valid and legit reasons. Gaslighting her into feeling bad about sharing it was an awful thing to do. Talk about insensitive and offensive to the adoptee experience, yet how many adoptees experience this daily? 

If we emerge from the fog and start sharing our feelings, we are always in fear someone will jump on us or tell us we’re ungrateful, and it can and does cause us to shrink back from sharing our truth. 

My point in sharing here is that you have no idea what it feels like to be an adoptee if you aren’t adopted. You don’t have a clue about the complexities that we carry around with us daily. You have two choices. To listen and try to learn from us OR you can turn the other way and ignore us like we’re the ungrateful adoptees the world says we are. BUT YOU WILL NOT continue to gaslight us and minimize our pain and suffering when it takes us our whole lives to get to a space where we feel confident enough to share our feelings. 

I know so many adoptees who have been on the edge of taking their own lives at various times in their lives. I am one of those adoptees. But, unfortunately, one friend or a family member can say something that literally can and will and has sent an adoptee over the edge of taking their own life, and there is no coming back. It happens all the time!

It blows me away that even when this meme says what it says, this individual had to insert his ignorant and self-serving comment without ever asking the adoptee, “Hey, I’m wondering if you can help me understand this better? I would love to learn from you!” 

I wrote an article back in 2014 – Just Listen, That is All. But if you want to do the world a favor, try to LEARN something new while you listen to adoptees share their experiences. It truly is a humbling thing when we come to a place in life where we acknowledge and accept that we don’t know everything and we can learn a lot of things from other people. 

If you have made it this far and are a friend or family member of an adopted person, thank you for reading. I would like to invite you not to comment when an adoptee shares feelings unless it’s coming from a place of support and understanding. What would you do if your comment was the breaking point for that person, and it was the last straw for them to feel once again invalidated, unheard and unacknowledged? You would have to live with that for the rest of your life, and there is no bringing that adoptee back. 

Like the meme says, LISTEN BEFORE ITS TOO LATE! 

How hard is it? 

TOO HARD FOR SOME PEOPLE! 

National Adoption Awareness Month is coming up, and so is Adoptee Remembrance Day – October 30th, and a lot of adoptees will be sharing feelings, thoughts, and emotions during these times. I invite everyone reading to try to understand the WHYS better when adoptees share how they are feeling. 

It costs nothing to be a kind and empathetic human being. 

I am thankful you are here for the adoptees who have made it this far because I want to invite you to cut these insensitive and harmful people out of your life. You do not need anyone in your life who tries to shut you down, silence you, and minimize your legitimate feelings. I encourage you to block, ban and delete anyone who can’t create space for you to share your story and emotions. Those are not your people, and it might be hard but do it anyway. You deserve to have people in your life who are understanding and empathetic for you and all that you carry. Allowing harmful people in your life will not serve you well in the long run. 

Family or not, they have to go.

Put yourself first, and set firm boundaries.  

Don’t forget this article along with all my other articles are available in audio for your convenience, just look up Pamela A. Karanova Podcast on Google Podcasts, iTunes , Spotify. and Amazon Music. Interested in treating me with a coffee, to add fuel to my fire? Click here. Many thanks in advance to my supporters!

Love, Love. 

*The views and opinions expressed in this article are that of the author, Pamela A. Karanova. Reproduction of the material contained in this publication may be made only with the written permission of Pamela A. Karanova

Bridging the Gap Between InterCountry Adoptees and Professionals

Published on by Pamela A. KaranovaLeave a comment

I spent 47 years of my life in and out of therapist’s offices back to five years old. I remember each time I was seeing a new therapist, the concept and idea of adoption was never brought to light or to the surface. EVER. 

As I emerged out of the fog in my 30’s I was still seeking therapy and direction on how to process my adoptee reality and was always left with absolutely nothing. Once I learned the deeper dynamics of relinquishment trauma compacted by adoption trauma, things became even more real. 

Even in my 40’s, seeking out therapy once again, I found myself therapying the therapist and exhausted in that process. While it’s been evident my entire life that there is a noticeable gap between not just mental health professionals but all professionals when it comes to the multilayered complexities of the adoptee experience and understanding that experience. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to help someone navigate their journey if you don’t understand the complexities. 

As I’ve spent a significant amount of time contemplating and trying to understand where things have gone wrong, and why have adoptees been failed so miserably? How are adoptees 4x more likely to attempt suicide, and our prisons, jails, mental health facilities, and treatment facilities are over-populated with adopted people. Yet, this reality isn’t a shocking testimonial that something in adoption is gravely wrong. Instead, adoptees are dying at the expense of this failed experiment called adoption. 

Knowing this gap is present, I have found that seeking help from professionals was a continuous letdown, so I stopped seeking understanding or healing from them. I had given up hope which is a bad thing. Thankfully, even though they couldn’t help me, I had enough strength to help ME when the world failed me. So I decided the next best thing was to create Adoptees Connect, Inc., or I likely wouldn’t be here writing this article.  

The fantastic news I have to share today and my reason for writing this article is to share an exciting new resource with my followers. I was contacted by my friend and fellow adoptee, Lynelle Long, the founding director of ICAV – InterCountry Adoptee Voices. Lynelle shared with me that she has created a new adoptee-led educational video resource for professionals designed to assist doctors, teachers, and mental health professionals to better understand the adoptee experience for intercountry adoptees. This project took many months, and a wide range of individuals helped pull it off. Click the link below to learn more. 

Lynelle Long, Founding Director – ICAV InterCountry Adoptee Voices

Video Resource for Professionals

This project from Lynelle and ICAV is a fantastic step in the right direction at bridging the gap with the communities that are designed to help adoptees but have been lacking the resources to understand the complexities of the adoptee experience themselves. In all my years of being in adoption and adoptee circles, this is the first I have seen that tackle such essential topics in this way, from the adoptee’s perspective. 

When I received Lynelle’s email, I was overjoyed for the adoptee community, and I can’t lie. I got a little teary-eyed about it. So many lost adoptees, so many locked up adoptees, so many adoptees who feel so misunderstood and invalidated. So many adoptees deported, and hurting. Finally, the resources we have needed all along are coming to life because of Lynelle and organizations like ICAV. It is a massive milestone in the adoptee community, and I couldn’t wait to share it with my followers.  

I want to share a special message of gratitude to Lynelle for being such an extraordinary force in the adoption community and for pouring her life out to create such valuable resources that have otherwise been unavailable. Another special thank you to everyone involved in this project. You all are changing the narrative and shifting a community that has needed this resource for far too long. From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU. 

To learn more about ICAV and all the other resources Lynelle’s organization provides, please take a little time on the ICAV – Intercountry Adoptee Voices website. 

To visit the new resource for professionals, click here – Video Resource for Professionals. 

Please be sure to share these valuable and life saving resources in your communities, you might be saving an adoptees life. Together we are changing the narration of adoption.

Much Love,

*The views and opinions expressed in this article are that of the author, Pamela A. Karanova. Reproduction of the material contained in this publication may be made only with the written permission of Pamela A. Karanova

Adoptees Deserve Far More Than What They Get

Published on by Pamela A. Karanova6 Comments

*Disclosure Statement: I do NOT claim to speak for all adoptees in this article, nor do I claim ALL adoptive parents are abusive or fit the narrative of the topics brought to light in this article. CHILL #apfragility

And for the record, Jesus, his love, our adoptive parents love or a house full of stuff isn’t enough. 

I keep seeing individuals use Jesus as a reason to invalidate the reality and truth of the adoptee experience. 

This has to stop. 

Adoptees are DYING. 

PLEASE STOP! 

Listen to Adoptees before it’s too late. 

First things first, if we’re transparent, adoption is messy AF. Everything about it. It’s complicating, emotional, taxing, and exhausting. There is no one size fits all, and all stories are unique in their own way. 

I’ve not only navigated my adoptee journey and spent most of my life in agony over it, but I’ve listened to the stories of hundreds of my fellow adoptees. We all have in common that we experience painful pieces of our journeys that can impact many areas of our lives, if not every area. 

“So what’s the big deal? Everyone deals with pain in life!” 

The big deal is that we live in a world that promotes and celebrates adoption (just like religion)  but do they realize they promote relinquishment trauma on every child separated from their biological mother?  While they pray for another person’s child, they ignore entirely that every adoption is rooted in loss and trauma FIRST.

They are praying for TRAUMA TO HAPPEN!

 If you have ever prayed for a child to adopt, YOU ARE GUILTY! 

Thousands of adoptees have walked before me and navigated these muddy and messy waters of trying to navigate a life that’s rooted in relinquishment trauma. Thousands of adoptees are walking behind me that haven’t yet made the connection, and some are slowly emerging out of the adoptee fog, figuring out just how damaging relinquishment trauma is on every person separated from their biological mothers at the beginning of life. 

For some of us, we don’t make this connection until later in life. We become all too familiar with waking up every day trying to make sense of it all, trying to heal, and finding happiness when our very beginnings were severed from the woman who should love and want us the most, our biological mothers. 

Society has this conditioned belief that adoption can be an excellent and painless alternative to many scenarios in life. For example, maybe someone can’t have children of their own, or they want to save unwanted children, so they sign an adoption registry and start the process to adopt a child. Whatever the reason is, we need to get to the root of the problems, and there are many! 

Adoption is a supply and demand multi-billion-dollar unregulated industry. Check out The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce or The Stork Market: America’s Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Industry by Mirah Riben if you need to research for yourself.  

If adoption agencies would genuinely care for the child’s best interest, they wouldn’t be in the business of separating them from their biological mothers. Whether some women choose to parent or not, if we have more adoption agencies, we have more accessibility to provide services for a mother to pass her baby over to strangers. Just like the more adoptive parents who want to adopt, keep these businesses in the business.  

Unfortunately, these agencies are FOR-PROFIT.  Of course, that’s why an adoption costs so much, yet we fail to realize that adoption today is rooted in legalized human trafficking. If you haven’t figured this out by now, I encourage you to do some soul searching and researching. The adoption industry is selling babies and making a living off of doing it. When a price tag is being put on a human being’s head for any cost, it’s human trafficking. It shouldn’t matter that adoption is legalized, it doesn’t mean its right.

When many adopted children are adopted, they are legally assigned a new identity, and their history is essentially erased. However, even when our beginnings are painful or abusive, we are still connected to our past via DNA and our history. We all have a history, even when the system of adoption is set up to destroy, erase and abolish its existence. Even when it’s painful, we deserve to know our truth and all of it. 

Why are so many secrets kept in adoption? 

When someone signs up to adopt a child, they sign up to co-sign for secrecy, lies, and half-truths regarding the adoptive child. Do you know what secrecy, lies, and half-truths do to a human being? 

They destroy them and stall their healing. 

When biological mothers refuse to share the truth about the conception, birth, and biological father of the adoptee, they add many levels of shame and secrecy the adoptee later has to uncover. It’s AGONIZING to not know who you are or where you come from!

Why should adoptees have to experience deception at every turn? 

We deserve more than that. 

HONESTY

TRUTH

TRANSPARENCY

It’s no secret that we can’t heal from half-truths because we don’t know what we are healing from. So if you ever wondered why your adopted child or adopted adult in your life is angry, sad, depressed, addicted to substances or struggling, I would like to look no further. Relinquishment trauma compacted by adoption trauma is the culprit. I’m not saying other things might exacerbate these issues. However, the ROOT cause is abandonment, rejection, relinquishment trauma, and adoption trauma. 

For those unfamiliar with the statistics, adoptees are 4x more likely to attempt suicide, and we’re overrepresented in jails, prisons, treatment, and mental health facilities. Why? Because adoption is rooted in secrecy and lies, anything embedded in secrecy and lies is bound to have significant repercussions. It’s also rooted in relinquishment trauma.

If you support adoption, you are a co-signer. 

Why should we have to spend our whole lives trying to fix what adoption has broken? 

Why should we have to fight the world for our truth? 

Why should we have to experience relinquishment trauma, to begin with? 

Why is our history, ethnicity, siblings, DNA connections, medical history, original birth certificates, and biological connections and relationships be kept from us? 

Why does the world rob us from acknowledging our grief, loss, and trauma?

Why have our adoptive parents co-signed for this pain? 

Why did our biological mothers give us away? 

Why should we have to look at doctors our whole lives and say, “I don’t know my medical history; I’m adopted?” 

Were they genuinely ignorant? Or did they choose to ignore these realities for the sake of their wants and needs? 

ADOPTEES DESERVE MORE! 

It’s no secret that there have never been resources for adoptees until recently. We didn’t sign any paperwork, yet we are sentenced to life for a crime we didn’t commit. 

For most of us, learning our TRUTH is the beginning KEY to accept that truth, acknowledge it, and make a choice to move towards healing. 

NO TRUTH = NO HEALING 

If our truth is kept secret from us, it will always have ways of impacting our lives and circling back around. It will keep surfacing. We often depend on substances to take our pain away because it’s so great we can’t process the feelings or address the trauma. 

Don’t read this and think for a minute that open adoption is any better. The secrecy part is usually not there; however, did you ever wonder what it’s like to be traumatized over and over again by being removed from your biological mother over and over again? You see her one day, and then you are ripped from her arms the next? How can anyone inflict this type of pain on a child they supposedly love? Open adoptions aren’t legally binding, and many times adoptive parents have no problems closing the adoptions. DOOR SLAM IN YOUR FACE, and there is nothing you can do about it. NOTHING!

Adoptees are met with adoptive parents who believe that Jesus, Love, and a nice home are enough to stand in the gap for what the adoptee has lost. This is manipulative and gaslighting behavior.  Let me be completely honest; you are fooling yourself if you think that any amount of love can replace the woman that gave us life! Jesus has never healed my adoptee wounds, and even if I believed he was real ( I did at one point in my life), I can and will never think he’s in the business of separating mothers and babies! If you believe this, you are delusional! That sick and twisted mentality is one of the many reasons I am no longer a believer.

A fancy house, a two-parent home, and all the material belongings in the world will never replace the loss an adoptee experiences. Adoptive parents get divorced, abuse their adoptive kids every day. Adoptees are sexually abused in their adoptive homes all the time. Many times adoptive kids are used as pawns to fill a void in the lives of their adoptive parents. Many of us are adopted solely to take care of our adoptive parents in their old age and even replace the relationship with a biological child that went south. Yet, time and time again, we’re expected to meet the expectations of our adopters, and no matter how hard we try, we always fall short. 

We are not their DNA, and we will never be. Yet, we notice being treated differently. We know when we are treated like the adopted child and adult in the family. We know when we don’t fit in or belong. Trust me; we feel it every day of our lives. As adoptees how it feels to be left out of the will, just because you are the adopted one in the family. Ask adoptees what it feels like to sit at the funeral of a biological mother or father, yet not be listed in the obituary as if they don’t even exist.

ADOPTEES DESERVE FAR MORE THAN WHAT THEY GET

The moral of the story is, get on the right side of wrong.

LISTEN TO ADOPTEES BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. 

 Understand that many of us aren’t grateful at all for all of this pain and trauma being inflicted on us at no fault of our own, nor should we be expected to be. Understand that many of us would have rather been aborted, and if you are withholding the truth from an adoptee, you need to share the truth NOW. Even when the truth hurts, we want it because it’s ours! If you see your adopted child or the child you adopted who is now an adult hurting, help them process pain, grief and loss. Try HARDER to understand your adoptees’ pain, and never diminish it or tell them they should be grateful or get over it and move on. NEVER use Jesus as a tool that intercedes in them processing pain. Research spiritual bypassing and don’t do it! Understand there is no time frame on grief and processing all that is lost and research and become great at helping an adoptee process grief and loss. Know that there is NOTHING you can do to fix us or take our pain away, and we would like to ask you politely to please stop trying.

The world might feel like we have a replacement family for our biological mothers and families, but we haven’t. That’s a fantasy, and the sooner everyone realizes this, the better. No one can sweep our DNA under the rug, but they keep trying. I can promise you that the truth always comes out, especially now more than ever, with the increasing ability to do DNA testing. 

There is no amount of money, fancy car, house or vacations that can make up for what was lost because of adoption. Nothing on this earth can replace the memories and relationships lost. NOTHING.

For my fellow adoptees, never give up hope in finding your truth. If anyone has told you your biological parents are deceased, DO NOT BELIEVE IT. I repeat, DO NOT BELIEVE IT unless you are standing over their grave AFTER you have done DNA testing to confirm you share DNA with them. I can’t tell you how many times I have learned that adoptees are told their biological parents are deceased, only for them to be very much alive. I am one of these adoptees who was told my birth father was deceased, and I refused to believe it and later found out he was very much alive!  

Please know you didn’t deserve the cards you were dealt. You deserved far more!  You are strong, and even in the dark moments, realize you aren’t alone. You are a survivor, surviving daily. Know that you don’t owe anyone anything outside of yourself. I challenge you to take back what was taken from you because you are the only person who can do it. Look deep within yourself, and you will find precisely what you need. 

Don’t forget this article along with all my other articles are available in audio for your convenience, just look up Pamela A. Karanova Podcast on Google Podcasts, iTunes , Spotify. and Amazon Music. Interested in treating me with a coffee, to add fuel to my fire? Click here. Many thanks in advance to my supporters!

Love, Love

*The views and opinions expressed in this article are that of the author, Pamela A. Karanova. Reproduction of the material contained in this publication may be made only with the written permission of Pamela A. Karanova

Adoptees, Pseudonyms & Identities

Published on by Pamela A. KaranovaLeave a comment

The topic of identity can be a lifelong paradox and struggle for many adoptees. It’s much easier for adopted individuals to tap into their true identity when they have the truth to guide them along the way. However, for many of us, we experience secrecy, lies, and half-truths as soon as we’re born and passed over to strangers. It’s challenging for some and impossible for others to gain a true sense of identity when we have no idea who we are or where we come from. No one looks like us, and we don’t see anyone’s face looking back at us when we look in the mirror. We all experience different variations of complexities when it comes to identity. 

It’s widespread for adopted individuals to have many names and identities in person and on the internet in the adoptee community. In the 11 years I’ve been present in this community, I’ve had my own experiences with my legal name, changing my legal name, and having several different identities on the internet in those 11 years.

There are many layers as to why.  

It can be confusing to many and downright annoying and concerning to others. Therefore, I wanted to take a few minutes to share my experience with this topic to hopefully help others who might not relate be able to understand better. 

For many adoptees, we’re forced to split between two worlds when we are born, surrendered for adoption and adopted by strangers. We’re parts of two worlds, yet usually denied one of them. Our DNA will always be a part of our first families, even when adoption tries to erase that part of our life. We are very much our first families DNA, and even with adoption legally changing our names to our new families. Many of us feel divided between two worlds. For some of us it’s internal and subconscious. For some of us, it’s like critical pieces are always missing. We create a split to protect the people around us, and to protect ourselves.

For most of my life, my legal name was Pamela L e e p e r. That’s right, L E E P E R. What does this name symbolize to me? A legal tie to my previous life, one I didn’t sign up for. It’s a legally binding piece of my life I had no choice in, that I wanted to divorce. It’s a tie to my painful past, the one where I didn’t sign any adoption paperwork. It’s a reminder of my abusive adoptive homes and the people who abused me in those homes. It’s a tie and reminder to an awful and painful childhood, teen life, and history. And let’s be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever felt a connection to this name, well, really because it’s only my name on paper, not via DNA. The Leeper family tree is not my family tree.

It can be if I pretend as I did in kindergarten for that family tree project.  

No one on earth will ever know the depths of it all, but I know it, and this name L E E P E R was a constant reminder of it all. I hated how it sounded, and I hated writing it. I hated having the life sentence of being attached to it. No disrespect to the Leeper family; however, this isn’t about them. It’s about me, my name, and why I chose to change it legally as well as seasons in my life where I used pseudonym names to protect myself. 

What did that process look like for me? 

How many years did it take? 

Who supported me? 

Who was against me?

In 2010, I started writing under a pseudonym, “Adoptee in Recovery,” which was a way to share my journey and protect my real legal identity. Some people refer to this as a “Pen Name.” Writing under a pseudonym name for me was fear-based. First, I was afraid of people I was close to learning how I felt about adoption because if they knew how I felt, they might just leave me too. Just like my birth mother did. I was afraid of judgment and ridicule. I was fearful of being shamed because if I felt these ways, I must not be praying enough or spending enough time with God. But, I didn’t just “Let it go,” so I chose to hang onto the pain. It was clear I had to create two separate identities and keep things separate, and my life depended on it.  

The idea of bringing these identities together caused me great anguish far deeper than someone not adopted could imagine. I lived in constant fear of “What If” my adoptive parents found my writings and disowned me for feeling the way I do? What if my adopted siblings learned how I felt? What if my biological family finds me and reads my writings? Will they all leave me? Will they be angry with me? How will it make them feel, knowing adoption has wholly wrecked me? What would they say if I wasn’t grateful for being adopted and I hated it with every fiber in my being?

Adoptees are professionals at putting others first, before our wants and needs. But, unfortunately, so many of us are groomed from a very early age that our adoptive parent’s feelings are more important than ours, so we tend to be hypersensitive to how they would feel from childhood. After all, shouldn’t we be thankful someone took us in when our own biological families didn’t want us?  Would they send us back or abandon us if they knew how we felt? It hung over my head constantly, and I knew WHY I was creating a dual identity. Almost everyone else had no idea. Likewise, I have learned that many people have no idea of the complexities of WHY adoptees have dual identities. Sometimes fellow adoptees don’t even understand it. 

I get it! 

The pseudonym name did a great job at protecting my legal identity. However, it was one more veil of deception because I hid behind a pseudonym; people didn’t know who I was or the real me. Nevertheless, the pseudonym name served an excellent purpose for that time in my life because I wanted to be protected from others who might look at my feelings as an insult or attack on them. 

I did what I had to do to protect myself. 

However, things change.  

It was clear when I made this decision that I was still hiding from many things, and if I’m entirely transparent, I did not have the inner strength or courage to share my true identity, not for many years to come. However, my courage and strength were building behind the veil using the pseudonym name little by little.

In 2012, I decided I wanted to be identified online as Pamela Jones. 

One more step towards genuine authenticity.

Pamela Jones was one step closer to me identifying the real true me. Jones was my biological father’s surname, and I had the chance to see his face in person in 2010. So I created a Facebook identity under this name and disguised behind it for about two years. I made many friends online under this pseudo name. I knew why I was using this pseudonym name, but reality hit me that I still wasn’t being true to myself.

Another dynamic to Pamela Jones was claiming this piece of my history and DNA, but that part didn’t claim me back. My biological father rejected a relationship with me because I have bi-racial children. His loss, I know, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less. This puzzle piece made me want to divorce from the Jones name because I didn’t truly fit in with that family, although we share DNA. We have no shared history or memories together. It was a paradox non adopted individuals can’t even comprehend. I wanted so badly to be wanted by my birth father, but the reality was even after finding him and meeting him, he doesn’t want anything to do with me. 

It was time I let go of Pamela Jones

*Disclosure Statement: I support the idea of adoptees or anyone using a pseudonym name, however I do not support anyone using a pseudonym name to hide behind an account that bullies, torments, stalks, starts cyber mobbing attacks, or is vile and cruel on the internet. They are flat out cowards!

In 2014, two years after I stopped drinking alcohol, I decided I had gained enough strength that I was going to get my last name changed. I had started coming out of the fog in 2009-2010, and in that time, I became empowered by connecting with other adoptees online and sharing my story. As a result, I had a new level of strength I had never had when sharing my Adoptee in Recovery journey. 

First, I decided to ask my adoptive dad if he would mind if I changed it. He expressed his thoughts and let me choose for myself. The next step was to find a new last name. I live in America, and it’s relatively easy and cheap to change your name legally.  I wrote an entire article called Pamela Karanova: Welcoming The Real True Me!. You guessed it, K A R A N O V A was the new name I legally chose to get changed on my 40th birthday. At this time in my life, I was consumed with the church, religion, and Christianity. 

KARA was another word for PURE. 

Philippians 4:8, “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is PURE, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”

NOVA was another word for NEW. 

2 Corinthians 5:17, “17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the NEW creation has come:[a] The old has gone, the new is here!”

It was one of the most unique gifts I gave myself, a new name for a fresh start in my life. Part of me felt like it was divorcing the painful past that hung so tight by carrying the last name L E E P E R. This piece of me was dead and gone on to a new page and a new chapter.  The other part felt like I was finally controlling something in my life when other people controlled most of it. It was liberating, freeing, and exhilarating. Although I am no longer a believer, this new name was and is very special to me. 

I can honestly say that changing my last name legally was one of the most healing things I’ve ever done for myself. It was stepping into a new freedom of making a choice for myself that no one else had any say in. I wear this name so proud, and I love everything about it. It fits me. It is the new me. Today the “what if’s” that used to torment me have vanished into nothingness. I personally care more about being true to myself, than I do about offending others. I made a promise to myself several years ago, to always be true to myself and I will honor that until the day I die.

K A R A N O V A

I received 100% support from everyone in my life with whom I have relationships when I legally changed my last name to Karanova. The only person I heard disapproved of is name change is an aunt by adoption, who gave her baby away by adoption, and she talked down about my decision to get rid of her surname, L E E P E R. I do not have a relationship with her, nor do I care about her opinion. 

It’s currently 2021, and my only regret is not changing my first and middle name when I legally changed my last name. However, I know that in 2014 I didn’t have the strength to change my full name. My kids were still in school at that time, and I didn’t want to put them through the process of their mom changing her first name. 

One day, I desire to legally change my first and middle name, but I’m not sure yet what it will be, but I have a few ideas. Maybe for my 50th birthday? Maybe next week? I’m not sure yet, but I worry more about how other people will respond to this change and don’t want to inconvenience people to try to remember a new name for another chapter of a new me. Finally, one day I will get up enough strength to “Just Do It,” and at that moment, I will have reached another milestone of stepping into genuine authenticity.

I think it’s important to remember that all adopted people are transitioning to a new person every step of the way. Every time we get a piece of the puzzle, it changes us in some way. Although most people have the truth handed to them when they are born, they can’t comprehend what it’s like to fight for your truth your entire life and be spoon-fed pieces of the puzzle over a lifespan. It’s a different kind of life, and one only other adoptees will understand. 

I have learned from my journey of discovery that all of my names have been very symbolic to me and my healing journey. They have each served a great purpose to help me feel safe, depending on whatever space I was in at that time. I can’t speak for all adoptees, but when I see adoptees change names, and hide behind a pseudonym name, I can say from the bottom of my heart, “I GET IT AND I UNDERSTAND.” Sometimes these extremes go with the territory of being an adoptee and finding ourselves when our truth has been kept captive for so long. I’ve seen adoptees attach four and five last names to their names as a way to honor their birth mother, birth father, adoptive mother, and adoptive father. I’ve seen them change their names more times than I can count.

Being adopted is complex! 

As you can see, identity plays such an essential part in the dynamics of the adoptee experience, and this is directly reflected in how we represent ourselves in the names we are assigned at birth, changed by adoption and the ones we choose for ourselves. 

If you are a non-adopted individual, hopefully, this article sheds a little light on why names and identity go hand in hand with the adoptee experience. Hopefully, you understand a little better. Be easy on the adoptees in your life, and accept whatever places they are in regarding names and identity. We weren’t offered the privilege non-adoptees are given. Many of us have to fight the world for our truth, and every clue we get to who we are and where we came from opens a new door of self-discovery. Change is going to happen—identity matters. 

If you are an adoptee who’s considering changing your name, legally or online, I am cheering you on. With every fiber of my being, I understand how we can spend our entire lives getting to the point of finding strength from within ourselves and the courage to push forth with an outward expression of legally changing our names or even creating pseudonym names for ourselves. 

Every step of the way, healing is happening. 

For any adoptees who have changed their names legally or created pseudonym identities online, I would love to hear your stories on how you navigated this piece of your journey? Why did you pick the name you chose? Have you wanted to change your name but haven’t done it yet? Why or why not? 

Whatever you do, be true to yourself and follow your heart. 

Put yourself first. 

You deserve it. 

Don’t forget this article along with all my other articles are available in audio for your convenience, just look up Pamela A. Karanova Podcast on Google Podcasts, iTunes , Spotify. and Amazon Music. Interested in treating me with a coffee, to add fuel to my fire? Click here. Many thanks in advance to my supporters!

Love, Love

*The views and opinions expressed in this article are that of the author, Pamela A. Karanova. Reproduction of the material contained in this publication may be made only with the written permission of Pamela A. Karanova

Adoptees, Mental Health & Daily Self-Care

Published on by Pamela A. Karanova3 Comments

Once again, I’m noticing a significant amount of changes in the adoptee community, and it’s helped me reevaluate and reorganize my commitments on where I stand within this community. We all have the abilities to make these choices for ourselves.

Back in 2010, when I started to emerge from the fog, Adopteeland (the online adoptee community) was a welcoming place to be in. It was a light to not only me but hundreds of thousands of fellow adoptees. We made online friends, we built online relationships, and we helped one another online when the other was down. 

I remember all of the “aha” moments I experienced in hearing other adoptees share their stories, and little by little, my story started to come out just like the adoptees I knew that shared their stories before me. It was empowering. I was finally able to tap into my deep-rooted issues that stem from being relinquished by my birth mother and being adopted into an abusive adoptive home. I started to share my feelings little by little, and it was validating and freeing in many ways. Eleven years of being completely consumed in Adopteeland has passed, and I’ve learned many things in that time. 

Part of sharing my feelings on my website has been for my healing, but it’s also to help my fellow adoptees who might be reading from afar so they know they aren’t crazy for feeling the way they feel. Our feelings are expected for a not normal situation. Nothing is normal about being separated from your biological mothers at the beginning of life. 

As years have passed, I saw the recognizable need for adoptee-centric spaces that meet in person, in our neighborhoods, and our communities. After a close call with my contemplation of ending my life in 2017, I decided I wanted to take all the pain I was carrying from my adoption experience and do something positive with it. For me, I describe it as finding purpose in the pain. It’s saved my life to create Adoptees Connect, Inc. In return, the resource itself has saved the lives of many adoptees around the USA and beyond who attend our in-person groups. 

Around 2018, I noticed an overwhelming and alarming amount of cyberbullying and cyber mobbing in Adopteeland. It was disturbing in every regard. I have seen fellow adoptees bully other adoptees to the point of attempting to take their own lives. It was so disturbing to see, and I created an Adoptees Connect Social Disclaimer because of this activity. I decided that any of the platforms I am a part of cannot and will not turn a blind eye to this type of behavior.  All of our volunteers and facilitators must agree to abide by this disclaimer to join our organization. 

I was hoping many of the other organizations in Adopteeland would follow suit, but sadly I have been greatly disappointed in that area. 

Let me be honest, aside from the adoptee vs. adoptee discord, the internet, in general, isn’t a safe space for anyone. Adopteeland is filled with triggers for adopted individuals, and time and time again, I see the fallout from these events. Someone is always getting hurt, and that’s never a good feeling. Adopteeland, just like the internet in general, is a breeding ground for keyboard warriors to flex their muscles and mistreat people disrespectfully and downright awful. Many people have big balls on the internet, even women. I have seen adoptees turn on other adoptees or adoptee-centric organizations and the drop of a dime. It doesn’t matter how much good they have done in the adoption community. This is the same community they wish to protect and care for. No one can be trusted on the internet. All of my real adoptee friends are ones I connect with offline, off the internet. There is a small group of them, and they know who they are. 

Because of the increasing toxicity of Adopteeland and the internet in general, I have decided to make some very significant changes for myself, and I hope you consider doing the same. First, I had to self-reflect and ask myself how these interactions with other adoptees and organizations made me feel? Do I feel consciously good about them, or do they leave me feeling drained, sad, depressed, isolated, and alone? Do they trigger me? How do I respond to the triggers? Are they interfering with my quality of life?

A lot of the time, I had so many fires in the oven all over Adopteeland, I sacrificed my time as if my commitments to Adopteeland were a full-time job. I knew the commitments created needed resources, and they were areas that had never been touched in the adoptee community before. I held my commitment to Adopteeland as one of the primary and most significant commitments of my life. This is 11 years of time I can never get back. 

I can’t lie; it’s taken a toll. 

I woke up one day and learned I had been misled by this community I put so much trust in because I saw what they would do to others. I knew they could do the same to me. Adopteeland can and will turn on you in a heartbeat, stab you in the back, and LITERALLY leave you for dead. Most of them don’t care about you. You are just another adoptee on the internet. I have seen adoptees set up cyber mob attacks towards other adoptees or organizations and not think twice about the person they are cyberbullying or what they might be going through in their personal lives. After many years of seeing my fellow adoptees get dragged through the mud, I realized I could no longer witness such travesties. My heart hurts and hurts deeply when I see these interactions online, and it aches me to the core to see adoptees harm fellow adoptees. This is not the community I want to put my hope, trust, and time into. This is one of the main reasons Adoptees Connect groups meet in person in real life. To bypass the internet and build genuine in-person relationships.

It’s life or death for many of us. 

Don’t get me wrong, there are adoptees worldwide whom I have built relationships with online and who mean the world to me, and I will never meet many of them in person. They aren’t included in the Adopteeland problematic scene. They are kind, loving, compassionate, and would do anything for the adoptee community. I would do anything for them. They know who they are. 

Adoptees are tender individuals, and no matter what anyone does that I don’t agree with or dislike, I don’t have a right to cyberbully them or set up cyber mobbing attacks on that adoptee or an adoptee-centric organization. If I was to lower myself to that type of activity, it’s CLEAR that Adopteeland isn’t a place for me. 

I think it is safe to say the old days of Adopteeland back in 2010 are dead and gone, and for my mental health, I have had to disconnect and release myself from 99.9% of adoptee-centric spaces on the internet. Let me be honest; I don’t give my time too much on the internet these days. I have a beautiful life to live, and I don’t like the primary bloodsucker (internet) stealing the most valuable thing I have, my time.

Another dynamic to my mental health is not over-committing myself to adoptee/adoption-centric responsibilities. I sometimes think, as adoptees, when we find the online community, we get so excited we jump all in headfirst. But the kicker for many of us is that we forget to swim back to shore and find life again. It’s sometimes tough, if not impossible, to find a happy balance between life outside of adoption commitments and to be adopted and finding happiness in the world. 

For me, Adopteeland and adoptee-centric activities have drained the life out of me. I think it’s so important that we listen to our bodies and make changes when things aren’t bringing us solitude and happiness. It’s essential that we learn that many things are for a season, and we’re not supposed to sit in Adopteeland or the Adoption arena FOREVER. It will keep us stuck, and I am a prime example that it’s kept me stuck for a long time. 

I don’t regret a minute of my time in Adopteeland, and I am not disappearing. However, I have to put my mental health first because my mental health suffering was impacting my physical health. I encourage anyone reading this to listen to your bodies and what they are telling you. It’s okay to back out of commitments and also prioritize them. 

Adoption and Adoptee related topics are draining AF. The internet and Adopteeland are draining AF. Self-care is an essential dynamic to being knee-deep in something as heavy as adoption. I have developed a very effective self-care routine, and most of the things I do to take care of myself have nothing to do with adoption other than writing. For me, this means removing myself from ALL THINGS ADOPTEE/ADOPTION at times. My self-care routine are the things I’ve found that re-energize me and allow me to stay grounded and centered. Hiking, walking, writing, reading, bonfires, sunrises, sunsets, outdoors, spending time with my kids and loved ones, my dogs, arts and crafts, kayaking, tending to my plant addiction, etc.

Staying in something so heavy so much of the time can and will impact our quality of life. 

I challenge you, if you are an adoptee in Adopteeland spaces, to be mindful of your emotional, mental, and physical health being challenged. Be aware of your interactions on the internet, with others and how you treat people, and how you allow them to treat you. Be mindful of the triggers you experience and how your body responds to the triggers. Adopteeland can be an unhealthy place to be involved in. In the beginning, it’s like you finally found your tribe, a euphoric feeling. It has a lot of pros to it, but all of a sudden, you get sucked into something, and your whole life is consumed into it, from the minute you wake up to the minute you lay your head down at night. Nothing as heavy as adoption can be healthy without consistent and committed self-care and a healthy balance.

Every. Single. Day. 

If anyone on the internet has mistreated you, adopted or not, I encourage you to report them if possible and block and ban them from all of your platforms. However, if you are the creator of a platform and allow this behavior to occur on your platform, I would like to ask you why you let abuse happen? Turning a blind eye, you are no better than the cyberbully or emotional abuser. I used to have a loyalty to the adoptees in Adopteeland, but that ship has sailed and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Unfortunately, there are many problematic adoptees in Adopteeland, and I will not tolerate anyone’s bullshit. Period. 

We have to realize that sometimes people make mistakes in person and online. We’re all human beings, and we don’t always get it right. If you make a mistake and have tried to right your wrong, and someone won’t allow for an honest, professional, and open dialog to find a solution for the mishap, you can walk away. If someone drains the life out of you, you can walk away. If anyone is bullying you and cyber mobbing you, you do not have to tolerate this behavior. I wonder what the online cyber bullies would do if they pushed another human being over the edge to end their lives? Would they still advocate for adoptee suicide?

WALK AWAY. 

REPORT ABUSIVE BEHAVIOR. 

BLOCK. 

BAN. 

DELETE. 

Adoptee Remembrance Day – October 30th is approaching. I picked one day on behalf of Adoptees Connect, Inc. to be a day we highlight Adoptee Suicide and all the other dynamics ARD symbolizes. I thought long and hard about this. One day was picked (over a week or month) because of the sensitive nature and focus of the day and how it can impact the adoptee community long term. One day seemed like a better idea than a week or a month because I worry about the mental health of anyone participating in such sensitive topics for a longer duration than a day. 

I am noticing the rise of a three-month highlight, starting with September being Adoptee Suicide Awareness Month, followed by October and November trailing on with some of the same highlights. I commend all adoptees who are pouring their hearts and souls into bringing awareness on such an important topic for the adoptee community. I support each of you!

First, of course, November is National Adoption Awareness Month, and it’s heavy and triggering for adoptees in its own way.  I worry significantly and even gravely for the mental, emotional, and physical well-being of all the adoptees participating in these topics for up to three months in a row. Do they have the resources they need? Are people spreading love and light during a difficult time? Who’s on standby when someone is on overload with emotions piling up during such a lengthy focus on such a excruciatingly painful topic?

I know for sure, my emotional and mental well-being can only take one day of it, and I am dedicating that day to Adoptee Remembrance Day. After that, I can not and will not be able to participate in more. It’s just too heavy. I would die committing to more, and I am not saying this lightly. 

One of the main points of me writing this article is that I’m worried about the adoptee community, and I see some awful interactions happening that are harmful and hurtful to the productivity of so many amazing causes. I’ve witnessed dark sides of adoptees I have known online and loved for years that I never thought I would see. In experiencing and seeing these things, I will continue to take steps back away from the same community I have poured my heart and soul into for 11+ years. My main focus is Adoptees Connect, Inc., and that’s the only commitment I have time for these days. Keep in mind, while Adoptees Connect does have a social media account on Facebook and Instagram, the root and main focus of the entire vision of the organization is creating OFFLINE adoptee-centric spaces that meet in person, in real life for many of these reasons. That’s where I choose to put my focus, time, and energy. I can’t get sucked into online drama, and I avoid it to the fullest at all costs. 

Please be careful with your online interactions and the amount of trust you put into Adopteeland. Please give yourself the gift of walking away from anything, anyone, and everything that doesn’t serve your emotional, mental and physical health positively. If Adopteeland is too triggering for you, either walk away entirely or set yourself boundaries and participate in small microdoses. Understand and recognize when your time’s up, and you can cross over to finding other fulfilling things in life. If you don’t do it on your own, your body will do it for you!  

Take care of yourself, and above all things, please put your Mental Health first. 

For any adoptees struggling right now, here are some Recommended Resources we have listed on the Adoptees Connect website. Please share them in your online communities.

Don’t forget this article along with all my other articles are available in audio for your convenience, just look up Pamela A. Karanova Podcast on Google Podcasts, iTunes , Spotify. and Amazon Music. Interested in treating me with a coffee, to add fuel to my fire? Click here. Many thanks in advance to my supporters!

Love, Love. 

*The views and opinions expressed in this article are that of the author, Pamela A. Karanova. Reproduction of the material contained in this publication may be made only with the written permission of Pamela A. Karanova

Twenty Seven Years of Wishful Drinking Died Nine Years Ago, So Did I

Published on by Pamela A. Karanova1 Comment
AUGUST 13, 2012 – MY WHOLE LIFE CHANGED!

“NEW BEGINNINGS ARE OFTEN DESCRIBED AS PAINFUL ENDINGS” – LAO TZU

August 13th – This was not only my earthly birthday, but it’s my re-birthday.

What’s my re-birthday? It’s the day I decided to live alcohol-free.

I have double reason to celebrate, so I shall.

I can hardly believe I’ve made it to this milestone of nine years alcohol-free. I remember nine years ago on that day, I was utterly lost, frightened, and all alone and had no idea what the next 24 hours had in store, let alone the next nine years. While I continue to walk forward towards a new season, it’s clear parts of the old me are dead and gone.

A little back story, I started drinking at twelve years old. I grew up in a small town in Iowa and was introduced to alcohol very young. Twenty-seven years after that introduction, on August 13, 2012, I was finally at a place where I decided alcohol was no longer for me.

Twenty-seven years is a long time.

I would be confronted with many life-altering situations; however, the need to keep alcohol close by was constant. I remember the days where I didn’t think I could survive without alcohol. And in my mind, I couldn’t, so I didn’t. It was my best friend and my confidant. It was always there for me and created a bridge I happily crossed every time I consumed alcohol. My reality was too much and too hard to process.

Alcohol created many fun memories and vibes, and it also made a lot of traumatic ones. The traumatic ones caused lifelong altercations on how I view the world and also myself. 

When I walked away from alcohol

August 13, 2012 – I had no idea it would cost me damn near all my friends, but it did. I walked anyway. I went from an extensive group of people I hung out with to literally less than five. 

What was I going to do with my time now? 

What person would I become? 

What hobbies did I have that didn’t involve alcohol? 

WHO WAS I? 

The truth is, I had no effing clue. Alcohol was the center of my life for my entire life. I stepped into a new space and a scary one. They say when you drop addictions, you have to replace them with other healthy things. I started going to church regularly, and the next thing you know, church friends, church activities, and church serving took up all the space I used to use partying. Then, Although I have different views on the church now, it did step in and create a bridge I needed to get to where I am today, and because of that, I am thankful. 

When you remove the center of your world, the walls come crashing in and you have to pick yourself back up and rebuild yourself and your life. It was like I died that day when I stopped drinking alcohol, and every day for the last 9 years I’ve been rediscovering who I am without alcohol, slowly coming back to life again. It’s like a brand new baby being born but for me I was re-born. Not the giving my life to Christ reborn, as that ship has already sailed and sank. I’m talking about every fiber of my being being transformed into a new me, not what other people told me to be or what my environment influenced me to be. Between beliefs, conditioning, and experiences I had to break out of the old and step into the new.

“You don’t know this new me; I put back my pieces, differently.” – unknown

This quote fits perfectly.

Over the last nine years, my life has progressed to great lengths and many times I’ve had to look myself in the mirror and I’m finally at peace with what’s looking back at me but not without a lot of blood. sweat and tears FIRST. I’ve had to get alone with myself to find myself. I’ve been single the majority of the last nine years, and even when I have been in brief relationships or been in the dating world, I continue to find myself learning more about the new person I have become. Hardships help us grow, and so do those we have around us inside our inner circles. Even with heartbreak, I’ve learned lessons that are of great value to me. 

“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.” – Cynthia Occelli

I’ve loved, and I’ve lost, and I’ve been betrayed and hurt. The kicker is that now I’ve learned that processing difficult emotions and feelings isn’t something I need to run from. Drinking alcohol every day for 27 years, I was clearly running from processing pain. I couldn’t sit with my sober self and alcohol was the great escape. This is one of the most significant dynamics of my career with drinking alcohol. I didn’t know how or want to feel those feelings of abandonment from my birth parents and the trauma I experienced in my adoptive homes. When I stopped drinking, all my adoptee problems showed up at my front door, and I was forced to sit with them, and I’ve been sitting with them for nine years now. It’s been painful but humbling at the same time. Crying and showing emotions is like the dried up well is living again. Finally, I can look at myself in the mirror and know I am not going to die like my birth parents, and I have done the work on myself to turn the page to live a happier and healthier life. 

Not just for myself, but my kids and future grandkids and my legacy. 

I have always had a tough time with my birthday, but this year was different.  Things seemed lighter and happier. I decided I wouldn’t wait for anyone to celebrate me because I had enough reasons to celebrate me. Waiting on others leads to disappointment. I have learned that I need to put my happiness into my own hands. I had a brief moment of sadness, which I feel was part of my processing the realities of the day I was born. My birth mother left me at the hospital, and I lost everything that day. Being adopted is always a hard pill to swallow. I had challenged myself in recent years to allow space for those feelings and process them and save room to enjoy my day because even when my biological mother abandoned me that day, one badass woman was born. 

Here’s an article on How Adoptees Feel About Birthdays if anyone is interested. It’s not just me; it’s many adoptees who struggle with our birthdays. 

I’ve been stuck in the dark sadness long enough. I’ve paid the price and done the time. I’ve put in the work to overcome the damage adoption has caused and lived a sober life doing it. THIS IS A MIRACLE! I will be working towards healing for the rest of my life; however, it’s critically important that we equally carve out space to enjoy our lives. We must find the balance not to let our adoption journeys dominate our lives. I’m guilty of doing this for the last 11 years, but today is a new day. 

This year, my gift to myself is to step away from almost all things adoption-related and step into a new life that I should have been living many years ago before the adoption trauma and alcohol tornado took over and consumed every fiber of my being. I think as adopted people; we owe that to ourselves. When we remove something unhealthy from our lives, we have to replace it with something healthy. My career with alcohol was unhealthy for me, not to mention what 27 years of consuming alcohol has done to my body. Adoptionland hasn’t been a healthy place for me either, for the majority of my time being present in the adoptee community. I stepped away from most of it long ago, however I still have areas I’m stepping away from in attempts to make my load lighter and my life happier.

This year, I had my birthday month all planned out for myself to bypass the familiar disappointment I get from outside sources. I also had a sweet friend tell me that I needed to celebrate my birthday month, not just the day. So while I didn’t exactly celebrate the whole month, I did celebrate a few weeks. 

The weekend before my birthday, I met with one of my forever friends, Christi. I took her on an adventure to Pine Island Double Falls, located in London, KY. We had a blast and enjoyed spending the day running wild, as we youngins love to do. 

The following week before my birthday, my youngest daughter accompanied me on a mini-photo shoot at one of my favorite parks in Lexington, not far from my house. The purpose was to celebrate my 9-year milestone of living alcohol-free with my MOTHER, AKA Mother Nature. I had a nine balloon, and my daughter took some lovely photos to capture this celebration beautifully.  

August 13, my actual birthday and re-birthday, I decided to take a mini road trip with my kids to Joe’s Crabshack to get some Dungeness Crab BBQ, one of my favorites! All I wanted was a little time in the presence of those I adore the most and who mean the most to me. My kids! It was a surreal experience because as I walked into Joe’s Crabshack with my kids, I realized the last time we had been there together was nine years earlier, TO THE DAY. The last day I drank alcohol on August 13, 2012. I wanted my birthday dinner to be at Joe’s Crabshack in Louisville. While this fact dawned on me, I couldn’t help but reminisce about where I was nine years ago and where I am today. WOW, at the difference nine years makes. We ate a lovely meal, went outside to take some pictures of the sunset of the river, and had a precious time together. Then, we drove back to Lexington to have cake together, my favorite pistachio from Martine’s Bakery here in Lexington. It was a perfect day to remember, with those who make my world go around. 

The following day, I decided to run off into the wild on a self-care solo trip to Tennessee to Cummins Falls State Park. This was an adventure to remember, and I must do it again and stay a weekend to explore the area more. There were two waterfalls I made it to, Cummins Falls and Waterloo Falls. Being able to be solo and hike this gorge was an excellent experience. But, sometimes, we have to take off and go live life. 

The following week on August 20, I flew to Salt Lake City to visit my best friend. It was the first time seeing her in almost three years. You can learn more about that visit by reading my article “Learning to Live and Hike with Supraventricular Tachycardia (SVT)”  We had a super time together, and it was fantastic to have my first hot springs visit with her, despite the SVT. It was also exciting catching up with another friend, seeing my best friends cute little family, and spending time with them. 

Here are some photos I would love to share with you! 

The changes I’ve made in the last few months have resulted in a lighter feeling with life in general, and I’m optimistic about the future and the path I have set for myself. 

Little by little, letting go of the unnecessary things makes room for the things that matter. I don’t want to waste more time on things that set me back and keep me stuck. I will write about that more soon. 

Special thank you to everyone who made my birthday special and to those who donated to my birthday fundraiser, sent me texts, called me, mailed gifts, and made my day one to remember. Special shout out to my close friends, family, and supporters near and far. I appreciate you all! Thank you! I love you!

Don’t forget this article along with all my other articles are available in audio for your convenience, just look up Pamela A. Karanova Podcast on Google Podcasts, iTunes , Spotify. and Amazon Music. Interested in treating me with a coffee, to add fuel to my fire? Click here. Many thanks in advance to my supporters!

Love, Love

Learning to Live and Hike with Supraventricular Tachycardia (SVT)

Published on by Pamela A. Karanova15 Comments

This is unequivocally the last topic I want to be writing an article about, but here I am. Acceptance is a real MOTHER!

Up, at the crack of dawn early on my second Saturday morning, to share a topic that’s one of my least favorite to talk about, let alone acknowledge and accept. I especially have a hard time sharing it with others.

My reason for sharing is because I don’t have the energy to explain some of my actions in recent months, and I feel I owe it to my friends, family, followers, and readers so they understand my actions better. I have had to back out of some things that I previously committed to. I have had to clear my plate of all items that are not 100% needed and necessary. I’ve had to walk away from communities, commitments, and even people to release some things from my life that we’re no longer adding to it the way I needed them to. The other part is me stepping out of denial that this is even a “thing” for me and stepping into the light that sharing this IS a real thing, and I hope a piece of my journey might help someone else.

A little back story:

In April of 2018, I started experiencing reoccurring signs of a heart rhythm upset, but I had no clue what I was dealing with, so I ignored these signs and continued my everyday life. Until eventually, it caught up with me. But that’s usually what happens when we ignore things. They always circle back around.

In May 2018, after a regular day at work, I visited an urgent treatment center when my workday ended for symptoms of chest heaviness, a racing heart, nausea, and fatigue; I was suddenly rushed to the emergency room by ambulance. My heart rate was stuck between 160BPM and 170BPM, and I was not running a marathon, hiking a trail, or walking fast. Instead, it was sitting still at work. This lasted for over an hour before I went to the urgent treatment.

The memories of that experience are vivid to me because it was the first time I had rode in an ambulance before. In transit to the ER, I remember the nurse giving me an IV and saying that I would feel weird, but he would have to provide me with some adenosine medicine in my IV to restart my heart.

Restart my heart?

WTF…

I remember things getting blurry, grey, and a hot flash came over my whole body. Finally, I faded out and back into consciousness only to hear him say, “It didn’t work I need to give you some more.” After another dose of adenosine, slowly, my heart rate finally started to come down. When I arrived at the ER, it was in the 130 BPM range.

The average BPM for healthy adults is 60-100BPM, and the normal resting for me is 80BPM. But, of course, if we’re exercising, running, walking, hiking, jogging, etc., it is higher, but average BPM starts to come down as you slow down activities or stop them.

As I arrived at the ER, they hook me up to more machines to monitor me, and they give me some medication to bring my heart rate down some more. Keep in mind, I’m a healthy person for the most part, so this was a significant shock to me to end up in the ER for heart-related issues. It would be helpful if I had my medical history from my maternal and paternal biological parents and families, but being adopted we don’t all get that luxury!

Eventually, the doctor comes in to explain that I have had an SVT episode. So, of course, my initial reaction is, “What is SVT?”

Supraventricular Tachycardia (SVT) is an abnormally fast or erratic heartbeat that affects the heart’s upper chambers. SVT occurs when the electrical signals that coordinate your heartbeats don’t work correctly. SVT occurs when faulty electrical connections in the heart set off a series of early beats in the atria. When this happens, the heart rate becomes so fast so quickly; the heart doesn’t have enough time to fill with blood before the chambers contract. As a result, you may feel light-headed or dizzy because your brain isn’t getting enough blood and oxygen. A normal heart rhythm is 60-100BPM. During an episode of SVT, your heart beats about 150 to 220 times per minute, but it can occasionally beat faster. Sometimes it can last a minute or two, and sometimes it can last hours, even days. Some people have no symptoms, and others have many. I have all the symptoms when an episode hits me, and they last between a few minutes and 6-8 hours. Sometimes I have to seek medical attention, and sometimes I have handled it on my own.

Signs and symptoms of supraventricular tachycardia may include:

  • Very fast (rapid) heartbeat
  • A fluttering or pounding in your chest (palpitations)
  • A pounding sensation in the neck
  • Weakness or feeling very tired (fatigue)
  • Chest pain
  • Shortness of breath
  • Lightheadedness or dizziness
  • Sweating
  • Fainting (syncope) or near fainting

I had a few choices that the doctor presented me with while in the ER in 2018.

  1. Do nothing and risk the possibility of more episodes, which could cause damage to my heart if left untreated.
  2. Take beta-blockers 2x a day for the rest of my life.
  3. Take beta-blockers as needed.
  4. Have a surgical procedure called a catheter ablation to correct the faulty wiring in my heart.

I thought long and hard about this, and I decided to take beta-blockers as needed if an episode arose. However, I’m not a pill person; actually, I’m not too fond of pills, so taking two medications a day for the rest of my life was something I wasn’t ready to commit to.

I was discharged with beta-blockers in hand.

Life went on its merry way – until it didn’t.

In June 2018, the middle of summer, I decided to hike with two other women to one of my favorite newfound gorges not far from my house. They knew this gorge well, and we had plans to show me around to become more familiar with this gorgeous area of Kentucky.

We met at the trailhead at 3:30P and off we went. This particular gorge, we had to hike approx a mile in a creek that took us to the top of a huge waterfall. Once we hit the waterfall, we adventured down a steep scramble to the bottom. Once we got to the bottom, we hung out a bit, and then we ventured up another steep scramble to see a bat cave on the other side of the mountain.

By the time I made it to the top, my heart rate was beating 210BPM. Then, I sat down and took a break for close to an hour, and my heart rate was still 210BPM.

I realized I forgot the medicine.

I was screwed.

The following six hours of my life is a time I will never forget. It took us over five hours to get out of the gorge it took us one hour to get into because I could barely breathe, walk, or talk with my heart beating so fast. I took five steps, sat down, almost passed out dozens of times. Then, finally, I would sit down again because I couldn’t go any further, and then I would get up enough energy to take a few more steps. Sweat dripping, and my chest was hurting. I was exhausted. 

H O U R S seemed like days.

I honestly thought I was going to die in that damn gorge. But the ladies I was with were so kind, patient, and understanding, and they were not leaving me behind. Of course, they had no clue what they were signing up for that day, but I will always be thankful for their presence. 

We finally made it out, my heart rate was still 210BPM, and I drove myself home. I should have gone to the ER, but I had to work the next day, and it was already dark by the time I made it home. I was so weak I couldn’t get upstairs to get the meds, so my son brought them to me. I was so tired; I couldn’t even tell him what had just happened. So I just sat there in the living room in the dark – hot, sweaty, and exhausted.

I took a beta-blocker, waited a few minutes, and crawled upstairs, barely making it into my bedroom. Somehow I got enough strength to get into the shower, almost passing out. I just wanted to rinse my body off so I could lay down and go to sleep. I knew once the pill started to work, my heart rate would come down eventually.

By the time I made it to my bed, I didn’t even have enough strength to put clothes on. I wrapped my towel around me, wet hair and all, and laid down. I couldn’t believe what I had just gone through. Little by little, the beta-blocker did its job, my heart rate finally lowered, and I eventually dozed off to sleep.

The next day I felt like I had run a 10K marathon. It took me days to recover and feel semi-back to normal. At this point, I decided I wanted to get the surgical procedure to fix this problem because I never wanted to go through this again.

E V E R

I reached out to my Electrotheseaologist and made an appointment to set up the surgery. I expressed how active I am, my recent upset in the gorge, how scary it was and how I never want to go through that again. He said many avid hikers like me choose to get the surgical procedure for the same reasons. So in July 2018, I was scheduled for a catheter ablation, which I was hopeful would fix this problem.

The surgery was a success, and I was discharged the same day and spent some time recovering. After that, the SVT episodes dissipated into nothingness, and I felt like I had my life back.

June & July 2020, things seem to shift a bit. I started showing signs of SVT again. I have also had symptoms resulting in getting up out of chairs, getting out of my car, and bending over.

Sometimes I would be awakened in the night with my heart racing 130-140BPM. Sometimes I would be sitting at work or home doing nothing activity-wise, and it would go up and come back down on its own after some time. I ended up going back to the Cardiologist in August 2020. I was sent home with a new monitor, but after a week of wearing it, I decided I didn’t want to be bothered with anything heart-related. Maybe if I just pretended like it didn’t exist, it would go away?

I just wanted it to go away.

Life went on, and some symptoms would come and go over the next year. I took note, but basically, I ignored them as they were minor compared to the episode in the gorge. I have been hiking on trails that are various levels of difficulty in that time.  I have seemed to do okay since the catheter ablation. I have been hiking a lot in that time, and I have never stopped.

July 2021, I had a significant episode come on me while I was at work, sitting still doing nothing active. I noticed my resting heart rate was 120-130BPM which a standard resting heart rate for me is 80BPM. This episode lasted off and on for 10-12 hours. I ended up taking a beta-blocker I had on hand to bring it down because I was hiking the next day, and I wanted to enjoy my hike and forget I was having this issue.

It’s always in the back of my mind, but again I just wanted it to go away.

Around this time, I decided that I need to start putting my health in my own hands, which goes for physical, emotional, and mental. If I got honest with myself, my plate was overflowing in all areas of my life. Some of the triggers for SVT are doing nothing. However, some are anxiety and stress, as well as many other things. Doing my part, I started to slowly clear my plate of all items that aren’t 100% necessary in my life for my health. All extra commitments and responsibilities had to go. One by one, over the last few months, I have been clearing my plate. I can no longer participate in anything that is emotionally or mentally upsetting or draining. I’ve had to make some significant changes, and some of them have been heartbreaking, but I know I have to do what I have to do for my overall health and, in return, happiness. I’ve been setting major boundaries for myself. This has been life or death for me, because at 47 years young, heart problems are the last thing I want to be dealing with. But here I am, dealing with heart problems. If I haven’t mentioned this to you before, sorry. I don’t like talking about health issues, and keeping it private has aided me in staying in denial.

Today is a new day.

It’s only apparent that I have to make some changes for myself.

Things have begun to shift in my personal and professional life, and I had to evaluate the things that mean the most to me and let go of things that aren’t a priority in my life or they might have been a priority, but not good for my emotional and mental wellbeing. So there has been a lot of getting alone with myself and soul searching, thinking about the life I want to live and the future I want to have for myself.

August 20, 2021 – I flew to Salt Lake City to spend my post-birthday weekend with my best friend. We decided on Saturday, August 20, we would hike a canyon to Fifth Water Hot Springs. We had never been too hot springs before. This was a gorgeous hike, approx—five miles in and out. The incline was pretty significant the whole way in, but making our way to the hot springs was so worth it.

We decided to spend about an hour basking in the hot springs before we make the trip to the bottom of the trail. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life, especially with my best friend. The ambiance was out of this world. We got out of the hot springs to gather our things, and I noticed I felt light-headed, dizzy, and totally off balance.

This is so not like me.

I sat down to get myself together, but I still felt sick. I decided to look at my heart rate as I felt it beating out of my chest. It was between 150-160BPM. I waited for it to come down, and it didn’t come down. We were sitting still in the hot springs, and even after resting out of the water for 30-45 minutes, it was still stuck between 150-160BPM.

Here we go again.

We waited longer, but it showed no lowering signs, so I decided to get up and keep it moving. At least we were going down an incline (instead of an elevated slope) going out, which would be easier for me. So we made it out, taking many breaks, and 1.5-2 hours later, my heart rate slowly started to come down on its own after about 3 hours at 150-160BPM. This episode was similar to the episode where I was stuck in the gorge, and if I was coming out up any incline like I was at the gorge in 2018, I’m pretty sure it would have been even harder on me. Don’t get it twisted. I love a challenging hike, steep scrambles, and I consider the difficult hikes something I enjoy to the fullest!

By the time we made it back to my friend’s house, I was exhausted because when my heart beats that fast non-stop, it does a number on me. I was feeling the impacts of this episode for the next 4-5 days, maybe even longer.  I realized I hiked a strenuous hike, around 5 miles, my heart rate was stuck for several hours, and I traveled by airplane. When I returned home, I was dead to the world.

I made it to work last week, but I was only showing up in a half-ass way most days. I could barely complete my routine tasks, and after work, I was home in bed. I had no energy, and I did not feel well. Finally, by Thursday and Friday, I started to feel semi back to normal. Tuesday, I made it into the heart and valve clinic, and after discussing this episode with my Cardiologist, it’s evident that the SVT is returning. I was told when I had the ablation that there is a possibility that the SVT could come back for a variety of reasons. I was also told other issues could come about after the ablation. I knew it was a possibility, but I didn’t want to believe it would happen to me.

So now what?

I sat in the Cardiologist’s office and failed miserably at holding back tears. Snot slanging, and my emotions overwhelmed me. I expressed my feelings of forcing myself to step out of denial that this is even a thing for me, and my hope of the problem being solved was shattered. I mentioned hiking, especially alone, is the number one thing I love doing in my life, and I didn’t want to be scared to hike alone or give such a precious thing up. So I told him I refused to give it up.

If I get one thing from both my birth parents, it’s stubbornness. I’m not a quitter, and I’m not going to let this heart issue stop me from doing the main thing I love to do. But, I won’t lie, this has been a difficult transition to step into.

The Cardiologist convinced me I needed to wear another monitor to catch an episode in action hopefully. He also ordered several tests to make sure its nothing else going on.

The thing with SVT is that everyone has different experiences with it, and it usually isn’t life-threatening. However, it depends on an individual’s lifestyle and the frequency and duration of the episodes on how it impacts each of us. Especially when I have the episodes hiking, it affects me significantly; it’s impacting my quality of life.

I have a few choices to make. I can let this paralyze me into stopping doing the things I love, or I can push through it and try to step out of denial that it’s even a thing so I can step into a space of truth that if I want to keep doing the things I love, I need to make some changes.

If anyone knows me, I will never stop hiking and chasing waterfalls as long as my body will allow me to go and run wild in nature! This is one of the things I live for. So I have chosen to push through and continue to hike. However, I am working on preparing myself; if things go wrong, what will I do?

I have invested in a new Apple iwatch six series that has some benefits for someone in my situation. They can now check your heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and they can monitor an ECG.  I will need to invest in a GPS (they are expensive!) device that will work when I lose a cell signal and almost always lose a cell signal hiking. I will have to let someone know where I’m going at all times and carry the medication with me if I should be triggered into an episode. I will have to talk to my close friends and family about what to do when I have an episode, and I will continue to research natural ways I can help myself when episodes should arise.

I’ve learned about the Modified Valsalva Maneuver, which helps reset someone’s heart when having an SVT episode. It seems pretty dramatic watching it; however, it looks like it does the job effectively!

One of the most important things I can do for myself is to walkway from the things that have been causing my plate to overflow along with anything that causes consistent stress or anxiety. I can control this, and I have been working on backing out of things and clearing my plate for a few months. I can honestly say it’s been exceptionally freeing to get to this space, but denial can keep us stuck and, in return, sick.

I am determined to kick SVT’s ASS around the world and back again. It will not paralyze me, and it will not control my life. It might slow me down sometimes; however, listening to my body is so much easier with less shit on my plate to tend to.

I’ve spent the last few weeks stepping into a space of acceptance that even with another catheter ablation, this might be something I deal with moving forward. This is important to me and could save my life at some point. However, acceptance hasn’t come without many tears because I don’t want to deal with this at the end of the day.

I’m reminding myself this is similar to when Covid hit us all, and we suddenly had to make some choices on what was the most important to us regarding our time and presence. So we cut back on many things to stay safe and keep others safe in return.

For me, this is my health and my life, so making these choices to step into a lighter role with less stress and anxiety will allow me to step into a space with more love, more laughter, and more quality time with those I love. Because of that, I am thankful.

One last thing I would love to share is that when someone is going through heart issues or any issues, it’s never okay to place a burden on that person as if they have done something or things to create this situation. We all live with stress and some levels of anxiety in life; however, it’s up to each of us to prune our lives to get to a place of peace and joy. Sometimes people are stuck; however, it’s not helpful to say things like “You need to calm down, and not be so stressed all the time” or “You are bringing this on yourself, don’t you think you need to let go of some things and your health might get better?”

It’s hurtful and can keep someone isolated from sharing important health information with those close to. I have gotten this stance several times over the last few years, so I just stopped communicating about this topic. Even when I had a legitimate heart condition, followed by a surgical procedure, it was nothing I could control, people have said these things to me.

Stress, anxiety and such can trigger our hearts to react a certain way, but it’s up to each of us to eliminate as much stress and anxiety as possible. Not those we love placing a burden on us that we are causing these problems; therefore, it’s our fault for the health condition. This is not helpful.

I’m not sharing all this to look for sympathy or prayers. I don’t need pity at all; however, if you are someone close to me and I have backed out of an event, or a relationship, commitment, tasks,  etc., this is likely the cause. Changes have had to happen, and in return, it’s opened my life up to a new path of freedom, even learning to live, love, and hike with SVT. It’s been emotional for me, but I have arrived at the place of acceptance. If you are a close friend of mine, I don’t need anything from you aside from a listening heart and understanding because if we are ever together and this happens, I would love for you to be prepared to handle the situation.

Stay tuned for a fabulous article on how I celebrated my 47th Birthday along side my 9 year sobriety birthday! I was surrounded by those who mean the most to me, my kids!

Are you an active hiker with SVT? I would love to hear others experiences.

Don’t forget this article along with all my other articles are available in audio for your convenience, just look up Pamela A. Karanova Podcast on Google Podcasts, iTunes , Spotify. and Amazon Music. Interested in treating me with a coffee, to add fuel to my fire? Click here. Many thanks in advance to my supporters!

Thanks for reading.

Love, Love

The Fight of My Life Revised

Published on by Pamela A. Karanova4 Comments

THE FIGHT OF MY LIFE – REVISED 

by Pamela Karanova

August 13, 1974, the fight began,

The minute I was born, my birth-mother ran.

 Conceived out of a drunken one-night stand with a married man,

Did my tiny body ever feel her warm, soft hands?

A sacred bond would be broken too soon,

 I can imagine the sorrow in the delivery room.

I spent the next four days in the nursery all alone,

But I’ve always wanted to know, 

Did she name me?

Did she hold me?

Did she love me?

Did she think about me?

Who was she? 

Just like that, at the stroke of her pen,

She never wanted to see me again. 

She signed the dotted line robbing me of the history that was mine. 

My birth father knew nothing of my existence.

During her pregnancy, my birth mother was persistent in keeping her distance. 

My history is to be forgotten.

Adopted Unknown

Case Closed

Records- SEALED!

Parents unknown

THE FIGHT OF MY LIFE

I was born fighting, the fight of my life.

Will I ever know my birthright?

What was the beginning of my life like?

August 13, 1974, the fight began. 

The minute I was born, my birth mother ran.

She snatched up my truth, and she took it and fled.

“She loved you so much” is all that was said.

How do you love someone and leave?

I’ve accepted love is a topic that isn’t for me. 

Baby Girl A was looking for a forever home,

 Adopted by a couple who couldn’t have kids of their own.

An outsider looking in is all I’ve ever known.

My truth is kept captive,

 Did they forget that one day I would be grown?  

Who’s fingers and toes do I have?

Why am I so tall? 

When she signed the dotted line, she took it all.

It’s time for me to take back what was taken from me.

I’m going to fight for what’s mine.

 My birth mother is the woman I’ve dreamed about knowing since the beginning of time. 

After spending a lifetime of searching all around, 

I experienced the biggest letdown.

 My biological parents didn’t want to be found. 

My heart shattered in a million pieces all over the ground. 

Abandoned and rejected not once but twice.

By the two people who should love me the most.

For many years, I was a walking dead woman, invisible like a ghost.

 Most of my life feeling hollow and empty inside.

 A dark cloud followed me everywhere I went,

Most days, it wasn’t easy to get out of bed.

Alcohol took the pain away for 27 years.

 As long I was running from the tears,

 The pain will never disappear.

 I have children to live for, 

And I wanted to preserver.

August 13, 2012, was the day I put that alcohol back on the shelf.

Now it’s time to start the lifelong process of finding myself. 

It’s been almost nine years of processing pain, living alcohol-free.

 I’ve been able to embrace the journey of finding me. 

Fighting for my truth has been the fight of my life,

This has been one hell of a fight.

Now that I have my truth,

I can see the light.

None of us can control the hand we were dealt.

But I recognize adoption has caused me the most pain I’ve ever felt, no doubt.

I’ve accepted these were the cards I was dealt.

I’m tired of being sad, and I’m tired of being mad.

I’ve learned the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.

What’s the key to healing for me?

I needed to be the one to SEE instead of everyone else telling me.

Adoption has caused me the most pain of my life but turning this pain into purpose is the only way I’ll survive.

TODAY I’m an adoptee in recovery, and I deserve to thrive. 

THIS IS MY ADOPTEE REALITY

THE FIGHT OF MY LIFE

Don’t forget this article along with all my other articles are available in audio for your convenience, just look up Pamela A. Karanova Podcast on Google Podcasts, iTunes , Spotify. and Amazon Music. Interested in treating me with a coffee, to add fuel to my fire? Click here. Many thanks in advance to my supporters!

Launching the Pamela A. Karanova Podcast – Finding Purpose in the Pain – One Adoptees Journey from Heartbreak to Hope and Healing

Published on by Pamela A. Karanova2 Comments

I’m excited and honored to share a project I’ve been working on for a long while now, months to be exact. I consider this project a gift to the adoption community, and I hope somewhere along the path of life, it helps others. I know convenience usually wins, so my goal is to offer something that might otherwise be inconvenient specifically to my fellow adoptees.

I want to share a little backstory on how I got here. I’ve been working on a memoir for many years, but every time I start it, something happens, and I have to set it to the side. So after 10+ years of trying to write a memoir, I have concluded that memoir writing is not for me.

To be completely transparent, my life is busy and very active. The last place I seem to want to be these days is sitting in front of the computer, spending a lot of time on it. So small doses for short amounts of time seem to work better for me at this stage of my life.

My website has always been a place of freedom because I can share feelings here without anyone interrupting me and telling me how to feel. So many years of my journey are written and shared on my website in chronological order, back to an open letter to my birth mother I wrote in 2012.

It recently dawned on me that my website is my memoir. So I decided to spend some time transferring all of my old articles to audio via the Anchor FM platform via the Spotify platform. Talk about a time-consuming task! I have written over 200 articles since 2012.

This way, my friends, family, and supporters can tune into several mainstream platforms like Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Radio Public to listen to my articles. My words can reach adoptees and people in the adoption community all around the world. I know time is of the essence these days, and people don’t have time to sit and read as they used to. Listening to books on audio and podcasts has become increasingly popular with almost everyone because our lives are so busy we can fit them into the hustle and bustle of life and keep it moving.

One of the most excellent parts about this transition is the growth I can see in myself and my journey over time. In 2012 I wasn’t as seasoned as I am now, and I was beginning to articulate my feelings about being adopted. I was a baby finding my voice. You can tell I was transitioning out of the fog, and over time I’ve learned to spread my wings like a butterfly and continue to share my story. It’s not been easy, but I know I have reached adoptees all over the world, and they are the reason I keep writing. In healing myself by sharing my story, I am helping others heal and gain courage in sharing their voices and stories.

While I wholly support all the memoir writers out there, my dreams of writing a memoir have dissipated into nothingness. It’s not a sad thing or a bad thing. It’s the reality for me and where I am in my life. So I’m celebrating releasing this task from my plate. I hope you celebrate with me.

As I move forward with a new phase of creating the life I want to live, I hope to spend less and less time in front of electronics and more time out in nature, running wild and chasing waterfalls. Instead of writing a memoir, I want to live my future days filled with adventures and spending time with those I love. I want to take road trips and be living my life.

As a self-care technique, I have chosen to leave almost all online adoptee spaces as they aren’t healthy for me, and I am eliminating as many unnecessary commitments and responsibilities from my life as I can. Not just in the adoption community, but everywhere. As a result, you might see less of me online in adoptee-centric spaces, and you might hear less from me in the days to come. If you follow my social media, that will be the best way to keep in touch, but please understand as I distance myself from the online world, I might take longer than expected to respond, and sometimes I might not respond at all. It’s nothing personal.

Let me be transparent; being in the adoption community for over ten years it’s taken a toll on me. However, as I come to a healthier place as each day passes, I have to set new boundaries for myself. In that, I’m stepping away from many activities I have been a part of, and I’m writing a new life for myself. Adoption has taken so much, and it’s time I take it back and enjoy my life with my friends and family. I still plan on writing but that will be the main place you will hear from me so be sure to follow along if you are interested in keeping in touch.

While I share the launching of the Pamela A. Karanova podcast with you, please be advised that this article is my first recorded podcast in my unique voice. To pull this migration off semi-timely, I had to convert the first 200 articles over with a digital voice that is NOT mine. You would be surprised how long this took by itself. I knew there was no way possible I could record the last ten years of articles in my voice and get it done anytime soon. That would be dead, just like the memoir.

Moving forward, I hope to have all my articles uploaded to the podcast in real-time so they will be available in my voice for you to take a listen while you are on your way to work or working out at the gym.

Be sure to follow along on Spotify and share this gift with your friends, family, and followers. You never know who might be impacted by a country girl from Iowa sharing her story!

Thank you to each of you who has supported me this far! I thank you and appreciate you more than words can express.

To visit my podcast, visit here- Pamela A. Karanova Podcast

Don’t forget this article along with all my other articles are available in audio for your convenience, just look up Pamela A. Karanova Podcast on Google Podcasts, iTunes , Spotify. and Amazon Music. Interested in treating me with a coffee, to add fuel to my fire? Click here. Many thanks in advance to my supporters!

Here’s my most recent article on my Podcast.

My Adoptee Awakening and Cutting Through Spiritual Shortcuts

Published on by Pamela A. Karanova2 Comments

Disclosure Statement: If you are someone who considers yourself a Christian, Jesus Follower, Church Goer, Religious Guru, Or if you believe your way of spirituality is the only way, I am asking you to save your comments, judgments, and opinions and share them on other platforms as there are many churches, online platforms and religious circles that would love to use the glory in your story to promote their church and religion. Please don’t come here to use your story to discredit mine. This page and article isn’t for you. We are all free to have our personal spiritual beliefs and journeys. My space’s boundary is not allowing others to use their personal stories to belittle mine.

Chapter 6.

“Spiritual bypassing frequently presents itself as an opportunity to fast-track spiritual progress, a shortcut through delusion to enlightenment. The real delusion here, of course, is the very idea that one can actually cut corners in spiritual practice. All of our attempts to dodge the messy world or difficult relationships, unpleasant emotions, and whatever else we would rather avoid only sidetrack and obstruct us, eventually generating enough suffering to draw us back to the steps we skipped or only partially took — of honoring, digesting, embodying, and integrating the essential lessons in our lives.” – Spiritual Bypassing, When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters. Page 37.

In the recovery world, in my world, this concept of Spiritual Bypassing actually set me up for a false reality that I was healed and that I had done the work to get to authentic happiness and wholeness. Don’t get me wrong, I did the work, but it was fast-tracked as if I was running out of time.

Part of my reality was, I never accepted my adoptee truth in a way that allowed me the space to sit with the feelings as I was groomed to bypass them from my early childhood. I never learned it was legitimately okay to be sad about being adopted and that my sadness could last an entire lifetime. I never understood that the grief and loss process is something I would be navigating from the moment of being born by being separated from my biological mother and processing relinquishment trauma for the rest of my life.

Instead, I learned to be hyper-focused in my adult years on being healed because of the spiritual teachings I learned, which stalled my healing and disrupted it. I was set up for a downfall I had no idea how to process. I was made to feel disgraceful and not good enough all the way back to the spiritual concept of being born a sinner. Expectations to be thankful weighed me down for as long as I can remember. My adoptive moms’ feelings of happiness were always highlighted and celebrated, while her happiness was at the expense of the most significant loss of my life, my biological mother.

 As a child, teen and adult, I was still feeling anything but pleasant and happy thoughts about being adopted, which caused more damage. I was told my feelings were a choice, and it was my choice to hang onto them or “let them go and give them to God.” I was also told that God was in control, and being adopted was all a part of God’s plan for my life. Gaslighting at its finest.

If I was still feeling pain from adoption, it was clear I was doing the praying, fasting, and serving all wrong. My heart must not be pure enough; I must be sinning too much. Maybe I wasn’t grateful enough?

Relinquishment Trauma isn’t something you can just let go nor is adoption trauma. Trauma can and will impact us for life unless we seek professional guidance and therapy to work on these root issues. No amount of praying has helped erase the trauma, as it always finds a way to circle back around. It’s no wonder, so many in spiritual settings and religious circles are walking around on the pink cloud, yet they are walking dead men and women deep down. That was me for so many years.

I will never forget the beginning of my recovery journey back in 2012; a woman in my step study said sarcastically, “Must be nice, Pamela, to be so high up on that pink cloud!” and I had no clue what she was talking about.

What is the Pink Cloud?

“A life of addiction causes so much pain, hurt, and grief, so sometimes it’s assumed that in recovery, everything will be different. While life in recovery is much more rewarding, it’s not always flowers and sunshine. In early recovery, people often experience a mixture of highs and lows as they gradually adjust to living a life without the influence of drugs or alcohol. Sometimes though, they may experience a short period of elation and euphoria known as the pink cloud.” – Eudaimonia Homes

I can relate to this now, but I was taken back by it then. I can no appreciate the fact that I was sitting on my pink cloud, but my activities in the church and with Christianity helped escalate me to my pink cloud. I like to think of the pink cloud as similar to my experience with spiritual bypassing and how these two concepts can be intertwined. The truth is, the whole time I was in the religious and spiritual settings, I was spiritually bypassing all the hard things I had run from processing my entire life. I might have skimmed over a few topics regarding my birth parents and adoptive parents, but I didn’t sit in it or sit with it, but it was always there. They don’t talk about trauma in church, but they love, support, and promote adoption, which is the root of my trauma.

Outside of church, I was a big part of Celebrate Recovery, a Christ-centered recovery ministry for 4+ years, and I began talking about my adoption/adoptee in the recovery journey there.

Before this, I attended AA for a few months, and it was apparent to me that it wasn’t somewhere I was welcome to share my grief, loss, and trauma from adoption. That’s a whole separate article in itself. While most people were talking about what took them to the rooms of AA, I was focused on what caused me to drink for 27 years.

What was the root of my issues?

Although I believe they are fantastic resources for many, It was clear to me I didn’t belong in these rooms or spaces. At AA, sharing tears and sadness about the loss of my birth mother, siblings, history, family knowledge would easily be laughed at if I was brave enough to share. So occasionally, I shared at Celebrate Recovery but never in AA.  The story they wanted to hear at Celebrate Recovery was the story of how “I Gave it all to God, and he healed me!”

I won’t deny, I wanted to believe I had given it all to God, and I tried. I also tried to forget about my pain and that it even existed. It was hard to pretend all the time, but adoptees are the kings and queens of pretending anyway! This created an extra layer of who I was presenting myself to be, but I was not healed deep down. From an early age, I learned to live with a broken heart and how to put on a front for the world. It’s no wonder I fit right into the church and Christian circles. I was an imposter from day one.

One of my many dangerous and traumatic experiences with God, religion, church, and the bible is that I was groomed and conditioned to NOT tune into my feelings because they are evil, immoral, and corrupt. I was lead to believe I should not listen to them or put action behind them as they can’t be trusted. In other words, I should never trust myself and my feelings were sketchy at best. The level of damage this has caused is something I can’t put into words. The spiritual practices of fasting, serving, praying were all pacifiers to keep me busy, floating around on the pink cloud pretending I was whole inside.

I found an interesting article – Feelings Are Not Facts,

“Are Feelings Reliable?

I don’t believe God intended for our feelings to guide us. He wants that job. God wants to be our guide. Our feelings should not be what drives our decisions but rather an indicator of what’s going on inside us.  We must put our trust in what God says and check our feelings at the door with the Word of God. Living by faith means allowing God to be our guide and not our emotions.” – by Starla Hill

This toxic and disgusting article is precisely what I mean when I say we are wholeheartedly conditioned not to trust ourselves but put our trust in God and God alone. Little girls are growing up learning this turn into young ladies and women with a deep entrusting feeling not to trust themselves or how they feel. Even boys, growing up to be young men and men, are damaging on every level. So how am I supposed to believe in the bible when so much of it is oppressive? It’s simple; I have no argument for your scriptures because I no longer believe in them. I can’t believe in something I know to be harmful. See, it’s much more than my bad church experience.

Being adopted, the layers of being taught not to trust our feelings and intuition combined with being told how to feel about our adoption experience and our feelings are always the back seat to others in our lives, specifically our adoptive parents. We’re entirely silenced for many of us, and it’s no wonder so many adoptees have deep-rooted issues, rightfully so. As if relinquishment trauma isn’t enough, we’re placed in the middle of a complete mental mind fu*k left to navigate it all alone.

I have witnessed Adoption, Religion, Christianity, Church & Institutions set up to separate, divide and destroy people, and they are destructive in more than one way. So, no, I didn’t just have a bad church and adoption experience! I will be writing about that soon!

“We are all in such a hurry to get it, whatever it may be. Greed for speed – fast food, fast money, fast relationships, fast spirituality. Drive-through divinity with organic fries and easy-to-swallow highs. Who wants to spend years doing spiritual practices when the same results can apparently be gained – given a sufficiently open mind and a wallet – in just a weekend! We may even be told that the only thing that could prevent us from seeing the desired results from such a weekend is OUR LACK OF BELIEF IN THE PROCESS. And so the shearing of the sheep goes on. Business as usual.” – Page 41. Spiritual Bypassing.

One of the many dynamics of Christianity’s damage that I have experienced is shaming that we are guilty of not believing enough or being good enough. But, unfortunately, this is usually used in the context of us not receiving the healing or wholeness we desire.

Many years ago, I asked some church friends to come to pray for a terminally ill friend with Cancer just a few weeks before she died. It was the end of her life, yet she prayed to be healed and wanted to live to be with her three children. As they prayed for her to be healed, even with cancer-consuming her body, organs shutting down, etc. when they left her house and walked to the car, they whispered, “Wow, she must have been harboring anger, resentments, and unforgiveness for God not to give her the healing she wanted.”  

This is one of the many examples of my experience with my journey in Christian circles that I am ashamed of to the fiber of my being. I remember being so confused by this and not understanding it at all. So God didn’t heal her because she was “bad?” What if she didn’t have the tools to work on her anger, resentments, or unforgiveness? What if she tried to work on them, but she wasn’t where she needed to be yet? This is why she didn’t receive her healing?

This was one of the many deciding factors of me leaving the fold and no longer co-signing in favor of this Christian God everyone spoke so highly of. One example of many I have had that didn’t sit well with my spirit and intuition now that I had walked away and could FEEL MY FEELINGS and acknowledge them.

Equally intertwined into the fiber of my being adoption and relinquishment trauma combined with religious trauma from Christianity, it’s a miracle I’m here to share my story. I see many parallels to conditioning beliefs from very early ages and being told how to feel. Christianity was introduced to me at no choice of my own, and being adopted was a considerable part of my life that was made at no choice of my own.

Of all the years of my life, I spent trying to stay alive, trying to figure this mess out. Finally, in 2012, I found myself in secular recovery programs dedicated to the church, God. After spending several years in these environments, my healing started to happen when I walked away from all of these systems, institutions, and what I was told to believe.

Straight out the door…

My healing started to happen when I looked deep within myself and started to believe in myself like I believe in God, people, places, and things outside of myself. (church, biological family, adoptive family, etc.) It began to happen when I learned to listen to my body and respond to my feelings. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen overnight when we spend most of our lives being told not to trust ourselves and our feelings don’t matter. It’s a slow and organically moving process. No one told me how to do this, and without God on my side, as I had always believed in my past, I went through a grueling process of no longer believing in this higher power but finding the glimmer of hope I needed to believe in myself. It was scary when I was told not to believe in myself and sacrifice myself for God and my adoptive parent’s happiness. It’s like everyone was happy but me.

But once again, I felt like I was alone on an island, but adoption prepped me for this. I already felt this way, but it was scary for me, and I had to process grief and loss all over again. I lost the church and church family I had spent years investing in and pouring into literally at the flip of a switch. It was a new chapter and a new door, and a harrowing one. I put up walls and swore to myself I would never allow so many people to get close to me again for fear of losing them all over again. And I haven’t, and I won’t. I’m very cautious of who I let in my space, and not many make the cut.  

I walked away from the church in 2015, thinking I would find God outside the church more than inside. I did to some extent, but that was an awakening process as well. To walk away from the church and God all at the same time is a terrifying thought. It’s taken me 6.5 years to find my voice and to have enough courage to share my life experiences with Christianity. While I began sharing my adoptee experiences and feelings in 2010, it took me 35 years to get to that point.

More healing started when I began sharing my feelings about these experiences OUTLOUD and writing about my adoption journey without apologizing for how I felt. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do this while I was in religious and spiritual settings (church) because of the happy and positive mindset believers are supposed to have. I also couldn’t share my adoptee feelings until I was estranged from most of my adoptive family. So it’s been a hell of a painful journey to be here to share my story.  

I had to get ALONE with MYSELF for this spiritual awakening process to begin, and while years have passed, I’m still evolving and discovering who I am and who I’m not every single day. For me, one of the keys was finding my biological family, and although what I found (rejected by both parents) was heartbreak on top of heartbreak, at least I know my truth. Adoptees need to see it for themselves instead of everyone else telling us or secrets and lies standing in the way.

I’ve been on a spiritual awakening, deconditioning, and deconstructing journey for over six years now when it comes to Christianity. I have been coming out of the fog with my adoption journey since 2005. I entered the recovery realm in 2012 into a new path, living life alcohol-free. I have walked away from everything I have always known on three different occasions to find who I am, so I could be a better version of myself – the one I lost when I was surrendered for adoption. I might as well have been stripped butt naked on a mountain all alone because that’s how it’s felt coming to terms with the realities of all of these areas of my life.

Finally, I’ve been able to look myself in the mirror and shed off all the old things that I carried I no longer wanted to carry. But the depts of everything I have had to lose to get here is something I can’t even begin to put into words. I feel like I’ve lost everything over and over again, but today I am humbly reminded that at least I have myself. I promised myself that no matter what happens in life, I will be true to myself even when my feelings don’t line up with the popular narrative.

There is a lot to be said about being true to oneself. But, unfortunately, many people spend their entire lifetimes fitting in the mold, not wanting to ruffle any feathers, just going with the flow, swimming to their graves.

Not me.

At the end of the day, as lonely as I feel and as painful as it’s been to get here, feeling like I’ve lost everything three times over, at least I am honoring myself and being true to myself in the process. I’m not giving all the glory to an invisible being who has allowed me to be in pain and suffering all my life since birth. Instead, I’m patting myself on the back for finding the glimmer of strength needed to get up every day and try to find happiness amid a lifetime of pain. I’m cheering myself on when I feel like giving up. Finally, I’m getting up enough strength to share the painful pieces of my journey in hopes of reaching other deconstructing adoptees so they don’t feel as isolated and alone as I have.

If you have made it this far, thank you for reading. I am thankful for my followers and hope to gain support from those who have different beliefs and views from me; however, I am prepared to lose some. But, when I’ve already lost everything four times over, I’m used to it. Being born and relinquished, I didn’t have a choice. I have chosen all the others, but it was to honor myself and be true to myself.

Four times in 46 years, I have lost it all.  

1.   Being born & relinquished on August 13, 1974 – the original root issue of relinquishment trauma.

2.   Coming out of the fog about adoption, moving across the country, legally changing my name, starting my life over in 2005

3.   Starting my Adoptee in Recovery Journey August 13, 2012 (Alcohol-Free after 27 years of dependence)

4.   Deconstruction, walking away from the church, religion, & spiritual conditioning. 2015.

I have lost a lot, but I have my true authentic self, and for me, that’s everything.

For my fellow adoptees, have you ever had to walk away from everything in order to find yourself? What was that experience like for you? For those who consider themselves deconstructing, can you relate to any of what I have shared here?

Don’t forget this article along with all my other articles are available in audio for your convenience, just look up Pamela A. Karanova Podcast on Google Podcasts, iTunes , Spotify. and Amazon Music. Interested in treating me with a coffee, to add fuel to my fire? Click here. Many thanks in advance to my supporters!

The views and opinions expressed in this article are that of the author, Pamela A. Karanova. Reproduction of the material contained in this publication may be made only with the written permission of Pamela A. Karanova

Disseminating my Deconstruction with Religion, Christianity, Church and Adoption

Published on by Pamela A. Karanova3 Comments

I’ve recently come to a empowering place in my recovery journey where I’m starting to share my deconstruction experiences with Christianity, Church, Religion and Adoption. They are so similar in so many ways. I’m writing as a healing tool for myself, but for others who might be on a similar path so they know they aren’t alone.

Below are a few posts that I’ve recently shared on my Facebook page – Pamela Karanova

Trust me when I tell you, this is only the beginning.


June 16, 2021 Hello Friends, It’s been awhile since I put any personal thoughts and feelings into this page. However, I’m back and ready to roar! I have a lot to share as I’m continuing to evolve, grow and reach destinations in my personal journey I never thought I would reach. Some of the experiences, views and opinions I carry are quite controversial to most. But here, I’m going to try to share them not only to free myself, but to hopefully be a light to other adoptees who might feel similar ways.

While we live in a society that celebrates adoption, do they realize they are celebrating mother’s and babies being separated?

Do they understand when they support adoption, they are supporting secrecy, lies and half truths?

Do they understand that adoptees are dying every day not knowing their truth?

Do other adoptees feel that coming out of the fog about religion is parallel to coming out of the fog about adoption? If so, have you been lonely in this journey? I see you, because I have felt this way too…

In adoption and religion, I see so much damage being done to innocent people, including myself & my family. I can not stay quiet.

While adoptions continue to happen, adoptees are stepping up to share insights on how this has impacted us, and also share areas we feel need highlighted and improved, sometimes even abolished.

As I share my story of coming to terms with the parallels of coming out of the fog about adoption and religion, I will focus on the purpose of healing and allowing others to know they aren’t alone if they might be going through similar experiences.

It’s been a long and lonely journey to get to this space, but I have arrived.

Thank you for following along, and embracing me as I share my journey with the world. – P.K.

June 16. 2021 For me, coming out of the fog about religion has been comparable to coming out of the fog about adoption. It’s been a long and lonely journey for me, but I have arrived at a space of freedom and strength where I am pushing myself to share my story. I am continuously taken back on how similar my experience has been coming out of the fog with adoption, as it’s been coming out of the fog about religion.

It’s eerily similar!

Just like adoption, I can no longer sit in silence as I continue to experience the unjust practices of religious beliefs, Christianity, Church (or adoption/relinquishment trauma), and how they damage, hurt and impact people I know and love and myself… & even people I don’t know and love.

My moral compass will no longer allow me to stay silent, especially when so many people are in agony and pain over these religious beliefs, practices, and circles. Let me point out adoption and relinquishment trauma have a million of the same parallels.

I’m calling out the contradictions, inconsistencies, and appalling discoveries I have made, and I am not backing down or hiding or censoring my feelings! Much of what I share will likely cause some buttons to be pushed, however it doesn’t change my truth (experiences) and how I feel about these topics. – P. Karanova

June 18, 2021 This is my brain when I try to process religious, adoption and relinquishment trauma.

A big majority of it is fear based, and more is trauma based. For the last 10+ years I’ve been on a journey of healing, evolving and self discovery. The larger part of this time I’ve been raising my kids to adulthood as a single parent.

Life has been busy… and hard.

When I think of all the dynamics of my deconstruction journey, and coming out of the fog about adoption and relinquishment trauma and even embracing a new recovery journey living alcohol free after 27 years of dependence, my brain goes into instant overload.

I’ve been trying to process it all as they have happened at separate stages of my life. But when I try to compare them or put the experiences together it’s almost like my brain shuts down. That’s the trauma.

It’s obvious it’s too much.

But I’m still going to try to try to do my best to push forward and share these layers of my experiences in hopes to not only help myself heal, but others who might be suffering alone. I would like to ask for understanding while I share. My words my be off, I might not share in the right order, and sometimes what I share won’t make sense to you.

Lastly, when someone is sharing areas that they feel have been traumatic for them, they don’t need you to swoop in and protest by standing up for the exact thing that has traumatized them. Please STOP before you even start and think before you comment.

Would you tell someone sharing about their heartbreaking divorce how wonderful your marriage is?

Would you tell someone who just lost their child to a horrible illness that your child survived that illness and is thriving well and that wasn’t your experience?

No, no you wouldn’t so don’t please don’t do it to me. It’s not helpful even if you don’t agree with me, and have a different experience I ask you to keep it moving! I appreciate it in advance.

Don’t forget this article along with all my other articles are available in audio for your convenience, just look up Pamela A. Karanova Podcast on Google Podcasts, iTunes , Spotify. and Amazon Music. Interested in treating me with a coffee, to add fuel to my fire? Click here. Many thanks in advance to my supporters!

The views and opinions expressed in this article are that of the author, Pamela A. Karanova. Reproduction of the material contained in this publication may be made only with the written permission of Pamela A. Karanova

Honored to be a Spotlight Guest Tonight – 5/28/21- NAAP Adoption Happy Hour

Published on by Pamela A. KaranovaLeave a comment

TONIGHT – National Association of Adoptees and Parents – AdoptionHappyHour – 7 pm est – Pamela A. Karanova – Adoptees Connect, Inc.

Join host Marcie Keithley as she welcomes spotlight guest Pamela Karanova.

Pamela is an adult adoptee, living in Lexington, Kentucky, was born in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1974. Although Pamela’s roots are scattered all over Iowa, she considers Kentucky to be her home.

Over the last ten years, Pamela has dedicated much of her life to not only work towards healing regarding her adoptee journey but also pouring into the adoptee community. She’s created resources for adult adoptees and built relationships with adoptees all over the world!

www.adopteesconnect.com

Registered attendees will be emailed a link to the event on Zoom Meeting on Thursday and Friday. If you add the event to your calendar when you register you can launch the Zoom Meeting from the calendar event. (click the play button in the center of the event image)

Visit www.naapunited.org to register! Or click the link below ⤵️

https://fb.me/e/V5AlHtyk

My Sentiments on Iowa Bill HF855

Published on by Pamela A. Karanova2 Comments

My Sentiments on Iowa Bill HF855

IA HF855 – A bill for an act relating to access to a copy of an original birth certificate by an adoptee or an entitled person, providing for fees and including effective date provisions. (formerly HF 723, HSB 226)

For more information on this bill, visit here.

I want to share that I am honored and proud to know Michelle Spear, one of the leading forces at Iowa Adoptee & Family Coalition behind this bill being passed. For over seven plus years, Michelle and many others have worked tirelessly to get Iowa laws changed for adopted adults to obtain their OBC’S. I have been cheering them on from states away during this time because I am an Iowa Adoptee, but I have lived in Kentucky since I was 17 years old. I have built a relationship from afar with Michelle and have admired her dedication and hard work in all these years to DO SOMETHING!  Her hard work, and dedication hasn’t gone unnoticed. I am eternally grateful!

I remember being told of my adoption back to 5 years old and asking when I could find my biological mother. Year after year of my childhood, I received the same response. “Honey, the records in Iowa are sealed, but when we get enough money for an attorney, we will get the sealed records opened. But right now, we don’t have enough money.”

Sadly, my adoptive mom knew who my birth mother was my whole life, so this was just a lie. I was spoon-fed this lie to simmer my desire and curiosity to know my biological family. However, it never calmed down my desire to want these CLOSED records OPENED and find my people. I can remember wanting my Original Birth Certificate from the beginning of my life.

As I learned of this new Iowa Bill HF855 passing, a wave of excitement and long-awaited happiness has come over me the last few days because of Bill HF855’s passing; I will be one of those adoptees. Finally, a dream come true, and one that I always thought was so far out of reach I would go to my grave never getting to see my OBC.

While I celebrate this massive milestone in adoptee rights, SOME adopted adults in the state of Iowa will not be able to receive their OBC.

Here’s why.

Bill HF855 is subject to redaction at the birth parent’s request. Instead of point fingers at the Iowa Adoptee & Family Coalition that this bill is not a clean bill, I point fingers at the entire adoption system that has set adoptees up with fighting this fight, to begin with. Let’s shine a light on the ROOT of the problem, and not those who are spending year after year fighting tirelessly to shift the laws in Iowa.

While I was overcome with multilayered emotions that I would be getting my OBC in the near future, I was equally sitting in the sadness for many of my fellow adoptees. It seems we’re still infantilized, being treated like perpetual infants who have never grown up.

This saddens me to the core of my being.

The perplexing emotions that have swept through me the last 24-48 hours are complicated at best. One minute I am crying happy tears, and the next, I am crying sad tears. Such significant steps that SOMETHING is moving in the state of Iowa regarding adoptees to have their OBC’s, but we still have so much work to do. Thank you to all who have been there for me during this time!

Part of me is so happy I will finally receive my OBC, and so many other adoptees will as well. I honestly never thought I would be alive to see my OBC and that I would be one of the adoptees who go to their grave, never laying eyes on it. Yet, I always knew Michelle was doing her best to TRY to get something moving in Iowa in the back of my mind.  

#simplepieceofpaper movement

It might be viewed as insignificant to many who have never lived without their birth certificates. Still, for many adopted people, we have been denied the right to obtain this simple piece of paper that most non-adopted people might take for granted. When someone is adopted, their OBC is kept secret, filed away in a cabinet, and the adopted person is generally never supposed to lay eyes on it as long as they are alive. They are never supposed to know who they are or where they come from. This knowledge is kept locked away for eternity.

What’s the big deal about having your Original Birth Certificate?

I want to know what information is on my OBC. Did my birth mother name me? Is my birth father listed? Does it have the correct birthday? Does it tell how much I weighed? It’s a tie to my truth, and no law should stand in the way of me having it.

I used to take care of a 86 year-old dementia patient named Pauline. I would go get her to bed at night, and even when she forgot her kids, and grandkids names, she would lay awake and stare at the ceiling and say, “I was adopted out of a home in Louisville, I never found out who my people were, but I always wondered who they were and where I came from. Were they looking for me?”

Even when she forgot many other things in life, she always remembered to her dying days she was adopted, and it haunted her not knowing who she was and where she came from.

How many Pauline’s have died before every learning their truth?

How many will continue to die before learning their truth?

I can share from the experience of building relationships with adoptees for over a decade that many feel like we aren’t alive because we feel like we were never born. Much of this goes back to being denied the right to know who we are and where we come from and to know our birth stories. Our OBC is a direct tie to our history and birth story, and every adopted person on the planet deserves to know their truth.

I also know that adoptees are 4x more likely to attempt suicide and they are over-represented in jails, prisons, mental health, and treatment facilities. These staggering statistics are alarming at best, and we have to understand that the closed adoption social experiment has failed and failed adopted individuals miserably.

Why are we still giving birth mothers anonymity and allowing adoptees to pay the price of shame and secrecy for life? It’s a fundamental human right to know who you are and where you come from. We all have a right to know who our siblings and biological families are. Adoptees are fighting for a document that most people have, and this document shares their truth. Hiding this truth never has been and never will be in the best interest of any child.

Truth and transparency are the only way to go, and anything rooted and grounded in secrecy and lies is only harming adoptees. We can’t heal from secrecy, lies, and half-truths because we don’t know what we’re healing from.

I’m a firm believer that every adopted individual should have UNRESTRICTED ACCESS to their original birth certificate under the law. While Iowa Bill HF855 is a shift I am eternally grateful for, we will continue to have work to do in Iowa and any other state that isn’t allowing unrestricted access to adopted adult’s original birth certificates.

I urge anyone who might read this article to share their voice and speak loud about the unjust treatment adopted individuals experience worldwide, just because we’re adopted. It’s never too late to get involved with supporting adopted adults and push for unconditional access to our OBC’S.

While I’m celebrating for Iowa, and I am celebrating for myself, I am celebrating that step by step, year after year, changes are happening for adopted adults. It’s just deplorable, so many people support adoption, but they don’t realize they are also supporting secrecy, lies, and half-truths.

ADOPTEES ARE DYING, NEVER KNOWING THEIR TRUTH!

We can’t afford to turn a blind eye any longer.

On the flip side, I’m honored to be a part of such a significant milestone for my home state of Iowa and show up to celebrate with them. Wednesday, May 19, 2021, I will be traveling to Iowa for the Governor’s formal signing of bill HF955 into law, allowing Adoptees to Access their Original Birth Certificates. I will spend less than 24 hours in Iowa, but I wouldn’t miss this event for the world! On January 1, 2022, I will be able to apply for my original birth certificate.

Wednesday, I will be wearing YELLOW as a sign of remembrance for Adoptee Remembrance Day, as well as all tribute to all the Iowa Adoptees who died before they ever found their truth. I would like to invite anyone attending this historic event to join in with me to wear yellow as well. I know my emotions will be running high, as many emotions will be that day. I have close friends attending, I will be in great hands.

http://www.adopteeremembranceday.com

I want to say a special THANK YOU to my close friends and family who have supported me through these past few days and my journey in general. Keila, Damia & Damond, Thanks for your continued love and support! Thank you Jennifer for being my side kick through this whole thing. Thank you Taylor & Clarita for covering work so I could go! You all have no idea how much your support means to me, and even just listening to me and saving space for my sadness and tears is healing in a million ways. I appreciate you, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

For all those who have had a part in this bill moving forward, Michelle, Susie, and the rest of the tribe… I salute you all, I thank you, and I love you. I will always hold a huge space in my heart for your efforts, your sacrifice, and hard work!

Don’t forget this article along with all my other articles are available in audio for your convenience, just look up Pamela A. Karanova Podcast on Google Podcasts, iTunes , Spotify. and Amazon Music. Interested in treating me with a coffee, to add fuel to my fire? Click here. Many thanks in advance to my supporters!

Love, Love!

Pamela A. Karanova

The views and opinions expressed in this article are that of the author, Pamela A. Karanova. Reproduction of the material contained in this publication may be made only with the written permission of Pamela A. Karanova