Storytelling as Healing: Dr. Liz DeBetta on Adoption, Trauma & Finding Wholeness

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We live fragmented, fragmented, fragmented.

We live divided, divided, divided.

But we were designed, we were designed whole, whole, whole, whole, whole. Powered by CJ Moneyway Entertainment and the Believe Network. On this episode of the CJ Moneyway Show, CJ sits down with Liz DaBetta, scholar, artist, activist, activist, creator of Migrating Toward Wholeness. Because leadership without wholeness fractures under pressure. The CJ Moneyway Show. Tap in.

How you doing, Doc?

I'm doing great. How are you?

I'm doing good. So Doc, let's jump into this for a second. Identity and origins. Let's start with your story as an adoptee and creative. How has this changed your journey? How has your journey been in reclaiming your voice?

Well, my whole journey has been about reclaiming my voice. As an adopted person, I spent the first 40 years of my life not having any real information about my origins, about the family that I came from, or what my ethnicity was, or who my biological relatives were. And so for, you know, sort of just about the first almost 4 decades of my life, I didn't really have a deep sense of connection to myself. And so a big part of my journey has been about reclaiming my identity through the act of storytelling, being able to figure out what my story was and to be able to tell it. And one of the ways that I did that when I went back to school in 2016 to finish my master's degree after a really big break in my education because of a lot of life, it was suggested to me that I take a class in autobiographical writing. And I had been writing my whole life and I had done a ton of academic writing, but I had never taken a formal creative writing class. And I thought, okay, that sounds interesting. Sure, I'll take that class. And I didn't need to take that class. I just needed to finish my 2 independent study credits, but it sounded like a good idea. Well, it was a good idea because what that class did for me was it invited me to think about my story. It invited me for the first time. My professor suggested that I write about being adopted after I had a little bit of a breakdown in class one night because I was listening to a classmate tell— read her story about growing up with her sister and how much they looked like twins and how everybody mistook them for twins and all the similarities that they had. And I just sat there crying. It hit me that I had no idea who I looked like. I had no idea if I had siblings out in the world. I had no idea who my first mother was or if she thought about me or if she was still alive even, you know. And it struck a nerve. And my professor said, you know, what's going on? And I said, well, I'm adopted. I have no idea. Who I look like. And it's amazing to me, like, I'm so fascinated when I hear about people's stories of their similarities with siblings or parents or other relatives. And I even like when I see people, I'm always like, oh my God, I can totally see that's a mother and a son or, you know, brother and sister. But I don't have that experience. And she said, well, why don't you write about that? And I said, what, being adopted? And she said, yeah, why don't you write about it? And I said, well, I don't know anything. What am I going to write about? And she said, well, just think about it. And I said, okay, I'll think about it. And I ended up really struggling through the process of writing that story because for the first couple of attempts at drafts, I was telling the story that I had been handed my whole life. And sort of in adoption culture, we all kind of know the terminology of entrance narrative and it's the story that adoptees are told about why they were adopted, what their place in the family is, often it's connected to what the parents' story is. And for me, that was very true. Like, it was this story about my parents' infertility and how they always wanted to have kids and they knew they would adopt. And so when I first started to try to tell my story, I was telling their story. And my professor kept saying to me, "No, that's not your story." You've got to tell your story. And it took me a while to figure it out. But the act of struggling through telling my story for the first time was really powerful and transformative for me because it taught me that I did have a story to tell. It mattered and that it was a story that other people needed to hear as well. And so a couple of years later, as I continued on into my PhD work, I got really invested in the idea of storytelling and identity. Because I needed to know who I was. And sort of concurrently, at the same time, I was able to get a copy of my original birth certificate, which then cracked open a whole lot of things. Because then I knew who my first mother was. And I, for the first time, started to feel like a real person, that I had come from somewhere, that I didn't just show up one day.

So let me ask you, Doc, you know, listening to your story, First, how old were you when you found out that you were adopted?

I don't remember not knowing. I have known since I was very small. It was not a secret, which is a good thing. There's been research done in subsequent years that tells us that it's important to tell children very early on that they are adopted so that they can integrate that into their identities. And it's not a surprise or a secret later in life. And disruptive in terms of the developmental stages. So I always knew the problem was that it was closed adoption, which is true for many people. And closed adoption is when you don't have any access to records. And many states still have closed adoption practices, which seals the records and amends people's birth certificates and makes it look as if the adoptive parents are the, the actual parents. And then there is no ability to access any health history or records about biological origins, which is the thing that really leads to a disconnected and disjointed sense of identity for adopted people. Certainly that's true in my case, and it is very true of all the people that I work with now and that I know, you know, as friends and people in the adoption community.

So let me ask you, Doc, you say that You know, you found out who your adoptive mother was, and it cracked open a whole lot of other stuff. Have you met your biological mother?

Yeah.

So funny, another interesting twisty turn of the universe. I got the copy of my original birth certificate on my 40th birthday. And so that was like, happy birthday from the universe. Here's your birth certificate. And it had her name on it. Her name is Mary. And I was able to pretty quickly after getting that information be able to find her because of the internet and, you know, Facebook and all those tools that we now have that I didn't have, you know, 20 years prior when I first started to think about looking for her. So this was in 2017, beginning of 2017. And it took me a couple of weeks to figure out what I was going to say to her and send her a message. And then I waited. I waited to see if she would get back to me. And I sent her a message on Facebook. And I also wrote the same message in a handwritten note and put it in the mail in the event that she didn't check her Facebook messages. But she did write back to me and she said, I've been waiting for this day for 40 years and I'm so glad you reached out to me. And so we've been in reunion now since 2017 and It's a slowly progressing relationship, but it's a good one. She's, you know, we have a lot of things, a lot of similar personality traits and a lot of like similar thought processes. So we have an easy time talking with one another, which is really nice.

Yeah, that's cool. That's cool. Well, you know, sometimes I guess in life, by you being a doctor and going to get your PhD, you know, I know the story. Like you say, then have an identity and everything. Sometimes some things happen for a reason, I guess, you know, because who's to say that we'd be talking to Dr. Liz the Better right now, you know, if things went the other way. So I'm pretty sure you and your mother squared it out because there's things that sometimes we don't know about why somebody did something or why this happened. I don't want to get into that, but like you said, life gets in the way of certain things. And unless you in the fire, you know what I'm saying, sometimes even, even as kids, you know, when you growing up in a household with your parents And, you know, the parents can be going through something like financially or whatever, but sometimes the kids shelter from that and they don't even know. Or the mother and father get a divorce and sometimes you take sides, but you really don't know the full story or the full backdrop of, you know, saying what actually happened. So I'm glad you and your mother, you know, amending that relationship. So let me ask you that, what inspired the name of Menegrating Towards Wholeness? And how does that concept reflect your own life?

Yeah, that's such a good question. So Migrating Toward Wholeness really is a reflection of my journey. What it's about is this journey toward a sense, a greater sense of wholeness and completeness that I have been on for my whole life, but really definitely for the last 10 years since that first experience of writing about my story as an adopted person and starting to piece together coherent narrative. So that the concept of Migrating Toward Wholeness is about finding a greater sense of self by being able to break silences around things that, you know, I didn't— wasn't able to talk about for a lot of years. You know, like I said, I always knew that I was adopted. But at some point in my, you know, or, you know, not my, like, middle school years, sometime between the age of probably like 10 or 12, we just kind of stopped talking about it. And then it became a thing I couldn't talk about. And so when I was in grad school, working toward my PhD, I took a class called Poetry and Healing. And I learned that there was this whole field of therapeutic writing, that you could use poetry and expressive writing as tools to heal trauma. And I was like, this is so interesting. And also, this is the thing that I've been doing my whole life, without knowing that I was helping myself. And so that exploration led me to writing and performing my award-winning solo show Unmothered, which was originally part of my dissertation work. And that was the first iteration, I will say, of this concept of migrating toward wholeness, because That was me making myself the subject of the research and taking this idea of how, how can I use, how can we as adopted people use poetry and expressive writing to tell truthful personal stories that help us to create a coherent storyline and process and heal some of the embodied trauma because trauma lives in the body. And when we don't do something with it, when we don't give it an expression that is outside of ourselves, we can get sick. And that's physical ailments and physical illnesses, as well as significant mental health struggles, which is another part of my experience, having lived with a significant amount of anxiety that went undiagnosed, that was related to my unprocessed trauma. And so being able to write and perform my story and figure out how to use that to migrate toward wholeness for myself then developed into what became the original pilot program for Migrating Toward Wholeness, which was run in collaboration with the Rudd Adoption Research Program in 2021. And then they reached out to me and they were like, we're really interested in this writing and healing stuff that you're doing. And we want, we want you to do something for us. And it was during COVID and it was on, you know, an online experience. And I said, well, what if I start a writing group with another group of adult adoptees and, and do this work and figure out what it is. And that was a really transformative experience, both for me and the group. It helped me figure out and then name Migrating Toward Wholeness. It was the thing I had been doing that had not had a name yet. And then it became the Migrating Toward Wholeness process, which then developed into The Five-Part Process Wheel, and as it is connected to the Seven Parts of Trauma Healing as I define them. And that framework is the foundation of some really powerful and transformational healing work that I get to do now with other adoptees because I have done it myself first.

Let me ask you, I didn't have this on the list, but I'm listening to you. So at what point in your life did you decide, you know, I wanted to be a doctor first? And did, you know, the thing, like, as you talking about the trauma and the things that you was going through, is that something that pushed you towards that avenue, you know what I'm saying, to find a deeper interpersonal self, you know, and try to heal from what you were dealing with?

Yeah, I mean, I'm going to say a couple of things about this. The first is that school has always been my coping mechanism. I have always been a really good student. I have always been really interested in learning in school. So I secretly always thought, oh, maybe I would like to get a PhD, but I never really considered it. I never really thought that I would do it until I left New York in 2016. My partner and I moved to Utah and I went— I returned to teaching. I had begun my career as a high school teacher in New New York City many years before, and then did a lot of other things in between. And then we moved to Utah, and I want— I returned to teaching in higher ed, and I realized I love teaching and I wanted to keep doing it. And I thought, well, if I want to stay in higher ed, it might be a good idea for me to get my PhD. And I, you know, came home one night and I said to my partner, I think I want to get a PhD. And he was like, Yeah, go for it, you know. And I started that degree at 40, you know, like I did not have a traditional path by, by any means. And, and I think that's in part due to like the many disruptions in my life and the many times that I made decisions that maybe were not the best for me. And so when I made the decision to get my PhD, it was really at the same time that I was also starting to figure out the pieces of my story as an adoptee, as an adopted person, and trying to start to figure out who— I hadn't yet met my first mom. But then a couple of months after I started, about, you know, in the middle of the first year of my PhD work is when I met her. And when I started the program, I had already started on my own journey of reading all of the research about the psychology of adoption and all the books that had been suggested that I had never thought I needed to read. So things like The Primal Wound and Journey of the Adopted Self and Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self. Like, these are all these, these books that were written in the '80s and '90s that had never really been on my radar because I thought, I thought I was fine. Like, I thought I didn't have any problems. Until I realized, you know, right, right before I finished the last two credits of my master's degree, which I talked about a little while ago, I had hit a point in my life where I felt stuck. And so for me, school was always the way to like, do something, move forward. So it made sense to me that school again was going to be the next thing to help me get to whatever was next in my life. And then what ended up unfolding there was that And while I was studying, it became really clear to me that becoming a resource and a healing resource in the adoption community was the path that I needed to be on. And that's what ended up happening because then it took me through this whole amazing journey of writing and performing my one-woman show, piloting the Migrating Toward Wholeness group, developing that program and that process, and now building, you know, building my, my business and the rest of my career out of it.

Yeah, I like that. Got a lot going on, got a lot going on, Doc. So let me ask you, you talked about the books and everything, so let's get into your own book. Writing is healing, as, as you've been explaining to us. Your book, Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal, is deeply personal and academic. How does creative writing unlock healing for others, especially adoptees?

Yeah, thank you. That's such a good question. So creative writing— I mean, really, any creative pursuit is integral in healing trauma because creativity helps us to create a container for the trauma. And so specifically, writing is a really great tool for helping people who've experienced trauma heal from things, because it allows us to attach language. For adoptees, it's particularly powerful because our trauma is preverbal. So it's a trauma that happens before we have words to explain it. Because it happens when we're separated from our mothers at, at or shortly after birth, or in the case of kids who are removed from families in the first, you know, 1 to 3 years of their life, it's the same kind of maternal separation disruption. And we don't have language, enough language at the time to attach words to the experience. And so what ends up happening is our nervous systems take in that information, and our brains get rewired. And then we spend a lifetime in this state of hyperarousal, constantly, like, on high alert for any kind of danger, any kind of thing that makes us feel the same way as that original separation did. But we don't have words for it. And so that translates into a lot of anxiety. For me, it was— it translated into a lot of nightmares, recurring nightmares for the first, like, 35+ years of my life. And I don't sleep very well. Adopted people don't sleep very well. It's because we're always on the lookout for danger. And so creative writing, particularly the process that I've developed with Migrating Toward Wholeness, is a really powerful tool because it allows adoptees to begin to put language to those pre-verbal experiences and to articulate them in truthful ways in order to create a deeper understanding of the internal experience that they're having of themselves, that we're having of ourselves. And then be able to talk about it more with other people. And so we use a couple different types of writing. Poetry is a really great container because of the emotional availability of the language. Poems become really good emotional containers for things that can feel really overwhelming. Part of my process of writing and performing Unmothered, I went back through a lot of my original poetry from when I was a teenager and in my 20s, and I used a lot of that. As the, you know, sort of narrative glue or the emotional glue of the narrative. And then I also wrote a series of new poems to fill in parts of my experience, to speak to things that I needed to name out loud. And so the poems become the containers for really big overwhelming emotions. They help us to make sense of them, and also to attach language and imagery to what are previously really difficult things to talk about. It gives us a way to talk about them. And just the act of expressive writing is about breaking silences. And many adopted people and many people who have histories of trauma are basically conditioned to be silent about their experiences because people don't like to talk about uncomfortable things. People don't like to hear about trauma. But if we don't break those silences and we don't give those experiences expression. As I said, they can make us sick. And so the creative writing is a way to literally take the things that you've been holding in your body and that maybe have been like spinning around in your brain and put them on paper and give them a place to live outside of yourself.

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So that you can then objectively reread it and, and look at what it's telling you and start to learn about yourself and the parts of yourself that still need care and attention and be able to do that work for yourself.

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You know, uh, before I get to your unmothered, I'm glad you clarified that to me because I think I said, um, am other because it got the dashes in that side. Okay, I didn't know what it was. Let me ask you a question, Doc. I was just talking to my wife prior, before me and you got on the call, and you know, we were talking about kids and I was telling her Like when a baby, when you're a baby and you know you're the mother and you know father and the baby is trusting you, you know, they trust in you, you know, you spending that time where they looking at you, you feeding them, you changing their diapers and things of that nature. That's that building trust within the parent where the child builds that trust, you know, and they, you know, I love you. I joke with my mother, my wife, all the time. I love you, mommy, mommy, because we got a 14-year-old son, so I mess with her like that all the time. But so what I'm asking is, Doc, and help me clarify this, when you go through something, the trauma, like, you know, ordeal, as you and some of the others has been through, the trust issue, the trust factor, is it hard to trust people, you know what I'm saying, even in relationships, friends, things to that nature? How's the trust factor, uh, with dealing with something like that?

Oh, it's incredibly difficult to trust. I mean, that's been one of the biggest parts of my journey was learning to be able to trust people, to trust myself. Because when you have that early attachment disruption, right, when you are detached from the only safe place you ever knew, which is the mother who gave birth to you, right, and you're put in a new environment where things smell different, things sound different, things feel different, and you're not with the person you're supposed to be with. And you're somewhere else. And so again, that nervous system gets into a lifelong trauma response of like, I'm not safe. These people aren't safe. No, but nothing is safe, right? And so that's where the inability to trust comes in. It's because there's this preverbal felt sense that It's not safe to trust. It's not safe to attach to people because if I do, they might leave me again. Right. And so for me, in my experience, and what ended up kicking off all the things that I am— have been able to develop and as my work and my purpose in the world, I realized that I had this really bad pattern unhealthy relationships with people, like, and, you know, for years. And I realized that if I didn't figure out why I was doing that, I was never going to move forward in my life. I was never going to get better. And it was because I didn't trust myself. Right? So I was listening to all of the external messages that I was getting about who I should be, what I should do, what decisions and choices I should make. Because I didn't feel safe enough in myself to make my own choices and my own decisions. And I also didn't trust other people, you know. And so it takes a lot of work to undo those patterns. But you have to see them first. And a lot of adopted people have a lot of trouble with intimacy and relationships because it's really hard to trust. It's really hard to trust that this person is going to stay around. Right? And is also like, wrapped up in that are feelings of self-worth, right? Because like, whether it's true or not, the implicit message is that the person who is supposed to love and care for us the most, our mothers, have given us away. And so there must be something wrong with us, there must be something that makes us not worthy of being kept. And so that becomes a pattern for the rest of life, until you break it.

You know, I asked you that because, you know, as you was talking, as you talking about the adoptees and we're talking about trust, you know, because it's something like an absentee parent as well, you know, as far as maybe the father wasn't around. And like we said before, sometimes we don't know the things that, you know, that transpired between mother and father and why this situation happened the way that it did. And so earlier you said that you and your mother since 2017 have, you know, been trying to build a relationship and trying to talk. And I ask that because I know that, because as we talked about not too long ago, the early parts of your life, the baby stage, where I get to trust. And although, you know, I might have met my father, I'm just hypothetically speaking, I might have met my father when I was 30 or 40. And, you know, I want to have a relationship with him, but that trust factor, you know what I'm saying, because he wasn't there you know, when I was coming up and was a kid, you know what I'm saying? I want to know who my father is. I want to know who my mother is. But I know that it's that— but what we call it, uh, it's a wedge there, you know, because internally, you know, saying you still feel, as you were saying earlier, your self-worth. And, you know, why did they give me away? Or why did this happen? You know, still internally still feel some type way, you know what I'm saying? Like, I want to hear you out and things of that nature, why this happened. But I would take it— and I'm just asking you, you know, because you've experienced it— I would take it that I hear what you're saying, you know, it might take me a while to get over what you're saying because for years I have held this inside of me and this is what I've become, you know. As they say, we may forgive something but we won't forget, you know what I'm saying? So I But I can't forget all the trauma that I've been through my whole life, you know?

Yeah. And trauma is one of those things that, like, it's not a one-size-fits-all experience. And it can show up in lots of different ways over time and across a lifespan. And like I said, it shows up in patterns, and it shows up in choices, and it shows up in, like, physical manifestations. Like, I used to get really, really bad headaches. Also, because of all this unresolved stuff that was just— my body kept recycling. And that's also where the nightmares came from. And any kind of disruption of a parental or caregiver relationship is damaging to people. And it's not like the trauma Olympics, right? Like, we, we're not like, my trauma is not better than yours, right? But we all have to like recognize that we're all holding some kind of trauma because of these disruptions in connections. And for me, when I met my first mom, and she told me her story, I had a lot of empathy, because partly I had always had the sense that I just always knew that if I reached out to her, if I was ever able to find her, I just knew that she would want to know me, that she would want that. And that's what ended up being true was that when I reached out to her, and I contacted her, and she said, oh my God, I've been waiting for this for 40 years. And I want to tell you everything. And then when she started telling me her story, and I understood that she actually had very little choice, you know, and like a choice made in the absence of choice is not a choice. She did not have the option to keep me and she said I wanted to keep you. I did not want to do this. I could not make a different decision. Because I had no support, her family would not support her. She had started dating somebody else. And the person she was dating and then eventually married refused to raise another man's child. And so then there's all these sort of cultural stigmas around all of this that get you know, layered into this experience. And so I can say that, you know, meeting her at 40, I think, was a good thing, because I had already developed enough of a sense of self and was already on this, this healing journey, that I could hold a lot of space that I had had enough of my own life experience to be able to sit in, in community with her. And really, you know, as a woman, understand what she had been through and understand that as a person, someone who had also been through an abusive marriage, and then like recognizing like how many our life patterns were so similar, even though she did not raise me, was a really interesting thing too. And so it helps, it has helped me to reconcile that part you know, that untrue messaging around that I wasn't wanted because she told me that I was.

Mm.

Validation. That's what you needed to hear at that time. Like you say, you had already matured, you was already on your journey. And you know, and it's something that you said and I thought about it. I think it's something that we talked about earlier. A lot of times we don't know the situation. You know, like you said, she didn't want to, but she had no other choice. You know, family didn't want to support her. The man that she wind up married, they want to raise another man's child, you know. So these are things, and until you talk to her and found this out, these are things for 40 years that you always wondered about, you know what I'm saying? Because we have all kind of things running through our minds, this and that. And then when you got the clarification of how your mother really felt. You know, like you said, it eased some things where I had empathy for her, and now, you know, it was— it can get that stumbling block out the way. Now we can try to build upon this and, you know, saying move forward. So I mean, I wish you guys the best of luck in your reconciliation. So let me ask you, Doc, in your one-woman show Unmothered, you tackle a lot of issues as far from adoption and things of that nature. Why was the performance the right medium for that message?

Yeah, I began, you know, my first degree is in theater, and I worked as an actor as my first jobs right out of college. And I always want— I wanted to be an actor. I thought that was going to be my career path. And I spent a lot of time telling other people's stories. And honestly, at the time, you know, through my teens and 20s, and even early 30s, theater was a lifeline. Being able to perform other people's stories gave me the opportunity, you know, in addition to writing, right? We already talked about how important the writing is. And I had always been writing. I started writing at 14 years old, and it was very secret, but I was doing a lot of this personal, you know, writing all these poems. And I was also doing community theater for a long time. And then And then I went to college for theater and I did, I did work professionally for a time. And being able to do that really helped me to manage all the unprocessed grief and unacknowledged loss that I was carrying, right, that I was still kind of unaware was attached to all of my adoption-related trauma. And so I do believe that being able to be a performer in that way for those years was some— it kept me alive because adopted people have significantly higher rates of attempting and dying by suicide than non-adopted people because we don't get the appropriate mental health support. And instinctively, many of us turn to the arts and other creative practices. And that's certainly what I did. So then when I figured out that I was going to write a one-woman show as part of my dissertation, I realized that that's what I needed to do, that it needed to be a piece of solo performance, because I needed to break a lot of silences for myself. It was a time in my life and in my journey where there were so many things that I had been conditioned to be silent about, that I— questions that I hadn't been able to ask, things that, you know, that I hadn't really deeply thought about until that time. And so it became really important for me to figure out how to tell that story And the reason that I chose theater and solo performance in particular is because of the ability for theater to help build empathy and open up conversation around difficult subjects. And I felt like if I'm going to tell a story about, like, the internal experience of being adopted and how trauma manifests itself over the lifespan and how the intersections of adoption and patriarchy are really problematic, I need to do it in a way that's going to be accessible for people. Right. So there's an empathetic exchange that happens when I, as the performer, get on stage and the audience is sitting in the same room and we're breathing the same air and they're feeling my energy and they're feeling my emotions and they're getting a different understanding of that story as I am telling it than they would in any other way. Because when you're reading something, you have your own internal filter and your own lens through which you're interpreting the information. And so that's a different way of taking in information. Theater in and of itself is a much more emotional and sensory experience. And that's why it was really important for me to use that as a medium. It's partly a tool for social change, and I wanted people to leave feeling and thinking differently than when they had stepped into that space.

Oh man, that's cool. Let me ask you, your adopted parents, you talked about theater. Was theater something that you decided to do on your own, or was it something that they kind of like moved you in that direction and you took a liking to it and things of that nature? So how did coming into theater come about?

Yeah, so it actually is something that I grew up around. Both my parents were English and theater teachers when I was a kid. So I remember growing up, like, when I was real small, when my dad would direct the plays at the high school that he taught at, I would go to rehearsals with him. And then when he moved on into other jobs, my mom still taught, and she would direct the plays at the high school that she taught at. And I was always kind of part of that process. And, you know, because I grew up in New York City, we were going to theater all the time. Like, I— like, we were going to Broadway from the time I was probably like 5 or 6 years old. Like it was just a thing we did as a family. And it was something that I was always interested in that I— that was fun, that I felt, you know, connected to. And I think also, like, in some ways, it probably helped me to have a connection to my parents. Like, if we liked the same thing, right, if we were interested in the same thing, then like, that was a point of connection and a point of safety for me that like, we could, we could have something in common, even though my internal sense of disconnection was still very much present, although I couldn't have articulated that, you know, at the time as a child and a young person. And so, yeah, so theater was always a part of my life. And then when I got into high school, I was, you know, really like, I wanted to do more and my high school did not have a theater program. And so I kind of bullied my mom a little bit into letting me start auditioning for community theater. And, you know, I just kept doing it because I was good at it. And like, that's, you know, I think partly my adoptee superpower too, besides empathy, my other adoptee superpower is being able to really step into other people's lives and other people's shoes and have a deep understanding of the human experience. And so like, I've always been a really good actor, because I understand people and emotions. And I also had an excess of emotions that I needed to put somewhere.

You know, I was listening to you and you say, you know, like, you find something that, you know, you and your parents have a common interest in. And, you know, as far as, you know, a kid, you want to have a common interest with your parents. Made me think, like, nowadays, like, my son, we both interested in sports. And, you know, kids nowadays, they, you know, on their phones, they with their friend, they want to do what they do. But it does feel good when your child wants to come out and hang out with you, watch the game. Or I guess they came out, wanted to watch the draft and things of that nature. Like you say, common thing, just to have that connection. But then I'm hoping that the audience can hear how this story, how your story, which is very, very interesting, was pieced together. Because, you know, you say you had the trauma and things of that nature. Now your parents, they were teachers and just being into this family that God blessed you to be into. And it opened up everything else for you to do what you're doing now, the Unmothered, you know what I'm saying? The things to release what was inside of you. I'm just listening like, wow, this is, you know, this is powerful. It's powerful how everything came full circle. And sometimes, you know, the things that we don't know how he's working it out for our good. Because just say if you didn't have the parents that was in the drama and into theater and the things of that nature, this was the very outlet that got you to the point where you are today, man. God is good, I tell you. We don't know, but he knows. Hey, so, um, before we get out of here, I got a game that I like to play, quick fire round, uh, game. Ask you 5 questions and give me first thing to come to your mind. Before I get there though, Tell us where we can find your book at. Where can we watch your performance of the one-woman show Unmothered?

The book is available on Amazon. It's called Adult Adoptees in Writing to Heal. You can also access that right through my website, LizDeBetta.com. And you can also read about Unmothered on my website. And if you want to see Unmothered, then you have to contact me and book a performance. In at your college or university or in your community. And I'll come and I'll perform and I will do workshop as well. And it's an engaged learning experience so that people can learn not only from the performance itself, but from the act of participating in a workshop about shared storytelling and developing personal agency by telling our own stories.

Mm. She's a traveling show, ladies and gentlemen. She will come. To your community and do a show wherever you want her to come to, as long as she's getting paid. Hey, so Doc, let's get into this quick fire. No, no, don't forget that part. Now, I ain't coming for free, but as long as I'm getting paid, you know. So, uh, Doc, you ready for this quick fire round?

Yeah.

All right, don't be scared. A lot of my guests, they get a little nervous. They don't know what's coming. Yeah, go ahead, drink that water. All right, first question: one word to describe your healing journey?

Transformative.

Good one. The book that changed your life?

The Primal Wound.

The one that you said that you avoided for a long time, huh? Performance or writing, which do you prefer? Oh, that's a tough one.

That is a tough one. Mm, I don't know that I could make a choice.

Mm, we gonna say 50/50.

50/50 on that.

Yeah, 50/50. What's one truth about adoption that needs to be said louder?

Oh, okay, one truth about adoption that needs to be said louder: that it is a traumatic lifelong experience and that we need better mental health support.

Better mental health support. What does wholeness look like to you?

Wholeness for me is about authenticity. It's about being able to show up as myself all the time, unapologetically, and to be able to speak my own truth.

Speak your own truth, ladies and gentlemen. You heard it from Dr. Liz Dabeta. Thank you for sharing your truth, as you were saying, your wisdom. And your mission. Your work is a testament to the power of story and an importance of owning who you are. As you said, unapologetically, I'm not apologizing for who I am. To our listeners, if today's episode stirred something in you, don't ignore it. Your story matters. Your healing matters. Don't forget to follow the CJ Moneyway Show. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and be sure to follow along with our bigger mission through CJ Moneyway Entertainment and GI: The State's Capital, the animated series with purpose, coming soon. Hey, this your boy CJ Moneyway with Dr. Liz. We out of here.

Peace. Before you go, let me leave you with this. Every story shared here, it's a reminder that your story matters too. Keep your faith sharp, keep your focus steady, keep your vision clear. And if this episode gave you wisdom, hope, or a push Share it with somebody you love.

Tap in with me on all platforms @moneyway and stay locked into the movement because God's not done writing your chapter. This is the CJ Moneyway Show. Brick by brick.

And always. Moneyway Johnson.

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