Control With Tina Miller

Yeah. Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of the Thriving Adoptees Podcast. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Tina, Tina Miller from Lutheran Family and Children's Services. Uh, looking forward to our conversation today, Tina. We had a great chat last time, so this is going to be great too.

Yes, looking forward to it, Simon.

Yeah, and, uh, listeners, Tina is also a mum to 2 girls through adoption, and your girls are in their 20s, yeah?

Yes, yeah, early 20s.

Early 20s, yeah. And they came to join Tina and her husband when they were 8 and 10, if I remember rightly, from the last conversation.

Yes, correct, yeah.

So we have— it's good when my memory is spot on, right? At 59, my memory is fading. So that fantastic, rich experience, the professional experience and the personal experience is something that we really love on the show because it brings a real richness to our conversation. So thriving, what does thriving mean to you, Tina?

I think thriving really is just taking the circumstances that exist for you and making the best of them. You know, finding joy, even if you can't grab ahold of happiness. Often you can find joy that is, you know, an overarching thing, regardless of your circumstances. So—

Yeah.

Having your needs met, having health in the relationships that, that exist for you, having people you can rely on. Those are all part of thriving.

Yeah, brilliant. So what, what, um, for you, where, where's that joy to be found for you? Just, you know, the, the joy that's kind of, um, that doesn't depend on our circumstances, that, that is, uh, you talked about joy, talks about happiness. Where do you find that? Where, where's your happy place, your happy space, your source of happiness, your source of joy? Where does that come from for you?

I think, um, professionally it's in getting to be part of a journey with, um, the people that I'm working with. Um, I have a very long relationship with my clients, um, from the time that they're just thinking about adoption, maybe they're coming to the end of their infertility journey and trying to decide what's going to be next. So I start with them at that point of figuring out what they want to do next, and then I'm with them well after their adoption. And so I have a really long relationship. And so I get a lot of joy out of being with them for a long period of time and seeing all those moments of growth and opportunities and seeing their family grow and help— helping them navigate difficult seasons. So professionally, you know, having that long relationship is filled with a lot of joy, even during hard seasons with clients. And then personally, I have really enjoyed every, every developmental stage with my kids. I know that, you know, some people, you know, you're getting to the teen years and they tell you, oh, teenagers. Oh, that's going to be so tough. Oh, you've got 2 girls who are teenagers at the same time. Boy, I feel sorry for you. And I really did not ever experience that. I have enjoyed what each season brought because, you know, it brought new developmental skills that my children, you know, were able to display. We were able to, you know, laugh in different ways because, you know, instead of laughing about, you know, fart jokes, we could laugh about things that were a little bit more mature as they got older. You know, seeing the things that they tried and succeeded at was fun to be part of. So yeah, just a lot of joy at seeing how my children grow in development over the years.

Yeah, I thought you were gonna say, because, well, yeah, I thought you're gonna say laughing at the way teenage boys behave, because I think about, because boys and girls Mature at different, uh, different stages, and sometimes the girls are far more mature than boys of their age. And so I can imagine, uh, girls laughing at boys and laughing at that, right? And I'm thinking about the silly things that I did, right?

Yeah, I think there was definitely a lot of that. Yeah, yeah.

So you, you touched on, uh, supporting supporting your clients through the tougher stuff. What are the trends? How do you see those? Are there any common themes of those tougher times that you see across your clients?

I think it's really different for every client. Sometimes, you know, Even just their personality type can be a challenge as they go through adoption. People who are very Type A and are used to being able to control the circumstances of their life sometimes struggle with all the parts of adoption because there's so little control that you have during the process. Common times that generally are a struggle for people You know, the home study is a slog. Lots of paperwork, lots of things to get through, lots of steps that you have to take and homework that you have to do. But really the hardest part is once the home study is complete and they're waiting to become matched with an expectant birth parent. That, that season seems to be the hardest for almost all of my clients. Because, you know, you don't know when it's going to happen. You don't know how many times you're going to be told no before you get your yes. You don't know if your yes is going to be reliably a yes, or if, you know, she's going to have a change of heart and choose to parent, if parenting is going to become an option for her because of a change in her circumstances. So a lot of fear during that time period. A lot of, a lot of people wait longer than they think. They think, oh, this It's going to be like it is in movies or TV. You know, they announce they're going to adopt and in the next episode they have a baby. Um, you know, we just have this idea that it's going to move a lot quicker than it does in real life. So that's a hard season to help people navigate and tolerate, um, the discomfort of. Yeah.

What about the post, the post-adoption stage? What What, what do you see as the particular tricky times, or is that very different for everybody?

That's really different for everyone. For situations where the baby has been exposed prenatally to drugs or alcohol, you know, in those situations, that can be really difficult for families in the beginning as the babies are having withdrawal. Having feeding issues, you know, may, may be very unable to soothe those babies easily. And so bonding and attachment feels difficult in the beginning for those families, you know, because, you know, when babies are uncomfortable and unhappy, it doesn't matter how much you're trying to bond with them. If they're difficult to soothe, it can feel like they're distant from you. So that's a circumstance that can make the time after placement difficult. For other families navigating challenges in their openness, you know, maybe they want to have a lot of contact with the birth family and the birth family's grief is, you know, really intense during that, that initial phase and, you know, they may pull back, they may respond in anger or you know, in ways that are really coming from a place of hurt, but, you know, it comes across sometimes negatively toward the adoptive parents, and that can be really difficult to help them navigate and have patience as birth parents work through that initial stage of grief that's so difficult. Other families, you know, really it's just the, the discomfort of waiting until the adoption is finalized. can be really difficult, especially if there are issues in the legal process, you know, a birth father who wasn't really on board with the adoption, we're not sure if he's going to take steps to assert his paternal, his paternal rights, you know, that can create a lot of fear for families as they wait for the legal portion of the adoption to finalize. And then after adoption finalizes, you know, and children start to develop a mind of their own, their own personality, and they start to ask hard questions, that can be a really difficult phase. We see that starting to hit around age 7 or 8 for a lot of families. They come back and ask us for help as their kids start asking questions and expressing their own feelings of grief when they start to understand what has happened. Yeah.

What about the teenage years? You said for you as a mum, they weren't That they weren't, or you said that you learned some new skills but that you didn't endure too much tricky stuff with the teenage years. A lot of people that have been on the show before have said that that has been a tricky phase for them.

Well, in our situation, you know, there were things that were difficult for sure. Mental health challenges, tend to pop up during those teenage years. Puberty triggers a lot of, you know, mental health challenges to kick up, and that certainly was the case in our family. So we had to navigate that. But really, a lot of the conversations that we had during their younger years about adoption and about their birth family, about the hard things that had happened to them previously, really gave us a lot of practice for how to have all kinds of other hard conversations. And during their teenage years, instead of becoming secretive and hiding what was happening with friends or, you know, things that were happening at school that were difficult, they were open with us in having conversations, you know, dinner table conversations about those things like, oh, I can't believe that You know, this friend of mine has started smoking pot. I don't know what she's thinking. You know, those are things that other teenagers would try and hide from their parents. But our children, we had become so practiced, practiced at having hard conversations related to their adoption that it didn't feel uncomfortable to them to have hard conversations about other life topics. And so it really was very made the teenage years a lot more positive for us to be able to just have an open door. They knew that we weren't going to judge them when they brought up things that were going on in their lives, and we could work through those things with them.

So, so the takeaway really is the, the earlier the better in terms of openness, in terms of Engaging with tricky stuff.

Yes, absolutely. Yeah, it gave us a lot of practice when they felt safer to do it, so that during those teenage years it didn't feel like so much of a risk.

Yeah, yeah. To what extent has your professional life informed being a mum and vice versa?

I think for sure being an adoptive parent has informed my professional life a ton because I'm obviously further ahead than the families that I'm working with. You know, I've been at my current job for 8 years, you know, so the very oldest child that I've helped place into a family is 8 at this point, and my children are in their early 20s. And so I've navigated things that are further down the road than what my clients are currently navigating. And so that gives me a lot of ability to say, you know, here's what worked when my children were that age, or here's what I learned from parenting and adoption, here's what I learned from having a transracial adoption situation. So I have a lot of personal experience that can inform the things that I'm telling people, and I feel like they trust what I'm saying. When I talk to them about issues because they know that that's part of my history. It also informs what I take away from the trainings that I attend or the books that I read. You know, being a parent, I'm not just leading— reading those things as a professional, I'm reading them as an adoptive parent. And so a lot of the things that they say resonate with experiences that we had and The messages of trainings or books or podcast episodes really hit harder because they were real. They really happened in my family. They had, you know, real outcomes that we had to navigate. And so I think being an adoptive parent really did a lot to inform my professional life. And then professionally, I have learned a ton that I've been able to apply to my own parenting. There are things that I've changed about the way that we have openness with our children's birth family since learning more about openness and how to navigate some of those things professionally. So that for sure is a takeaway that I've had from my professional life that's helped my personal life.

And what about you personally, if you look back now on 14 14-ish years, is it? Maybe 14-ish years since the girls came to live with you. What have you learned about yourself on that journey?

I wish I had a time machine and I could go back to the person that I was before they came home, after they came home, because the lessons that I know now about trauma-informed parenting, Attachments. There are things that I definitely would have done differently if I had that knowledge back then. Yeah, there are books that I have read professionally that would have been a game changer for me 14 years ago.

Yeah.

And I wish I'd— I wish those books had been published back then.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So have you got a recommendation in one or two books, perhaps?

You would— My personal favorite book to recommend to people is The Connected Child by Dr. Karen Purvis. It talks about trauma and how trauma wires the brain to essentially exist in survival mode. And for kids, teenagers, adults, you see that kick up in, you know, fight, flight, freeze, fawn. Kicking up in times that aren't even necessarily what you would think of as needing to be survived. You know, being told to turn off the TV and go brush your teeth might kick up a trauma response for a young child. And instead of seeing it as misbehavior, which is what so many parents do, what I did before I realized what was happening, You think that they're misbehaving, you think they're defying you, being defiant. And when you understand that trauma-informed response that, that kids are having, their survival brain kicking up a response, it helps you see, okay, they need to regulate those emotions before we can work through what is happening, before we can move forward. And if I go into harsh discipline mode, sending them to timeout, giving them a punishment while they're still dysregulated, I'm not going to get anywhere. It's just going to make everything worse, and the, the, this difficult moment in our home is going to take longer than if I help them regulate. And then we talked about what happened. And so It's my favorite. I love it for teachers, for people who volunteer with children. Obviously, I love it for parents in foster or adoption situations. It's just an excellent book. So that's my favorite one to recommend to families.

Yeah. And so this Karen— I'll put the links in the show notes, listeners— but this Karen Pose, unfortunately, she's no longer with us, but we've She's the founder with this TBR approach, and she's out of the Christian University of Texas, Texas Christian University. So that this— we've interviewed David Cross, who was her professor, and Karen did some incredible work in this area, so that book's really worth checking out, bearing in mind her pedigree and her experience. So as you were describing what the biggest learns from that book, it was— you mentioned about situations that you wouldn't have thought would be triggering, are triggering for kids. Is that the kind of the one of the key themes of the book?

Yes. Yeah. Just if you look at kids' behavior, you know, and they're kicking up a response that seems like it doesn't fit the situation, well, it's probably that their brain has triggered that survival response and they're no longer using their their frontal cortex to think through the consequences, or, you know, if I do this, then that is going to happen kind of thinking. And it really changes everything in a family if you can see their behavior that way and start to respond to it as they don't have access to their frontal cortex. So any punishment or any discipline strategy that requires them to think is not accessible to them until they regulate their emotions, and that is just a game changer. The book— I think the thing, the thing that I really love about that book also is it's extremely practical, you know, gives the theory, it explains the theory really well, and it's very accessible to parents. It's not written, you know, at a level that only professors would understand. It's very accessible to the normal normal everyday parents, but it's also extremely practical. Lots of practical examples of how to use trauma-informed parenting in lots and lots of different common situations. I just really love that book.

Yeah, so it sounds like reading that book meant that the challenges that can occur for adoptive kids did occur, but you took them more in your stride. So is, is that about it really? Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah, um, you know, in those situations I was able to reframe the behavior that I was watching, um, and instead of seeing it as a tantrum that was out of misbehavior, if I could see it as, oh, She's struggling. How can we regulate her emotions and see what was a struggle about this? You know, we just— it really transformed the relationship that we had with our daughter, who tended to struggle more with those trauma responses. It's also extremely practical if you have a child who is neurodivergent. Because often it looks very much the same as trauma responses when they become dysregulated. And so being able to utilize the tools to help, help regulate emotions, calm their nervous system back down to, you know, a level that they can hear what you're saying and access their frontal cortex again, it's really helpful. So.

Yeah, I, I was talking to the lady that— because unfortunately, listeners, Karen Purvis died a few years back now, um, but I was in— I was talking to the lady that's kind of taken over, um, the program that she, she ran, and she said something very, um, very interesting to me, which was something about we can't We can't expect them to be regulated if we're not regulated ourselves. Something along those lines?

Yes, that is, uh, that's an excellent point that they make in the book. You know, if we rise to their level of dysregulation and we have 2, 2 people in the room who are dysregulated, um, you know, it's, it's like throwing gasoline on a fire. Um, whereas if you can stay regulated help them regulate through matching your breathing or matching your tone of voice, they're going to much more quickly be able to return to a state of regulation.

Yeah.

So, yeah, excellent advice from that book.

Yeah. So what helps you do that? I'm not going to ask you a how question, how you regulate, because that's got to be different for everybody, and it feels a little bit oversimplistic to me to ask, but what helps you in that with this regulation?

I think the biggest thing that helps me stay regulated in those moments is to keep my mind framed around, she's not doing this to me. This child that I'm watching struggle is not doing this to me. They are struggling. And it's my job to help them to get back to a place where they're not struggling. And that change in mindset has made the biggest difference in my parenting. It's made a huge difference when I'm volunteering with kiddos or in the school system where I used to work. That change in mindset really made a huge difference in how I approached kiddos who Seemed like they were being defiant, when really it was they were dysregulated and needed help returning to a state of emotional regulation.

So you mean not taking it personally?

Correct. I think a lot of parents—

because it isn't personal, right?

A lot of parents jump into, they're doing this to me, they're pushing my buttons. For example, you hear a lot of parents say, oh, my kid knows how to push my buttons. Well, if that's your mindset, it's an us versus them mindset, and you're going to view their misbehavior as being defiant, opposing you, doing something to you or against you. Whereas if you can have the mindset that my child is struggling, how can I help them so that they're not struggling? It switches it from I need to escalate my own response to, I need to keep my response calm, because that's what is going to help them return to a state of calm.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you remember when that, that insight landed for you?

Hmm, I would say probably the first time I read the book was probably 10 years ago. So I wish I had read it sooner. But about 10 years ago, that's when that insight landed. And it was transformative in my parenting.

So it's shifting from opposition to togetherness. What— how would you— how would you summarize it?

Shifting to an attunement to what the child is experiencing. And responding to the need rather than reacting to what you think they are doing that's naughty or oppositional.

Yeah. So is it that space between— we hear quite a lot about that, don't we? That space between reaction and response.

Yes. Yeah.

So the insight allows allows us to respond differently with, with thought and empathy and understanding. Um, it sounds like it's something that's kind of quite small and very big as well, right? So when you use the word mindset, I think, you know, of a, of a, of something big rather than— and but it seems to be a very big thing and a and a little thing at the same time. It's about that macro approach of mindset and the micro approach of what happens in that specific moment.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If I can change the way I think about it, then my behavior in response to that thought changes.

Yeah. And it's the insight that does the hard work then, right? The insight that changes the mindset. Reading the book. Yeah. So, I mean, some people might call that self-awareness, I guess, from a bigger vantage point. Yeah.

Yes, probably. Yeah.

What other big stuff came came for you out of that book or out of other sources of wisdom?

Well, there was another book that I read. You may be familiar with this author, Lori Holden. It's The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption. She's a fellow adoptive parent and she wrote it with the birth mother of one of her children and really focuses on the benefits of openness in adoption. And she's one of the creators of the inclusive family support model of openness that has the quadrants. So, you know, she, she talks about how openness isn't just the contact that you have with the birth family, It's also how you talk about the child's story with them, how you share the child's adoption identity with them, how open you are with the child in answering their questions and exploring their curiosity with them. And so I really, really appreciated what she— how she approaches openness in all of the ways that she teaches in that book, but in, you know, her podcasts and other, other works that she's done. It really, you know, my family has post-adoption contact with the birth family, but that book was really transformative in thinking about, like, it's, it's way more than, than keeping up with the required amount of contact that you've agreed on. It's seeing that family as an important part of your child's system. And the more you can see them as part of— an important part of your child's life, the easier it is to, like, see them as an inclusive part of how you speak with your child, how you think about your child's activities. You know, so I am much more mindful of, you know, shooting off a text to my child's birth mom, text her an email, you know, hey, this thing has happened, here's a photo of it, instead of waiting like, oh, it's, you know, it's Mother's Day, I'm gonna send her a long letter about what's happened for the last 6 months. Instead, it's this thing happened, so right away I'm gonna send her a message.

Yeah.

So she's more an inclusive part of our family at this point.

Yeah, yeah. I interviewed Laurie a few years ago. You're pointing to that mindset approach then, right? Because we hear that word openness and we think it's just about the communication and the— but it's far, far, far bigger than that. Perhaps it's about the openness of our mindset.

Yeah, yeah, I'd say that's true. If you, if you can take yourself a little further out of this center of the equation as an adoptive parent and make sure your kid is in the center, a lot of what we do is easier. Like, okay, so before contact was, well, it was more of an obligation. Like, I agreed to have this contact, it was more of an obligation, and so I was successfully meeting my obligation, but when I firmly have my, my children in the center of the circle of why I'm doing that, well, it makes sense that I would include their birth mom in what's happening in their lives so that if they have their own communication with her, it's not a surprise that, you know, I've, you know, that something has happened that I haven't mentioned, because I'm looping her in so that she's aware of the big stuff. And that's important for their relationship with her that they have on their own.

Yeah. Yeah. Some big stuff here, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

What, what do you think gets in the way of, of adoptees thriving?

Um, I think sometimes adoptive parents can get in the way of it. Um, I think as an adoptive parent, if you have a lot of fear that your child is gonna love somebody else more than you if they just had the chance, um, Then you're going to hold them too tight and hold them back from things that could help them thrive. You know, for example, having contact on their own when they're old enough to have contact. You know, if you create a system where they have not been allowed to explore their feelings about their birth family, you have prevented them from being curious about that out in the open. Mm-hmm. That creates some harm for them because either they're going to have to secretively go after contact on their own, you know, searching on the internet on their own, reaching out on social media on their own, potentially getting into a situation that's not as safe on their own, all because your fear kept kept them from being able to. out in the open, have that journey with you, safely walking alongside you in that journey. So I think adoptive parents' fear can get in the way of it. I think, I think there are adoptive parents who have not worked through their own attachment stuff. You know, they have attachment wounds that they carried from their own childhood and created some barriers to deeply attaching with their child. Um, I would love for every adoptive parent to get some therapy before they're allowed to adopt. Um, unfortunately, I can't ask for that, but, um—

And also, it's never too late to understand our own attachment style. As, as I've— as I was speaking to the lady that's taken over at, uh, at TCU, uh, um, now who now runs what was Karen's program. She talks about, um, the understanding our own attachment style. So listeners, if you want to understand your own attachment style, you can Google attachment style questionnaire. You don't need to, um, you don't, you don't need to see a therapist. Obviously You may well choose to do so later on, but I think, you know, I mentioned the word self-awareness earlier on, and when I think of these questionnaire-type things, I've done that myself. So I've done questionnaires, I did questionnaires like self-analysis, self-awareness inventories, When I ran a small business, right? So you do— it helps— it helped me see that I couldn't see myself. And the phrase that always pops into my head when I get anywhere near this is that it's hard to see the picture when we're in the frame, right? So we're so close to ourselves, we can't— and we've been doing the same things for so long and thinking the same things for so long, feeling the same things for Like that, that we're blind to them. So doing one of these attachment questionnaires, uh, can give you an insight into how, how we are without, without us having to speak to anybody else in the first, kind of in the first instance. It's a, it's a, it's a fast thing to do. Um, I play around with a lot with ChatGPT at the moment. I'm wondering whether that, that could be a tool, um, for, for this stuff as well. So we can, we can work at understanding ourselves better in, in a simple, a simple way that doesn't take up too much of our time and doesn't cost us too much, uh, cost us too much money, right? So Free to use that. Yeah. The whole thing comes down to— well, I'm talking about Texas. The first thing, something that an adoptive mum from Texas who runs an agency spoke to me ages about, she said, it's not about fixing our kids. Raising adopted kids isn't about fixing them. It's about unpacking our own emotional baggage as adoptive parents, and that seems to be in line with what you're talking about too.

Yes, absolutely. Yeah, um, I think the other thing that I've noticed with families who are further along, you know, their kids are further along, I think, um, Sometimes parents, adoptive parents, struggle to accept who their kids are. Like, we know that our kids have a biology that is different than our own, but I think there are some parents who think that nurture is gonna be significantly more important than nature in how kids are, are going to behave or what kids are going to be like and try to fit their kids into the mold of the family they're nurtured in without accepting the nature that they're bringing into it. And so I definitely don't see this with 100% of families. You know, I've got lots of families who absolutely see who their kids are and have built their family around what those kids need. So this is definitely not every family, but the families that I sometimes see struggling are the ones who struggle to see their, their children in light of the biology that they're bringing into the family and expecting them to be like, oh well, I'm really into sports and I want my kid to be into sports.

Yeah.

And that's not who they are. And I feel a little disappointed that that's not the life that we're gonna have.

Right.

You know, so that kind of expectation put on kids to be the biological child you would have had if that had been available to you, instead of being the child that they are, with the temperament and biology that they bring into your family.

Yeah. Does the fact, um, does the fact that people have adopted babies rather than kids play into this as well?

Yes. Yeah, I think, you know, as, as much as we want to believe that we're really enlightened, I think some people still hold on to the blank slate idea that babies are a blank slate, blank slate, and you can just write their life onto them by the way that they're raised. And, and there are some aspects of their life that, you know, are written as they're in your family. You know, the foods that you eat in your family are going to be the foods that they grow up being familiar with and comfortable eating. So there are some things that are true about that, but they're not completely a blank slate because Genetically, they are predisposed to lots and lots of the factors that are going to become who they are. Yeah.

When I think of the term blank slate, I also think of the fact that there's some trauma. Trauma is written on that slate, right? So how do you see the connection between the relationship between trauma And thriving?

Oh, for sure. Trauma is a huge part of the thriving that kids have access to. You know, kiddos who, who display more of a trauma response, you know, their trauma responses are more evident, do get more attention. We do, you know, get them into therapy. We do read books on how to help their trauma response There are some of our kiddos whose trauma response is really helpful, you know, that fawn response, you know, just looks like, oh wow, what a really well-behaved kid, you know, they're just so agreeable. They're just so easy to raise. And that is— could be a sign that they have the fawn trauma response and that internally they are feeling anxious, they are feeling their emotions triggered in the same way as the kid who's having a fight-or-flight response that's more obvious. So I think definitely trauma is something that shapes the experience of adoptees, even those placed as infants, and we don't think of that— a lot of people don't think of that as being a trauma. You know, well, they were taken out of a home where they might have experienced neglect or abuse that would have caused trauma, but but but that happened before they experienced any trauma. Well, the removal from their birth family is a form of trauma, and a lot of people just don't recognize that and think that kids won't won't have a response from that. So I you know we talk a lot about it with our adoptive families. You know before they ever get into. having a baby placed with them. You know, we talk about trauma that comes from adoption placement. We talk about attachments, the attachment needs, and how to parent with attachment needs in mind. And we talk about all of those things, but, um, you know, whether it— whether it sticks, whether people really recognize it when, when those trauma responses are happening, um, or not.

It's a different matter.

Yeah, yeah, that's a different matter.

You were talking about fawning early, uh, earlier in that, um, in that segment. Um, so some people, if, if the— so the fawning is a, a trauma response, can that— why is, why is that an issue? Is it Um, because it, it seems, uh, I don't know, I can't, I can't understand. I can't, I can't just kind of place why, why that would be an issue. Would that make— is it because it would— it can't— it might get them into trouble later on in life, or—

Well, it's, it's because they are— there is a feeling of safety underneath that that's missing. So here's here's an example. My my oldest daughter has tended toward a fawn response as her as her trauma response, and so so here's a perfect example of it. So when she was younger, whatever food we put on the table in front of her, she would eat it. She didn't ever complain about it. She would you know indicate that she liked it, and then. As she became more comfortable later, she would say, you know, I don't, I don't really want to finish this. Can I have something else? And it's like, well, I thought you loved that. You've always loved that food. I, I've never loved that. So for years, in, in a sense of self-protection, she was fawning. She was having a response that covered up how she really felt about food that she was eating because she didn't think it was safe enough to let me know that she didn't prefer it or that she didn't like it. So that felt sense of safety existed within her even though on the outside I couldn't tell that anything was happening. And I think that is just like a very surface level Example of what happens a lot with kiddos who have a fawn response. Yeah, they are making the people around them feel comfortable to achieve safety for themselves, but at the detriment of their own emotional well-being, their own sense of comforts. They're masking their sense of terror within themselves. So that other people around them don't notice.

So this, and it could explode, is that the concept?

Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's got to be a tricky one, right, to get to the bottom of that, have the conversation. Yeah, it feels tricky, and it feels kind of simplistic for me to ask the how question, But I can't see another question on that. Well, maybe— was there a time when this became clear to you, Tina?

There was a point, I don't know, maybe in the last 5 years where she started speaking up more about preferences. Showing that she had her own mind about things, and it did sort of make me question like, well, how many things was she just stuffing inside that she didn't like because she was afraid to tell me she didn't like it? It just took her that long to feel safe enough to have her own opinions out loud without fear. That something was going to happen to her. Yeah. You know, and I feel sad looking back on it that it took her, you know, such a long time to begin expressing her own opinions. But that, you know, that was, that was her trauma response, her, you know, her way of expressing that she was feeling something unsafe inside.

Despite everything.

Yeah. Yeah. Despite, despite all of the evidence that she could have said, I don't prefer this, and it would have been completely safe to do so. Yeah.

Wow. So we're coming up on time, Tina. It's been broad-ranging. Fascinating. Is there anything that I've not asked you about that you'd like to share?

Um, well, you've asked a lot of really great questions, and I really appreciate the conversation that you've, that you've guided us through.

Yeah.

Um, I think, I think the thing that I really love educating adoptive parents especially about is, um, when we talk about openness, having a mindset of seeing the birth family as part of the child's orbits and being an important part of who that child is, but also seeing your child is going to be old enough someday to seek their birth family out on their own, with or without you. And so it is our job when children are young to build a bridge for them to safely have that kind of contact Instead of going it alone without our support. So that's the thing that I most love talking to adoptive parents about is, is that safe travel with your children while you can walk alongside them so they're not having to do it on their own when they're older.

Yeah.

I think that's my, that's my biggest takeaway that I love passing on.

So it sounds to me like it's all about foundations.

Yes, yeah.

And proactivity, is that— I mean, is that too— it feels like it's about getting ahead of— putting in the early work. Putting the early work in, and which makes it easier in the long run.

Yes, 100%. Everything you do from the moment you meet your child, so whether that happens as a newborn, as a 5-year-old, as a 12-year-old, whatever age you You meet the child that is going to become your child. Everything you do from that point forward needs to have an intention of meeting their needs. So for a newborn, you know, their needs are obvious. You know, they need their diaper changed, they need a feeding, they are, you know, coming down with something, so you give them medicine. Whatever it is, you meet the need. A huge need that you are meeting for them is building for them the scaffolding that they need to be teenagers, young adults who can navigate their own post-adoption relationships with their birth family if that's something they desire to do on their own, and who have the tools that they need for coping with those trauma triggers as they go into adulthood, because they won't always have you next to them to help them self-regulate. So making sure that you are building their life with the tools that they need, so that their life can be lived with as much thriving as possible.

Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you, Tina. And thank you to listeners for listening. We'll speak to you again very soon. Take care.