Wandering Tree ®, LLC Podcast
Wandering Tree ®, LLC Podcast is the ultimate audio companion for curious and adventurous minds, offering a journey through thought-provoking discussions and unique perspectives on life, culture, and the journey of an adoptee. This show has been established with the simple goal of reaching other adoptees who may benefit from just hearing other adoptees share on the lived experience. Host, Adoptee Lisa Ann, will share the tangled roots of the life long journey as an adoptee, the search for biological connections, the good and bad of reunions and how saying "I am adopted" has connected to so many others. The candid discussions between Adoptee Lisa Ann and her guests will tackle the term "adoption" and how it is covers so many aspects of our society.
Wandering Tree ®, LLC Podcast
S6:E2 Healing and Transformation Beyond Trauma with Thriving Adoptees Host Simon Benn
What if the very essence of who you are could remain untouched, even in the face of profound rejection and trauma? Join us for an insightful conversation with Simon Benn, the creative force behind the Thriving Adoptees Podcast, who courageously shares his personal journey of reaching out to his biological father. Despite facing rejection once again, Simon's story reveals the incredible resilience adoptees often possess, emphasizing that rejection often reflects the other person's struggles rather than our own worth. Together, we explore how Simon's experience serves as an inspiring testament to navigating the emotional complexities of reunion with strength and self-compassion.
Discover how somatic experiences and identity exploration can lead to profound healing and transformation. We dive into the significance of childhood memories, like finding a cherished teddy bear, and how they can spark a deep exploration of consciousness and self. With insights from internal family systems therapy, we highlight the concept of an indestructible core self, offering a hopeful perspective on healing from trauma. Through powerful stories and therapeutic wisdom, we aim to inspire listeners to embrace their wholeness and embark on a journey of thriving beyond past traumas, providing a beacon of hope and understanding for those on similar paths.
As young kids you know, days old, weeks old, months old, whatever that is. It's pre-verbal trauma, so we don't have any cognitive, we don't have any memory of it. We didn't know, we didn't have any words for it. It's pre-verbal, so pre-verbal trauma.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Wandering Tree Podcast. I am your host, lisa Anne. We are an experience-based show focused on sharing the journey of adoption, identity, life search and reunion. Let's begin today's conversation with our guest of honor, simon Benn, and I'm going to jump in here and say we are thankful to have you on the show. I have had the privilege and the honor of being on your show a couple times. Let's talk about who you are. You are the creative owner of Thriving Adoptees Podcast, the multi-continent phenom that you are. You pump out so many wonderful guests on your show and I just love what you are doing for the community. But before we get into all of that, this is an opportunity for you to tell your story and be in the hot seat a little bit. So let me turn it over to you and kind of tell us who you are, simon.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you, lisa, and the honors are mine. You know like we're all here to help one another, you know, walking each other home, as they say. I'll start with kind of some recent stuff, because some people might have heard the story from me before, but last week I connected with the second biological cousin that I've spoken to. I spoke to one about 18 months or so ago and I spoke to another one last week and I found out that my biological father was actually in care, so his mum had died and his dad was a sailor, and the sailors, obviously they're away at sea, right. So he was one of three siblings, uh, and they were all in different orphanages, uh, in workhouses, right, these were orphanages for workhouses, um, in liverpool, I think, uh, in, you know. So this would be in the 40s, I guess, maybe in the 40s, um, 1940s, and so that gave me a different, and so that gave me a different take on why, when I had called my biological father out of the blue last October, that he basically shunned me and this, this I say with a British metaphor I say he blew me out, which meant the end of the conversation was don't call me again, and so you know, the last thing he'd heard was a letter that he had a waiver form that he had signed back in 1966, before I was born. Yeah, and 57 years later, I contact him out of the blue and he doesn't really want to know, and so that was an interesting one for me.
Speaker 1:My first thoughts were I didn't handle that very well. Maybe I could have handled it better, and if I'd handled it better would I have had a better result. And then I looked back at the forms and I thought, well, he, um, he, he didn't want anything to do with the baby. Before the baby was born, he'd been out with, he'd been dating my biological mother, pat, for five months, and when she told him that she was pregnant, he didn't want anything to do with it. So that was back in 1966.
Speaker 1:Fast forward to 2023, last October, he still doesn't want to have to do anything to do with me, and so he hasn't changed. The phone call was an experiment to see whether he changed and it hadn't. The phone call was an experiment to see whether he changed and it hadn't. And the uh, what I? The learning that I took from that is that his rejection didn't uh throw me, um into a bout of insecurity. I think there was a couple of minutes when I was slightly stunned and then I bounced back pretty, pretty quickly, pretty quickly, and as adoptees, we are incredibly resilient, incredibly resilient, and I don't and and people talk about resilience like it's something that we build by going to the, by going to the gym, like building a muscle.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's like that. I think resilience is seeing the strength that we've always had, that we just haven't appreciated before, and so so, yeah, I'm cheerleading, really, for our resilience and I guess I'm pointing the listeners towards where they have seen their own resilience as they've navigated the ups and downs of this adoptee life and the reunion rollercoaster, and just to perhaps take a moment out and see, because we're really tough on ourselves we are adoptees, absolutely, we're really tough on ourselves and I, you know, one of the biggest things, uh, I'm seeing at the moment is how powerful this grace is, grace for ourselves, grace for ourselves seeing our own resilience.
Speaker 1:Um key thoughts, thoughts I had when you asked about the story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, what I want to do for our listeners is take just a moment, because we have, between us, talked to a large number of adoptees, sometimes on mic, sometimes off mic.
Speaker 2:There is always a little bit of a thread around the reunion and secondary rejection conversation, and where you are in your journey has a lot of impact on how you handle that, and so what I really liked about what you've just shared already in the first few minutes is a method or at least understanding of your own resilience and giving yourself grace. But what I also tapped into real quickly was your birth father's character and integrity was deeply ingrained in him and many decades later and many decades later, still the same guy. That has nothing to do with us, the adoptee. That is that person's to own. And, to your point, giving grace, I think the place we need to be more grace oriented is not taking that rejection as if we've done something wrong, taking that rejection as if we've done something wrong. Yours is a great lived experience of how you had no hunt in that in that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I judged him hard. And then when I found out last week that he'd been raised in care, first off I didn't know that britain had work workhouses, so people may have seen it on television. Um, the filomena story, which is, uh, you know, he's a british, a british actor, and it's it's the story of this, you know, like a catholic, a catholic woman in ireland, and and this workhouse that they put in. I didn't't realise we had them in the UK, but we did, and he spent some time in there. So he's got, he had his own trauma, the death of his own mother, and where he was raised in a workhouse-sproke orphanage.
Speaker 1:And is it wonder, you know, he was damaged, is damaged himself, he's still alive. This it wonder, you know, he, he was damaged, is damaged himself, he's still alive. This guy you know, um, and uh, he's so. So it's grace for ourselves, but it's also grace for them and I'm feeling a little bit more. I'm feeling more grace to him. I'm not judging him quite as hardly. As hard I've downgraded his, his, uh, status, uh, they rude words which we wouldn't talk about on the show but it's a lesser rude word.
Speaker 2:Well, you've downgraded his importance or you're a little bit more empathetic to his mindset. Just having a similar, just having correlation things you can correlate between what you believe could have been his experience to your own, I'd like us to also take a step back. I do think that there's a large number of people that know a little bit about your story. But just in case everybody does not know your story, you are in the UK and you were adopted in what time? General time period 1967.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I was born in Wrexham, which is in North Wales, very close to Liverpool, and then I was adopted out of the Adoption Council an adoption council like an adoption agency but public sector in Liverpool, when I was four weeks old. And then I grew up in Yorkshire, which is 80 miles away or so from Liverpool, and I've lived around there all my life. I've lived within about 20 minutes drive of home, you know, for all my time, apart from university and a couple of spells abroad, abroad, um, but yeah and uh, I was told that I was adopted when my when, when we went to collect my little sister from the same adoption agency, when I was two, or just before I was two, I think, and that's when my mom and dad told me I don't have any recollection of that and I so I grew up knowing and knowing that I was adopted. I had a book about. There was a book that was in my bookshelf like a kid's storybook about an adoption, a family that grew by an adoption and, uh, did any conscious adoption trauma and went into the family business.
Speaker 1:At the age of 40 I found out that the teddy bear that I've had from, as you know, as long as I can remember is was from my birth mother. My first reaction to that was one of curiosity, and then, a couple of months later, I had some anger towards my birth mother. I never thought about my birth mother before, never had any anger towards her, and so that kind of that coming out to the fog moment set me um on a personal development, identity crisis or whatever a personal journey I also around. That time I'd eventually, after many, after over a decade I'd had a good year in our business and that didn't make me happy. So I thought maybe adoption has messed me up. Business success hasn't made me happy. It hasn't stopped me worrying about the future and my antenna were up about where, where's my happiness going to come from. So that's that's when I was 40. I'm now 57, so for the last 17 years I've been exploring identity and consciousness and emotions and trauma, that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, with that said, how do you for yourself identify or define identity? Because we talked a little bit about integrity and character just a few minutes ago and personality comes in here somewhere, but it's not your identity, so kind of give us your take on. You know this journey that you've been on, associated with that.
Speaker 1:I see our identity as what some people would call consciousness, what some people would call chi, what some people would call chi, what some people would call awareness, what some people would call I don't know, our non-physical identity. So we are the. I'm going back stream from stream from. Well, we're not what we do, we're not what we feel, we're not what we think. Um, we're not our characteristics, because they change. We're not our personality, because that changes. I'm looking, I'm defining us as the spiritual being having the human experience. That that French Jesuit guy said many years ago. He said we're not human beings having a spiritual experience, we're spiritual beings having a human experience.
Speaker 2:So spirit is another word that people use and that resonates with you, based off of your journey and how you've been approaching your healing path, kind of give us an idea of what are the really important things for you to do to help yourself be whole. If there's a whole person of you which there is a whole person of you, we are all whole people. It's just how we kind of move the, the.
Speaker 1:This is tricky stuff, right. So metaphors are our ally on this stuff. So the. I came up with something last year which separates our trauma from who we are, and this is when we're playing the rock paper scissors game that we played as kids. If we go one, two, three and I stay as the fist, you go scissors. Rock beats scissors, rock. Rock is who we are, scissors is a metaphor for our trauma, but our scissors, the scissors don't cut the rock. They're not sharp enough. They can't do any damage to the rock, but we know this trauma stuff is real. So if, so, if we see paper using the same game analogy the paper our trauma is the paper. Paper hides the truth of who we are, but it doesn't hurt who we are. So we are, I paper. We separate the trauma that we have been through and that we have felt from the essence of who we are, this whole rock.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really great analogy for that really deep core statement of trauma that we talk about in our community pre-verbal, then growth, trauma and how we have navigated our life as a result of that. But you really have spent a good portion of the time period I've known you, which is a couple of years now, you know in retrospect, really trying to help navigate the world with a positivity, with a health view, with a don't get stuck view and maybe it is part impartial to pulling back that paper and exposing the core rock of trauma. But how can you have a, you know, a positive life? And so tell me a little bit in our audience, why thriving adoptees and and how that started for you, what your intentions are, that's your why and how you're moving, how you're accelerating things in our community.
Speaker 1:So, from a personal perspective, I read the Primal Wound and I felt wounded and I felt I was doomed to live with that wound until I had this insight right. I had a sight from within that who we truly are, our essence is unwoundable. And if people want a different way of looking at this, perhaps to go deeper, then if you look at internal family systems, the founder is a therapist of, uh, internal family systems is a therapist. This guy called dick schwartz and he talks about the uppercase s self. So what I call spirit or consciousness, richard schwartz calls uppercase s self. So it's, it's our essence, it's the essence of who we are and that I had a glimpse of that essence, a big glimpse of that essence, about eight years ago and that gave me hope. People hope and interview adoptees about what's helped them heal, what's helped them see their wholeness, what's helped them see that they are unwoundable.
Speaker 1:Nobody's saying the trauma didn't happen. The trauma has hidden us, it hasn't hurt us. And now that sounds like a nice idea, but I'm talking about a lived experience. So recently I've started doing, I've started with a somatic experience and I've seen her a couple of times and in my sessions with her I have had a reminder, a felt experience of this wholeness. So what's really helping me is marrying up a deep knowledge of this uppercase S self that is unwounded, it's been hidden by the trauma, marrying up that with the actual felt somatic experience. So we're talking about two different therapy modalities here Internal family systems, that says there's an uppercase S cell that is undamaged, it is untouched, it is intact, the trauma has not damaged it, it has only hidden it. And what I have actually experienced again and again and again, but at a more deep and profound level, through this somatic experiencing this, this sense of oneness, right, so we're?
Speaker 2:yeah, so let me do a couple of things here for our listeners, if you don't mind, simon. I'm always about what tools can we put in our tool belt, and it's different for everybody, just like the journey is different for everybody, just like the trauma has exposure in different ways for each of us. We have, maybe, some common threads. Do you mind giving a little bit more explanation around the somatic experience therapy, a little more definition? I know a couple of people that are working, you know, in the US, in that realm and so if you don't mind just giving a little bit more around what that is, because it's so new to our community so, um, somatic experiences experiencing.
Speaker 1:The main guy in this area is a guy called peter levine. The relinquishment trauma, um, in, as young kids you know, days old, weeks old, months old, whatever that is, it's pre-verbal trauma, so we don't have any cognitive, we don't have any men, we don't have a memory of it. We we trauma, so we don't have any cognitive, we don't have any memory of it. We didn't know, we didn't have any words for it. It's pre-verbal, so pre-verbal trauma. If pre-verbal trauma meets trauma, talk therapy, it's gonna fail, because how can we talk about something that we haven't got words for?
Speaker 1:So people talk about the, the, the, this Bessel van der Kolk guy, he talks about the body, keeping the score right. So somatic work is exploring, sensations in, in, in the, in the body, so it's sitting with what's going on within us. So, uh, so for me it, you know it was a tightness, a tightness across the, the chest, and then it felt like a, a big, a big steel ball bearing right, so that's probably about four inches wide, like, you know, a metal ball. It felt that that was rolling around my body and it was going from the left hand, like my left hand, up my arm into my chest down to the right hand and it's, it's some tension, it's something within. I think soma is greek for body, if I may be wrong on that. Basically, what we're doing is we're sitting with the sensations of our body. Does that explain?
Speaker 2:it. It does explain it, and one of the things I want to pick up on in that definition or that explanation is the difference between cognitive therapy which many of us are used to probably the predominant methodology of therapy is cognitive therapy and you're blending the concept of cognitive therapy can only go so far if you have trauma that you cannot verbalize because it's pre verbal trauma, but it did keep score in your body through natural, not reflection but effect, right. So I get it, I 100% get it. I like that. I wish there were more tools in everyone's toolbox and availability to have the big S, as you've just talked about, the somatic experience, which is a little bit different, a little bit more tuning into the physicality of your body, and this cognitive approach that is predominant in most therapy. I'm currently going through the cognitive approach just because it's what's available. I'm also blending just a little bit of thought process around somatic. I haven't made the leap yet, but I've got a lot of cognitive to work through, so I'm okay for that for now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I did a bit of EMDR with a somatic slant to it. So I and I did that because a lot of the guests, a lot of the adoptees that I've interviewed who are therapists for the Thriving Adoptees podcast, have they've really switched me on to this pre-verbal trauma. They just everybody kept on saying it pre-verbal trauma. And so I've done some EMDR, somatic kind of EMDR work. I've done some, you know, somatic experiencing and and that's what I continue to do and I'm, and I've also I'm putting dipping my toe in the in the parts work, as so I've been listening to Richard Schwartz's book no Bad Parts. At the same time, I'm exploring all of these things, exploring all these different modalities and trying to hook them together, and I'm doing that because I want to be more in touch with the uppercase S itself.
Speaker 1:I'm working on a healing framework for adoptees and I'm drawing from all the knowledge that I've gained interviewing the adoptees that have been on the show, all the input from some adoptees that have done some questionnaire you know filled in some questionnaires about what's helped them heal and my own experience, ongoing experience too. So I'm drawing on three sources to create a healing framework. I'm trying to demystify it, I'm trying to get under the bonnet, right under the hood, of what helps us heal, because what I found is that everybody defines. You know, when you came on the show I I interviewed you around healing. Everybody's got a different definition of healing. So let's focus on the healing. I believe that we should be trauma-informed and healing-obsessed, so I'm shining the spotlight on healing on my podcast. Some people don't even like the word healing, so we're looking at well, it's integrating, it's processing, it's resolving.
Speaker 2:What I really like, regardless of what word you use, healing or not is the concept of I want to feel good about myself. I do know what joy looks like. I do know what it means to be happy. It ebbs and flows in everyone's life. It doesn't matter if you're an adoptee or not. Those are just common things that happen to humans. But with that said, a lot of my ebb and flow comes from the concepts of adoption and everything that has happened through that.
Speaker 2:So, utilizing cognitive therapy just as an example within the last probably, I have to think about this. I have to math this backwards for just a minute. Last four weeks come to the absolute official position. I, absolutely. This is why it's an absolute despise conflict.
Speaker 2:Like I am, I will do almost anything to avoid conflict to the extent that it is hurting me more than it's hurting someone I'm going to be in conflict with, which then has lent to an understanding that I am angry about a whole bunch of stuff. But how am I addressing the anger that landed in? Well, will you rationale everyone's behavior because you want to avoid the conflict and so, to your point, to be healing? Those are three major steps for myself through the cognitive therapy approach, but at the same time I do have pockets and windows of like when I remember being extremely happy. So it's an ebb and flow for me. I don't know if it is for everybody else, but I like the fact that through these types of conversations and the continual engagement between people such as yourself and I, who've had multiple conversations, we're learning, and every time we learn we share something new, and again the toolbox changes and grows and becomes more solid. So if it's a healing framework, it's a healing framework.
Speaker 1:Yeah, people say that time is the greatest healer. I don't think it is. I think it's insight. So you had an insight. You had an insight about conflict avoidance. Sorry, that's my word rather than yours, I think, but you know, if I link this back right, do you get when you are sensing potential conflict, do you so you're anticipating it right? You're seeing potential for conflict that's going to happen. Do you actually feel that in your body?
Speaker 2:Well, let's talk through that. So I do, and that's what's really interesting about our conversation today, because some of these things are getting uncovered as we're going through them, and I think that's really important for our listeners. It could be you, it could be me, it could be any of the other podcasters, any of the people that are writing books and blogs. It's our moment in time. We're going to absolutely to your point learn from insight, and I do not think time heals all wounds. I call bullshit, I just flat out call bullshit, because it just doesn't happen that way and you have to want in my view, you kind of need to want some level of insight in order to figure it out. You have to have a curiosity, right. But to get back to your question, yeah, there are some very physiological feelings that happen, right.
Speaker 2:Anxiety. I can start feeling a welling, you know, from my stomach up into my chest, up into my breathing, and I just start tensing up and then I know I'm going to be in some state. Now it doesn't present the way I just spoke of it. It doesn't present as if I'm like this, you know, nervous. You can see me, my hands are going, going, going. It doesn't present that way what it presents as in the context of my need to avoid, I walk away, I stop talking, I move out of the situation or I just acquiesce Okay, you're right, Even though the me deep down says you're not right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, um, you, you get that feeling in the pit, that, you get this horrible feeling in the pit of your stomach, um, and, and that's no surprise, because that's where the, the there's the biggest nerve endings and the biggest collection of nerve endings in our body are in our gut, and so that's where, and I have that, I get that too. So what we're doing with somatic, what we're doing with somatic work, is we're bringing that up. What happens for us? I guess it's and this is just my experience, right, I'm not a shrink yeah, um, what I think we get is we get that feeling, uh, in our, in our bodies, and we don't want that feeling, and and so we, we avoid, we avoid the conflict, we avoid sharing our the truth of where we're at, and we stuff it, we're stuffing it.
Speaker 1:I was thinking about a couple of nights I don't know how many. This happened. So my bedroom when I was a kid was above the kitchen and I remember how many times Once, twice, three times my parents were, generally speaking, not arguing all the time, but I remember hearing them argue in bed because they were in the kitchen and I was in my bedroom upstairs, and I remember that, being scared of that complex. Do I remember the physiology of it? No, I'm going back probably 50 years now, but I remember not liking that and yeah, so that's with the somatic experience. We're surfacing this stuff in a safe place. I also remember one massive physiological shift that happened for me, a physiological moment in therapy about eight years ago, when I had, I had, um. I found my birth mother's name, but I hadn't gone to the next step of trying to trace her, and the therapist asked me why I had this, this. This picture came into my head of the, of my birth mother being outside me opening the door, the therapist door, um, the other side of the, the studio, the office, her being there, my birth mother being there, pat being there and something in her face saying rejecting me. And I flushed ice cold in terror and then red hot in anger. I'm not prepared to let this fear, you know like, haunt me for the rest of my life. And that was the time when I restarted my search and and that led to the, to the finding the letter in my adoption file to the social worker from a birth mother, and when it became clear that the teddy bear that I'd dismissed as a consolation prize was actually a symbol of my birth, mother's love. So that was a huge, huge moment for me, as the tears came screaming down my face and they, they washed away the last vestiges of this belief that she didn't love me enough to keep me.
Speaker 1:This somatic stuff, these. Our body does keep the score and helping us understand that, helping us be okay with that score and helping us surface that. It's insight again. I think most people would agree with the fact that time is not the greatest healer, but they don't know what is. If it's not time, what is it? It's insights. That's what we're sharing here. We're sharing insights. Put, put those on a plate and just say listener, can you, can you learn from this insight? Is it can? Can this, this thing that helped our fellow adoptee? Can this help you on your healing journey?
Speaker 2:yeah, I would agree. Well, as we're closing out, how can people connect with you, share with you and help kind of create this framework?
Speaker 1:So my focus is the framework I have got. I've got a lot of work to do. We've got to start off with a holistic view of it, then then dive down into the, into the different parts of our healing journey.
Speaker 2:I would agree. Keep on moving it forward. Well, thank you for being on today's show. You are always welcome here. I've appreciated your insights throughout the years and I know we're going to be in active conversation, so it's a pleasure.
Speaker 1:Thank you, and thank you again for the opportunity.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening to today's episode of Wandering Tree Podcast. Please rate, review and share this out so we can experience the Live Adoptee journey together. Want to be a guest on our show? Check us out at wanderingtreeadopteecom.