Equanimity for Adoptees
Wings have birds and other revelations
Hello! I’m Logan and I help folks mindfully integrate complex identities via mindfulness practice, references, and a little oversharing. I facilitate workshops, privately mentor, and share resources here.
This post is the third installment in my series on the Heart Practices.
CW: This post contains material related to infant separation and, of course, adoption.
Key points:
Equanimity is balance among wisdom, compassion, and courage
Wings come from birds
Balance is not indifference, nor is it static
Adoptees are often masters of emotional alchemy
Takeaway practices and adoptee resources are at the bottom
The Heart Practices: Understanding Equanimity
Whereas the Noble Truths guide much of Buddhist philosophy, the Four Heart Practices help us live with greater ease. Equanimity is the third Heart Practice I’ll cover.
LovingKindness (Metta) - An attitude, orientation, or action to honor our inner goodness and that of others. My first post in this series aimed to serve people who had experienced relinquishment.
Compassion (Karuna) - Acts amid difficulty, distress, despair, and disconnection. My second post in this series provided guidance on simple ways to provide compassion to oneself (adopted or not).
Equanimity (Upekka) - The wisdom to see our options, the courage to decide on a path, and forgiveness when things don’t go as planned.
In The Places That Scare You, Pema Chödrön describes equanimity as “pride without fixation” and provides this story:
Whenever someone asked a certain Zen master how he was, he would always answer, ''I'm okay." Finally one of his students said, "Roshi, how can you always be okay? Don't you ever have a bad day?" The Zen master answered, "Sure I do. On bad days, I'm okay. On good days, I'm also okay." This is equanimity.
Equanimity represents the moment-to-moment balance between wisdom and compassion.
Wisdom can be found in the cognitive, theoretical, ethical, principles. It’s the heady stuff. It helps us frame our experience.
Compassion does something because it feels something: listening, resting, or speaking up. It’s the body stuff. It helps us meet our experience and choose appropriate action.
Together, they comprise “the two wings of awakening.” Just remember,
THEY’RE NOT IN A BUCKET
Heather Sundberg uses the metaphor a bird to explain the body, courage, connects wisdom and compassion.
Last fall, I had a conversation with a doctoral candidate studying undocumented Asians in the United States. They were themselves undocumented. I asked what it felt like to move through a very political, planned city, knowing it was not made for their “illegal” body.
They delivered a brilliant lit review and, with academic finesse, avoided the question. I asked again what it felt like for them. In their body.
“Oh, I don’t go there. My body isn’t a friendly place.” They laughed, uncomfortable.
Compliance-based education systems first train students to take standardized tests, then discourage critical creativity through very specific required course-loads determined by budget. These courses often use quantitative, punitive rubrics designed to validate the instructor’s knowledge.
They graduate into being the people who use the term “woo-woo,” as if lack of curiosity + condescension = superiority. I know because I was that person.
My graduate training was in performance studies: a discipline born of a hopefully-psychedelic tryst among anthropology, linguistics, and theater. Given the world is a stage, and if there is no one behind the curtain, what are we doing? Why? How?
At New York University’s ground-breaking program, I prided myself on taking all theory classes. Yes, some others were decolonizing their bodies through movement, but I took seminars like “Black Womanist Spirituality.” I didn't mess with that embodied practice nonsense. I already knew it took bodies to merge spiritual traditions from home with the ones they were taught in the States.
Like, duh, I was reading a lot about it.
Remember the wings of awakening? Remember we’re talking about equanimity? Remember Lainie from Reality Bites was asked if she knew the definition of irony?
When I told meditation teacher Jonathan Foust my practice was primarily concentration and wisdom-based, he asked me with great kindness: “what if metta is the discipline? What if it’s all one bird?”
.
..
…
FRIENDS.
IT’S ONE BIRD.
IT’S ONE WHOLE-ASS BIRD.
The context, the experience, the courage.
Those Black Womanists in South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia? It took courage to build chapels from refused material, to congregate despite the constant threats of violence, to call and to respond. To embody their own spiritual practices. This was metta meeting wisdom.
My context, my experience, my courage.
A view from above, while staying grounded below. Both/and.
The opposite of love is not hate. It’s indifference. — Elie Wiesel
Equanimity is not Indifference
A “near-enemy” is something that can look like a heart practice but leads to further suffering or stress. For equanimity, the near-enemy is indifference.
A lot of folks think meditation and mindfulness is a form of emotional neutrality. It’s not that at all.
In Love and Rage, Lama Rod Owens frames his equanimity as a calm settledness.
Some may view my settledness as apathy. However, my experience in the moment is one of having space around what I feel and thus having the agency to make
decisions about how to react to what I am feeling. When I am pissed, I can
feel the energy of being pissed, but I am not trapped in a compulsory
relationship with that energy. This settledness is an expression of wisdom in
relation to all my emotions.
According to trauma psychologist Mariel Buqué, over 70% of the United States population report at least one incident or period of individualized trauma in their lifetime. Of that, 83% report layered, multiple traumas.
One common emotional pattern for people with trauma in their history (like adoptees) is disassociation, an emotional alienation from one’s own experience. This can feel anywhere between “I have feelings I don’t understand, so don’t deal with” to evacuated awareness.
Another is dysregulation, emotional overwhelm.
Recognizing your tendencies is a major first step. And then you keep walking.
My own patterns can be, to use a word, disorganized. I draw from tools that address both tendencies. It’s an ongoing unfolding.
The biggest in-the-moment equanimity practice is pausing to breathe, listen, and check in with your body. In a time-is-money culture, pausing is resistance. Pausing as needed around others models self-ownership.
The duck is floating and its feet are kicking. Both/and.
How do you practice equanimity?
All-encompassing health, wholeness, unity, and salvation are never fully attained in this world. As we constantly become, we are constantly vulnerable to evil and constantly capable of overcoming it. In postmodern womanist theology, salvation is an activity. Each new moment brings possibilities in both directions.
— Monica Coleman
Adoptee Equanimity
Pain doesn’t need to be visible to be real, and violence doesn’t need to be physical to be serious. Imagine someone you’re meant to call “family” saying something like, “You know, you really shouldn’t be complaining. A lot of kids back in your country are starving in the streets.”
Non-adopted people often forget one cannot be adopted without being first relinquished. Adoption is not a one-time event; it’s the start of a lifetime of prompts to recall a gap where medical, family, or personal history might be. As such, as Ellen Herman argues in Kinship by Design, adoptees can “never take belonging for granted precisely because they were adopted.”1
Fear or distrust of inclusion and disenfranchised grief are common topics in adoptee circles. And rightfully so. Who else could “get” our experience like another adoptee? What other group knows how complicated a date of birth can be? These spaces promise and often provide catharsis, so participants stay there.
And fixating on the grief, trauma, and separation can be its own attachment issue.
I want to balance this bird, so to speak. Mindfulness and equanimity practices allow space to change either/or thinking to both/and. I want to draw awareness to life and living.
I believe the other side of denied grief is denied acknowledgement of strengths. People do not know how to see what they do not understand.
That exhausting, scattered awareness? It can make us excellent analysts, empathy experts. We can be extremely perceptive. Also, given our backgrounds, we are often resourceful, scrappy types. Many of our childhoods trained us to adapt.
But the biggest oversight is our alchemical ability. I now prefer queer scholar’s Hil Malatino’s phrase “emotional alchemy” over resilience. The reason is similar to my preference for NiCole T. Buchanan’s turn from “at-risk” to “vulnerable populations.”
Usually the folks praising the “resilience” of “at-risk” populations are the ones with enough privilege to do more than clap. The idea of genetic or identification-based resilience can be tied to the justifications for enslaved labor. Just because we learned to bend doesn’t mean we will not break. How about we stop putting people at-risk?
Back to the point: many adopted people are masters of emotional transmutation.
We have known for a while now that being separated from one’s birth parent has both short- and long-term effects on psychological well-being.2 As Gabor Maté writes in Scattered Minds, “we can expect all adopted children to be at unusually high risk for psychological problems in general, ADD in particular, without any recourse to genetic explanations. Such is the case.”
According to a 2015 study out of Norway, international adoptees consistently reported heightened levels of distress relative to over 10,000 non-adopted peers (depression, ADHD, obsessive compulsive disorder, and perfectionism).
At the same time, there were no differences between the two groups in terms of “resiliency.”3
In another study from Ireland, international adoptees “indicate a remarkable capacity for recovery from adversity in most, but not all, children after adoption and exposure to pervasive and permanent environmental change.”4
Of course, an individual’s ability to manage these emotional landscapes varies depending on personal circumstances and support systems.
And if you are adopted and reading this, you are a master of alchemy.
You were relinquished and exist right now. This alone makes you a statistical miracle.
You may lack lineage and you have the right to claim your own ancestors.
You may wonder if anyone else in the world looks like you and know you look good as hell today.
You may wonder, with others, if you are flying or falling. And, as survivors of relinquishment during the most vulnerable times in our lives, we know there is no ground.
Many of our relinquished siblings have fallen, opted out, or passed as is our human nature. May they rest in peace.
And here we are.
Takeaway Practice
Guided Meditation
This begins with a breathing practice, goes into somatic awareness, and concludes with metta. Here’s the script if you’d like to get a sense of where it’s headed.
Everyday Mindfulness
Every morning, I start my day with a rounded emotional survey. At time of writing, my survey looked like this:
Anxious [restless, anticipatory energy that can be positive or negative] - Fischer’s eyes
Upset [can be anger, sadness] - MMTCP
Looking forward [future oriented] - Meeting with Noelle
Happy - Honestly, this term hasn’t been bad at all
Grateful - My practice
I find anxious and upset are common for this kind of exercise. The other three were my additions. I can see how often something makes me upset or anxious, versus how often it actively brings me happiness. You’re encouraged to do whatever serves you.
Currently Reading
Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, by Caroline Criado Perez
This book is quant-driven but very accessible. The case studies about bathrooms, public transit, and working conditions are all told in a clear, narrative style.
Cars (and their safety systems) are STILL not designed for women or children. Criado Perez points out women’s pockets are shitty and small so they purchase way more phones, screen replacements, and protective gear. And purses. GIVE WOMEN POCKETS FFS
Bio and Mentorship Info
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) is a mindful integration mentor offering 1:1 sessions and group workshops.
If you found this post helpful and would like to discuss practical tips for applying this to your own life, please email Logan [at] lighthiveintegration [dot] [org].
Adoptee Resources
Therapeutic Resources
Adoptee and attachment literate therapists — there is no shame in seeking out qualified, competent support!
The Adoption Resource Center offers free adoption mediation services
How to be Adopted, mostly UK-based
I Am Adoptee, an adoptee-specific wellness non-profit
Media
Adapted Podcast
Adoptees On Podcast (the episode “Is Adoption Trauma?” Lesli A. Johnson, MFT provides several resources)
They also have a wonderful book list!
Lara Leon’s Adoptee Wellness YouTube Channel
Communities / Organizations
The Adoptee Mentoring Society, founded by Angela Tucker
Adoptee Voices, founded by Sara Easterly, offers two support-based writing groups
Korean Adoptee Adoptive Family Network (KAAN) is a volunteer-run organization with an annual conference
National Association of Adoptees and Parents (NAAP) runs regular Zoom groups for all three groups within the adoption triad (adoptee, bio parents, adoptive)
National Council for Adoption has resources and events for all sides of the adoption triad
Rutter, M. (1972). Maternal Deprivation Reassessed.
Askeland, K., Hysing, M., Aarø, L., Tell, G., & Sivertsen, B. (2015). Mental health problems and resilience in international adoptees: Results from a population-based study of Norwegian adolescents aged 16-19 years. Journal of adolescence, 44, 48-56 .
Greene, S., Kelly, R., Nixon, E., Kelly, G., Borska, Z., Murphy, S., & Daly, A. (2008). Children's Recovery after Early Adversity: Lessons from Intercountry Adoption. Child Care in Practice, 14, 75 - 81.
LATCHFORD, F. J. (2019). Scientia Familialis: Psychoanalysis, Bio-Narcissism, and the Constitution of the Adoptive Subject. In Steeped in Blood: Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family (pp. 181–222). McGill-Queen’s University Press.