Breathwork and Healing: A Journey Through Adoption Trauma with Kellan Bacon - Ep 183

Welcome to this episode of Unraveling Adoption, an intentional space to delve into adoption's complexities together. I'm Beth Syverson. I'm an adoptive mom of a vibrant and insightful young adult son, Joey, who is on his healing path. I'm walking beside him while working on my own personal growth and healing. Joey and I are committed to helping anyone impacted by adoption, and we want to help the general public understand adoption's complexities better

too. I'm also a certified coach, helping seekers who want to move their lives forward. So listeners, have you ever heard of breathwork? It's a powerful healing modality that goes beyond simple awareness of the breath, which is also a great tool, and it provides significant healing for people, especially when trauma is involved. I've had powerful experiences using breathwork

myself and I highly recommend it under the guidance of a practitioner. Today's guest is Kellen Bacon, a gender-expansive, transracial adoptee from China who was adopted as an infant in 1998 to England. Now living in Cardiff, Wales, they've recently started a professional practice called Kai Ming Holistics to

help others using breathwork and other embodied modalities that have helped them so much. They are one of our 100 practitioners in our Healing the Adoption Constellation database. So I don't know if I'd count as Welsh since I've only just You're just a transplant. Okay. So you're a Welsh English hyphenated. Okay. You're living in Wales. Okay. Well, you're the first person I've known that lives in Wales. Well, first I always want to highlight adoptee stories. So let us know whatever

Yeah, sure. So as you mentioned, I was adopted in 1998 from China. And I feel like adoption was always one of those things where the dominant narrative around it was that I'd been saved. And, you know, I kind of grew up with this belief that I was like, adoption doesn't affect me. And I'm, I'm totally fine.

And my parents are just my parents. It's all the same. And, you know, we often use the term coming out of the fog, meaning that we realise how adoption has impacted us and the trauma involved, and yeah, the grief, the loss that is involved in that. And I think that happened for me around when I was 19, 20, so around, oh

sorry, yeah, 20-ish. around 2019 and that was when I was kind of going through my mental health crisis and it was actually only after that that it really hit me and I was able to kind of validate all the feelings that kind of been bubbling below the surface, like just like a dam ready to kind of burst open. And that's, yeah, that's kind of really where my deeper healing journey Just curious, did a professional bring up adoption trauma?

Or was this just you that realized, well, this might be bigger

Oh yeah, interesting. I think it was mainly myself that realised this, in that I'd had a few therapists before, but most of them weren't trained in adoption or particularly adoption competent. And actually, I did have a couple of therapists before that perhaps worked with me around certain aspects that are impacted by, well, everything's kind of been impacted by adoption. It's all interconnected. Um, well, I think they actually did quite

a bit of harm. You know, they, they kind of reinforced that very traditional narrative around being saved and, Oh, you were so little. You don't even remember stuff like that. Yes. Yes. We've heard that too, from therapists that have tried to help Joey. Yeah. They can definitely make it worse. If they don't know what they're doing. Yeah. Well, so it just bubbled up for you. And that's a pivotal time for many people, that young adult age, you're trying to figure out who the heck

you are, what is going on. And you were raised Yeah, so you had the transracial aspect of it as well. How was

Yeah, I think growing up, you know, I got the kind of really stereotypical racist comments that a lot of Chinese people get, you know, people doing thin eyes at you. it depended on where I was at really and again it was one of those things that I didn't acknowledge it at all. I thought it was just very normalized to be Chinese and have two white parents and I think it's only in more recent years

and actually it's still something that I feel like I'm still processing. and things around it are still landing for me in that i now feel quite a big severance with that where i'm just like my family often doesn't quite feel like family anymore like there's this disconnect there and it almost feels like untrue to me to kind of see it as like a yeah like a normal normal family connection when there's just this So before coming out as trans and presenting more masculine

as myself, I was mistaken as my dad's wife quite a few times. Yeah, where there was this massive age difference as well and it was just very Like the, what do they call those? Like when people go to Thailand and buy That must have felt terrible. Yeah. Oh, awkward. Yeah, that's, that's yuck. And did you want to talk about your trans experience? Transgender? You've got like two, transracial and

Many, many trans transitions going on. yeah so i think my my kind of coming to terms with my queerness um actually very much was instigated by my coming out of the fog oh interesting and i think it was only after i'd kind of come to terms with where i'd come from and this like this truth around my roots and the the trauma with adoption that i actually felt safe enough to start exploring my authentic self more and realizing that actually i wasn't like meant to

be the perfect golden you know daughter that my parents went over and got um and actually there was just so much to explore around gender and sexuality and you know so many other aspects of life Yeah, so this has been a four or five year trek for you so

Yeah. Wow. And that is huge. And it indicates that our identities are not in little nice, neat boxes and pockets. We are a whole person and all of these things that impact us and have to get all unraveled together, intertwined back however you want them to be. It's a major transformation and I very much admire you for I can't imagine how much effort and insight and work you've had to do to parse all this out and to stay safe and to be productive and

do your life through the whole thing. That's a lot. Plus we had COVID in the middle of all that. And I think you said that COVID affected you getting some help. Is that right? Am I remembering yes yeah so covid is actually how i got into somatics in the first place so it wasn't straight off the bat when covid was kind of rife but i i did contract covid and i recovered and i was fine for a few days and then all of a sudden this covid fatigue set in And I'd, you know,

I'd always been really active. I'd always enjoyed working out and just fitness. And suddenly I was just too tired to like get out of bed. My brain fog was so intense, like I was not remembering things. And with that came like so much depression. It was like my body was just going into this like collapse, shutdown response. Yeah, my nervous system was just not, not happy

so i was doing nutritional therapy at the time and i was doing so much to help my body physically but then it wasn't until somebody just offhand mentioned breathwork for energy and you know i was one of these slight skeptics i was like well i've been breathing all my life like what what can breathwork do for me what does it have to offer um but i was getting a bit desperate at this time and because yeah i was really fatigued and nothing was really kind

of getting me back to where I wanted to be. Which just, yeah, as a side note, I kind of don't believe that we get back to where we were. I feel like illness is very much like a catalyst for our growth and becoming so much more than we were. And sometimes that does look different and does look like, you know, using different supports and working around

your energy in a different way. But anyway, I'll get back to the story. And yeah, it wasn't until I did breathwork that I actually felt my energy was kind of starting to heal and starting to be restored. And then I, again, randomly just signed up for a breathwork facilitation event that I thought would be very much similar to what I'd been practicing. So more like traditional, they call it pranayama, energising breathwork.

Yeah, just kind of being aware. Yeah. Yeah. Like focus Yeah, breathing exercises, you know, calm, energise, that kind of thing. But this was much more of an intense, deep experience where something

called conscious connected breathing and instead of you know it kind of just energizing you or calming you, you go inwards, you go deep with it and it's a very activating breathwork style where you're actually purposefully raising your oxygen levels like hyperventilating and this can put our nervous system into like a very activated

state which might not always be a great thing. but in this context it is kind of like it's allowing the body to get to the nervous system state where trauma occurred so it's kind of being able to access that and through doing that in this state we can the body can naturally start to process the stuck trauma and the stuck energy that we've been holding in the body for so, so long, like potentially all our, all our lives, you know, especially for adoptees where potentially that trauma happened at

For sure. Yeah. So I wonder if you would be

yeah okay so i've not heard that before that's interesting but the breath is it sounds so simple as well but it's just a very quick inhale through the mouth which is which is more activating than a nasal breath and then it's almost like a sigh of relief so what we're doing with that is we're taking in so much oxygen and expelling the the co2 so we're really reducing the co2 so it looks and sounds like So we're breathing like deep into that like lower belly, the diaphragm.

Yeah. And like I said in the intro, I've done breathwork a few times and it's kind of the work part is no joke. It's like a physical activity. It's not like laying on your yoga mat and just relaxing. This is like intense. It's like a physical exercise, but it does get you places. And it gets you similar places that psychedelics get you, I think. And it can get you to some of those other layers that your regular old brain doesn't want to go to. So I think it's wonderful. And I also think that it

is important to do it with somebody that knows what they're doing. Because like you said, you know, it can pull up trauma and you don't really want to be by yourself completely, you

Yeah, definitely. It can be a very intense experience and a lot can come up and it's important to have a guide there to like resource and bring some external safety, especially for those kind of people that maybe haven't done so much somatic therapy before and don't have a strong connection to their internal safety resources just

Yeah, because it might bring up some stuff. And if yeah, if you're not really well versed in your inner world, and how to handle all this trauma, you need somebody to help you navigate that. And also, like, what if you get into a spot in breathwork? Like, for instance, if you're using psychedelics, you're gone for hours. Like, you have no choice. Once you've taken it,

But breathwork, how do you get out of it? Like, what if you don't want to be there Yeah that's a good question because I think the I guess the upside with breathwork is that we're in control of the breath at all times and so if it's too intense we can actually just slow the breath we can raise our co2 by breathing into our hands there's a lot of different little things we can do to just bring that physiology back to its more baseline state and they call conscious

connected breathing psychedelic breath as well sometimes. So we can enter these almost like trance-like psychedelic experiences or in that we have so much agency where we haven't taken something that's like now in our blood. We're just Yeah, and you're never really completely gone. When I was doing breath work, I definitely had some very, very strong visionary experiences that have still affected me to today. But at any time, I could have said, stop, I don't want to do this anymore. And I

could have just slowed down my breathing and been done with it. So I, it's like my soul or myself or my whatever's watching it all happen was conscious and ready to stop it if I felt too scared or too whatever. So I think breathwork is amazing for people that might want to go a little deeper into their trauma if they want to kind of start. looking at stuff, looking at some of those layers. You know, the cognitive behavioral therapy, that frontal lobe stuff is great, but it

Yeah, it's great up till it's not. Like it can take Yeah. It's great for day-to-day living, for, you know, problem solving, whatever, those kinds of things. So I'm not, you know, it's fine, it's good, but it won't get to, especially for adoptees. How do you think breathwork particularly is helpful for adoptees with maybe some really old, old, very early childhood trauma?

Yeah exactly because our trauma goes back so so far in alien life it's often pre-verbal or pre-cognitive sometimes people say where we can't directly access the memories to it so unlike I guess traditional talk therapy we might not be able to to talk about it and process it from that rational mind and you know when trauma occurs um you're probably familiar with like internal family systems and this idea that there's parts of us within us and often when we're triggered the

parts of us that are activated have the i guess the mental age the capacity and resources that that part had and when our parts are so, so young, it's Yeah, they have to feel it, they have to process it in the body where it's been held in the nervous system. And so yeah, our trauma isn't just in the stored memory in the brain, it's literally in ourselves, in our nervous system, maybe even in our DNA, you know, the there's a lot of connection between adoptee trauma and, well, anyone's

And, you know, chronic pain, things like IBS. I don't know if you've noticed, something that I've noticed is

Yes. Well, that was a brilliant explanation of how trauma lives in the body and how breathwork can really get to it in a really unique and gentle way. Like

we said, without substances, you're not putting anything in your body. And just with a guide helping you, I think when I've done Yeah I like to use to use music that people may not have like heard of before and maybe like cultural music and music that like invokes that kind of like ancestral like feelings Oh, it's interesting you said that because I'm a musician and I resonate deeply with music. And when I did my first one, the

whole soundtrack was amazing, but then it hit a song I knew. It was kind of an obscure song from a film, so I'm sure most people had no idea, but it was one of my favorite films. my favorite pieces of music, I'm like, got right out of it. Then my mind was like, oh, I remember that movie. Oh, I love that song. It's interesting that it's important to find the music that is not going to remind you of stuff or it should be fresh and new. I love that. You went to school for this

Yeah, I did a breathwork facilitation course. It was mainly online and I actually work virtually a lot with people. I know a lot of in-person stuff can be really beneficial, but I tend to work with queer people and adoptees and we're kind of spread out, so I didn't want to limit myself to just the people in my travelable distance. It seems like COVID made the breathwork explode. Is Yeah, I feel like before it was perhaps very niche and

not many people knew about it. They'd maybe heard of Wim Hof, you know, the Iceman. But I feel like the interest in it really soared after COVID because suddenly people were interested in their lungs and breathing and being able to breathe when Yeah. I didn't think of that correlation. Yeah. And you can do it. I did it in a big group. I just had headphones on and there was a facilitator and you could ask for help if you needed it. But everyone was

just, you know, in our own bedrooms with our own headphones. And yeah, it's pretty amazing. So you work with people throughout the world and you're on our Healing the Adoption Constellation database and you love working with queer adoptees. And I think you have a group, right? Yeah, that sounds amazing. And if people wanted to use you as a practitioner or find your trans-adoptee group,

Yeah, so I'm probably most prevalent, I guess, on Instagram. So I've got my, you know, my kind of public normal account where I do share about like trans things about my life. And then I've got my Kaiming Holistics account and people can find me on either of those and DM or email me Okay, I'll make sure and put those links in the show notes. So everyone look in the show notes, just scroll either down or to the side underneath

where you pressed play for this. Is there anything else you'd like to share about Yeah, we can talk a little bit about root cause healing, like root cause therapy. So that's something that I've just been training in

Root cause, yeah. Like really going to the root of our kind of, well, it involves a few different kind of modalities, really. Yeah. The synthesis of them. And it's a way to basically get to our subconscious limiting beliefs and just the, yeah, the beliefs that we kind of stored in our, not just our brain, but our entire system. Things like I fear abandonment or I'm not good enough. And

it's, it's so interesting because often. we have like an intellectual desire to do things and we're like oh i'm ready for this but then we sabotage and we have these blocks and it's like where is this coming from our beliefs are always trying to prove themselves right so the root cause is basically it allows us to to see what they are and to go back and using different techniques and timeline therapy to go back to when these beliefs

were kind of instigated in the first place. And what's been interesting on my journey is that I thought I'd be going back and looking at birth and my birth mother and mother wounds. And for some of them, I went to past lives. I'm like, I went way, way back. Yeah, and I don't know if it's something that I expected or not, but it's really opened my mind to the possibility of this energy being passed on.

You know, we've got transgenerational trauma, but perhaps even beyond that, where our trauma has maybe From one life to the next. Yeah. I am open to the possibility of that happening. I don't know. Maybe we get another chance at it. Okay, here's another whack at this. You still aren't figuring this part out. So let's give you another try here. And I don't know. I don't know how the universe works or what's going on.

It's fascinating. It sounds like you're really doing some deep work. And I'm kind of amazed and impressed with you because you're just in your

yeah yeah i just uh i just turned 27 which is yeah it's a comment sometimes where people like i didn't realize how young you were and like um you know but i i've worked with you know some 60 year olds and 50 year old sure i That's great. I mean, a lot of people your age are just trying to figure it out, like just day-to-day living and you're really going deep with it. Oh, we all are. Believe me, I'm in my 50s. We're still just working out at it, hacking away at it. Well, I really am

so glad you came on to talk. I am very glad that you're in collaboration with me and doing the Healing the Adoption of Constellation database and that you're providing these wonderful, wonderful resources for adoptees and others. But I think that your modalities, the somatic work, the breathwork is so critical for adoptees. And I think it's a wonderful tool to get to some of those layers that

So if they're willing, I really hope people reach out to you or to find breathwork on their own, maybe where they live or whatever. you know, these these practices are available, they're out there, there are folks that are really wanting to help other people. So I hope people really dig into it. We'll leave some links in the show notes, like we said, and I'm just so glad to know you and glad you're here. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you for reaching out to me as well. Yeah, really happy to

Very good. Thank you. Thank you all for listening and supporting Unraveling Adoption and make sure and go check out Kellen's website and all their offerings. And Kellen and I want you all