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 own 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 adoptions complexities better
too. I'm also a certified coach, helping seekers who want to move their lives forward. Today's guest is Sharon Stein McNamara. She's an adoptee from Minnesota who is one of the practitioners in our Healing the Adoption Constellation database. There's a link to the database in the notes below. She is a licensed psychologist, an adoption-competent therapist, a certified mediator for family conflict, and she has a doctoral degree in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard Graduate
School of Education. And today, Sharon is going to help us learn about DBT, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and how it can be a particularly helpful tool specifically for adopted adolescents and young adults, but for more people than that too, but especially for that specific contingent of people who really can sometimes use some particular help. So Yeah, we've intersected many different ways at different events and things, and I'm happy to bring you on with your definite expertise.
And I love to provide tools to families and to adoptees. And I wonder if before we get into DBT, I always want adoptees to be able to share their Yes. I don't know if we need to do trigger warnings at all about, you know, I was thinking, I know that you have co-written a book on adoption and suicidality and I have read that book and I'm grateful that people do talk about. One of the biggest issues in my life was overcoming an adolescent period
in which I was suicidal after a breakup. So my story is I was adopted at about six weeks old, and I was back in the baby scoop era, you know, in the late 50s, early 60s. So my birth mother was an unmarried 19-year-old woman in Minnesota who I've now been in reunion, and I can share her story. has
passed and so is my birth father and my adoptive parents. So I can freely speak about all the secrecy about I was the first grandchild in that family and my grandfather, my birth mother's father, was ashamed that his daughter got pregnant out of wedlock. And so back then, this was before Roe v. Wade, and there wasn't any options for women except for basically to have
a child and relinquish it for adoption. So she was sent to an unwed mother's place and then went to the Booth Salvation Army Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota. And then I was relinquished to a waiting family through Children's Home Society of Minnesota. But the piece that I most resonate with the dialectical behavior therapy is it's one of the therapies that really understands this core feeling of
feeling overwhelmed and like you don't want to be alive. The pain is so big that it becomes overwhelming and so DBT is specifically tailored Wow. Yeah, that's that's so great because that feeling is pretty dangerous, right? Yes. If people aren't around that can help with that feeling, it can lead to suicide or self-harm or other sort of self-abusive behaviors. So. Yeah. ABT, I feel like it's pretty new, or maybe Well, it's been around since the late 90s, early 2000s.
I believe Marsha Linehan's first book came out then, and she did a pretty big research project. But it has become much more widely used because there's evidence-based practices that she worked hard to get research to say, you know, it used to be that therapists would be like, well, I don't really get why you feel that way. So why don't you just stop? Why don't you stop doing that behavior? And dialectical behavior therapy, she recognized that you can't just do cognitive behavioral therapy
to talk them out of it. It doesn't make sense. So the piece that I think is the most beneficial of her therapy is that there's a mindfulness component. and a distress tolerance component so that instead of being shamed like, knock it off, why are you so upset? They were like, oh, you're upset. That means your brain isn't working right now. You need to use distress tolerance skills. So we'll give you some skills." And as a young therapist in the 90s when I was first learning this, I was like, oh
my gosh, this is the best therapy ever. This actually works for me personally too. Because as an adoptee, I would easily get into either panic experiences or shame experiences and then realize that the distress tolerance skills of like actually naming, oh, you're in a shame spiral right now. That's okay. You can work with that. You can put cold water on your face. You can take a walk. You can do some exercise. You can listen to music. So rather than just cognitive behavioral, it used these
Oh, that's so great. Yeah. As many know that have listened to this program, our son has been struggling for many years with kind of chronic suicidality. And I'll tell you, cognitive behavioral therapy doesn't touch his pain. It doesn't get anywhere close to it. It does nothing. It probably just adds shame. I don't, I'm not saying that it's not useful for some things, but when he's in one of those spirals, Trying to make sense out of it
with his frontal lobe is going to go nowhere. Yes. Completely useless. Yes. Yeah. So those things that you mentioned are mostly physical Yeah. So the distress tolerance component of dialectical behavior therapy says you are past the point of being able to think logically. We can't do cognitive behavioral therapy now. We need to get you safe to a space where you can do something to not make things worse. So, once the client realizes that, because a
lot of clients will be like, well, I don't know what happened. My brain shut off. And it's like, yes, your brain did shut off. And rather than fading it, let's go. You can excuse yourself from your board meeting or wherever you are. You can get out of your work environment, go sit in a cooler or go to the bathroom and put cold water on your face. Rather than struggling to make your brain work when it doesn't, go do something to your body to get your brain
Aha. So you're kind of shocking your system a little bit and saying, OK, brain, I know you're offline. I'm not going to talk to you right now. I'm just going to put you on hold and keep my body safe. Yes. And do something that keeps my body safe kind of reminds me that I'm in my body. So those kinds of things that are grounding, and body-based somatic. It seems to be the key word nowadays is finding out what's happening in our body. We've been so mind-focused, or maybe just me, but the
Right. No, there's this whole other level of intelligence that is your body-based intelligence. And My personal story is that I was raised back when they told parents that you should just let your baby cry themselves to sleep, you know, the fervorizing or that. And what I believe I did then was I sort of like dissociated or I learned that that was a coping mechanism. What I found out as an adult is that that is
a really bad coping mechanism. You need to be able to stay present with yourself, you know, you can't just space out. And so this distress tolerance skill helped me in having Okay. So in DBT, that seems like maybe the first step, right? To kind of get yourself into your body, kind of everyone get on the same page that that person's brain is offline. We're trying to keep them safe. We're present. We're nonjudgmental.
And then that probably is not the whole hour of therapy though. What So then once you are joining with the client, getting them back, you can then be, there's this re-regulation experience of breathing with your client. And so many times, once the person feels like, oh, this person isn't going to shame me for having a shame attack or having an anxiety attack, they're going to actually help me, then they trust you and then you can reform a positive attachment experience.
So then, then you can talk about like, wow, you know, you're at this job where you keep having these panic attacks and you keep going offline. Maybe this isn't the best environment for Maybe we should problem-solve on finding you a more nurturing environment for you to work at so that you don't keep having these Well, that's so great. And do you have a lot of adoptees in your client base? Is that your typical client are adoptees at Yes. I love working with adoptees
from all ages, teens and adults. And I do occasionally work with kids, but what I have found that is where I most enjoy is with teens and How do you think DBT is particularly useful for adoptees? What is their particular intersection that makes that particularly Well, the piece that I feel Marsha Linehan was able to name and was able to talk about was this feeling of this absolute self-loathing.
And almost every adoptee I have worked with says, Yeah, when I really get down to it, there's a part of me that is like, they gave you away because you must have been disgusting or you must have been not worthy or you must. So there's this core attacking the self. And so when you can name that and talk about it, it makes it just so much easier to work. And I thought Marsha Linehan was the first one to really, I mean, not just adoptees have
that, many survivors of trauma have it too. So, for example, if somebody had sexual or physical abuse as a child, they will often have that self-loathing because they have attached to the perpetrator thinking that they must be Linnehan was not an adoptee or a specialist in adoption, but she just understood that worthlessness piece. Yes. Yes. That so aligns with so many adoptees. And so you found that this really fits that dissonance beautifully.
And it sounds like it really does. I don't know how to ask this. So maybe it's something from your own personal life, but give us a specific example of an adoptee who is struggling with something. came in and you worked with DBT for, I don't know, days or weeks, and Sure. I mean, this happened to me personally as well, so I really do resonate a lot with it. But with many teen adoptees, there's this thing
that happens when you first fall in love. So you fall in love and you for an adoptee to fall in love, they didn't have that normal separation from the mother that is supposed to have happened like over a period of years where you form a sense of self and that you have this severing and then you're supposed to reattach to this adoptive family, and you do. Most adoptees don't have severe reactive attachment. They are able to attach, but
it's what I found. So I'll just tell my personal experience, then I'll tell how I helped with a teen that had this same issue. Okay. So when I was 17, I met the love of my life. He was 19, two years older. He chatted me up. I was a waitress. He, you know, was very, just, I fell in love completely. And there was just this sense of like, I would do anything for him. I would, you know, so, so many adoptees also don't have good physical boundaries.
And then the feeling of like, you're in love, it becomes, you'll have sex, you know, you won't think about like boundaries. It's like this person is your safe person and then you'll do whatever they want. And sometimes you'll be put into situations that might be good for you because there's this agreement to get this love. So I did that and then he got nervous about like, oh my gosh, I'm not ready to get married and he
broke it off with me. And I had no preparation for the experience of having this kind of first breakup. So I went into this. I now know as a psychologist that this is a natural thing that people do is they obsessively keep thinking about the person that they wish that they were with. And I couldn't help myself. I would call him and ask, why did you break up with me? Can't we get back together? And he was, of course, you know, he was a
19 year old boy. He was like, you got to give me a break. girl. I'm not going to keep reassuring you all the time. I mean, we're done. This is over." And so then it turned into a, if he doesn't love me, I don't love myself. I'm not lovable. And then that turned into like an obsessive thought about suicide. So I have now learned, there's actually another book that I really like called How to Overcome Your Addiction to a Person. I'm not sure if I'm saying it
exactly right. I can look up the exact title, but How to Cure Your Addiction to a Person. Anyway, people with attachment issues have this. It's like a breakup becomes this obsessive I have to get this person back or I'm not going to be okay. I mean, I couldn't sleep. I had trouble. So for me, I had a couple of months of this. My parents kind of knew that something
was wrong. And what happened is I had sort of this healing dream where I don't know if it was a person from my ancestral, whatever, but I had this experience of a feeling of like some woman came to me in a dream and just said, you're going to be okay. You're going to end up helping a lot of people. You need to just move on and let go. And somehow that helped me. But as a therapist, what I've done with people is I've just reminded them, you have a bigger purpose here. This feeling that your life
is over, it's because of the pain from that. Basically, it's a reenactment of that original mother loss of that first love. Because all of us, our first love is our, we're attached from the moment we're born because that nine months in the womb. is a love story between you and this person that's holding you. Even if it's not consciously aware of it, your Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I know my son has talked about breaking up as literally like
death. He'd rather stay with somebody, even if it's not the right person, because the idea of being alone is death to him. And he's not kidding. It's no hyperbole. It's just, And I bet that a lot of adoptees feel that because of that primal wound, that initial severing of that bond with their birth mother. And a lot of people in the community and a lot of adoptive parents don't quite get that. So I'm trying to help people become more aware of that, but it's
helpful to hear your story. And it's totally understandable when you think about that bond and then it was severed at such a young age for many adoptees or even in childhood for someone that was fostered or adopted later. Anytime from like zero to, I don't know, I guess anytime even as an adult, to be severed like that is Yeah. And many adoptive parents, they're like, why are you hanging out? This person isn't good for you. They're not really that nice
to you in the relationship. And the adoptee is like, I have to stay because of this attachment thing. They have this thing. But DBT can help with that too, where you learn. So having that distress tolerance, like, okay, I'm having that compulsion again to call my ex or to try to get in touch with them, but I know they're not good for me. I need to hold on to that feeling and know that I can do things to help myself to get through and it will pass. So DBT also is,
you can use it for addictions as well. So it's like when you have this craving, the craving for a substance or to drink or to use, you hold on and say, this will pass if you do these other things to get through this craving period. And then it retrains your brain to be able to know you think you're going to die, but you're not, and you can get through it. But it takes having like a higher, in DBT they call it the wise mind. Your wise mind has
to watch and observe. See, you got through this last time when you wanted to use, you got through this last time when you wanted to, you know, hurt yourself. in your life and you didn't die and you can do it. And so that building of that awareness over time is what helps I love how DBT just goes forward through it. It doesn't try to talk around it or it doesn't like try to deflect it. It goes right into it, right Yeah, and it doesn't try to minimize it. It's like, no, you do
feel like you're going to die. That's right. Your feelings are valid. And you need to do these other distress tolerance things to get through it. Both and versus either That's so great. Now, are all therapists DBT Well, there are quite a bit more opportunities to learn it now. And they call it the third wave cognitive behavioral therapy. So like, for example, acceptance and commitment therapy also has components of DBT in
it. And I would even go so far as to say, like, I know you've talked with other people about internal family systems. Well, internal family systems is what you do once you have enough skills so that you're not suicidal anymore. When you're like, Oh yeah, that part of me that gets really upset when I get rejected. Okay, so that's your exiled part of self or whatever. And then, and so you can use the DBT skills with your parts. So it's like a nice internal family systems is a nice addition
after you've learned. You have to learn how to not be so out of control that you can't not Yeah, so there's that baseline that DBT tries to get you Oh, that's great. I know in the Healing the Adoption Constellation database, we have a little category for people to check if they are DBT practitioners, but it might be good if people are looking for a therapist in their area to ask if they are Yeah, there's several certifications and I think as long as the person knows how to
do, it's called a chain analysis. So the biggest thing you want to do is be able to, can they see when the, whatever your teen or the person who's in treatment goes past the point of being able to calm themselves and then they need to have like intervention or distress tolerance skills or something like that to to intervene. So that's called a chain analysis. So once the therapist can figure that out, then they can teach the person how to prevent Okay. Yeah. So let's take a hypothetical client
that had a breakup like you had and was in so much distress. So you teach them how to sit with it, how to acknowledge it. You get that wise self coming in, being mindful, bring some body awareness. And then over the weeks or months, what is the outcome usually or what is a possible outcome for that? Well, the core issue, and this is what's so hard for adoptees, I think it's possibly one of the worst things that you can be born into is this
feeling of self-rejection. So staying loyal to your birth mother means you're saying, I must not be valuable. And so we have to shift that to even if my birth mother didn't want me, other people want me. And what I found is I had to change my, I had a core belief that I was just an accident. I was just a random accident. I was just a product of two people having sex or whatever. And a wise therapist helped me reshape that core belief to, wait a minute, people don't come
into this world by accident. There must have been something bigger like the life force or, and that's what Gabor Mate talks about, life wanted you. For me, I do have a religious belief system of believing in God, so I changed that to, on some level, my higher power or God. did Ah, so you really changed that core belief. You changed the script in your head that was running probably subconsciously for a long time. Yeah. And you, you went and did surgery on that and
said, no, I'm going to believe something different. And that, that helped you to literally stay alive. Even if you got broken up with, or even if something felt, maybe you didn't get a job you wanted or something, I bet you'd run into that And then you remind yourself, oh no, I have this core belief that I have decided to hang on to. That's lovely. That's lovely. And I
can see how that could really, really help adoptees. Well, I hope that people are listening that maybe weren't so familiar with DBT or didn't realize how therapy can really get to those core wounds that a lot of adoptees have. I hope maybe they'll reach out to you. Yeah. I For me to be able to take health insurance as a licensed psychologist, they have to be in Minnesota. But if they wanted to reach out to me for training or a form of coaching, I do do some parent coaching
Gotcha. Gotcha, gotcha. Okay, so people can reach out to you. So I have a web address. It's basically SharonSteinMcNamara.com, Okay, I'll put that in the show notes so people can get a hold of you. And oh man, I really appreciate this. We kind of did a fine tuning on this one tool, but it gives people lots of hope and lots of lots of ideas for how to help themselves or maybe their child or a loved one or somebody they knew who's struggling. Thank
you so much, Sharon. Do you have any other last words, anything that I should I guess the piece is to just please don't ever give up hope on an adoptee. You never know when there's going to be that whatever magic formula of people who are surrounding them that can Yes, yes, yes. And it does take a village sometimes and just continuing to believe in their inner strength and their inner coping and inner tools and external tools too that we all come along with next to them. and
provide them like what you do for people, so. Oh, that's beautiful. Well, thank you Sharon for being on. I really appreciate it. Thank you everyone for listening. Please make sure and find Sharon or share this episode with someone you know who might need to hear it. And Sharon and I really hope that