Into The Blank

Week 1 When I spoke to Astrid about setting goals around professional development, and she suggested the NTI training, she warned me that it could be triggering. Of course it’s going to be triggering, I am taking a class from someone without my life explaining to me my lived experience. Feminists balk at the notion of “mansplaining.” Imagine the intersectionality of the tone-deaf level of mansplaining meeting your core trauma. When I took the pretest, I found myself on an intellectual battle field: do I answer these questions with my own knowledge from this being my life, or do I answer these questions based on the mental health narrative of adoption? Certain questions were more activating than others. When it came to statistics such as how much intercountry adoption has increased or decreased in the past 20 years, I felt completely at ease knowing that I was just going to guess and that was going to be okay. But when it came to questions about the efficacy of therapeutic intervention on adoptees, I know exactly how hopeless and unhelpful this area is for so many of us. Does the NTI “expert” know? As I flipped back and forth between justifying each of the answers, thinking back to different professionals in my lifetime and how they’d view these topics, it became clear to me that the right answer may or may not be the answer they were looking for. How much HAS changed since I stepped away from seeking mainstream mental health treatment? And how educated were those practitioners towards the end? Sure, McClean hospital never even mentioned my adoption status in any setting other than when noting my lack of family history. But that was 2006. It’s been almost two decades since I was barred from ever returning, deemed beyond the scope of their treatment. Unfixable. A risk not worth any reward. Do the folks behind the creation of the NTI curriculum know more than the near hundred professionals I had seen prior to sitting in this virtual classroom? After racing through the pretest—it couldn’t end fast enough—I am given my score. 77.78%. You need an 80% to claim that you are now adoption competent. I don’t even wonder which questions I got wrong, because at the end of the day, I bet they are wrong. At least on some points. After trudging my way through most of Module 1, I’ve already found myself caught in some very activating positions. “Children adopted as infants: Generally, children adopted as infants do not become aware of the loss aspects of adoption until they are school age.” (Module 1, Lesson 3, Guiding Principle #2, video 2.6) What?? WHAT?!?! How invalidating. A shot in the heart for tiny newborn me, ripped of my name, my identity, my history, my culture, my family, my mother. Laying in my hospital nursery bassinette screaming and crying, begging to be granted nervous system regulation. That child doesn’t understand loss? ALL that child understands is loss. That is all I am experiencing. When I see my peers nowadays taking years to recover from the death of their mothers, it’s a grief all too familiar to me. I struggle to empathize at times. You had your mother your entire life. You had your mother through all of your milestones, through all of your growth, through all of your brain development. How incredibly tone deaf of you to think you could come to me with these extreme emotions around something you are experiencing at an appropriate time of life. When President Joe Biden flew to a fire-devastated island nation of Hawaii and compared it to his fear during a kitchen fire… this is the equivalent.