Hello, deserving listeners. It's just me today. I thought I would do an episode about adoption.

Adoption. It's a pretty big topic and one that is relevant to me in my career.

I was prompted to do an episode on adoption because a patron wrote in and asked for us to do an episode on adoption he uh i'll just summarize

his email as a is a is a nice email and he said that he was adopted at birth his mom is a psychoanalyst

his parents are very loving his adoptive parents are very loving and

they're good parents. And the patron has spent a lot of time learning about psychoanalysis

and psychodynamic theory, even though he's not a clinician. He's half white, half Native American.

So he, that's his, you know, biological roots. His birth parents or biological

parents were, one was white and one was Native American. His birth family were not so great in his

life when he was growing up. His birth family committed a lot of unwanted and uninvited incursions in his life, he said.

I don't know the exact details on that, but in my experience, what that means is that the

birth parents had contact with the adopted child, with their biological child who had been

adopted into this other family, and might have been a little chaotic themselves, and might

have asked for visitation sporadically and when visitation

happened it didn't go so well they might have ox there and i don't know what he means by

in you know uninvited incursions into his, but that can even get as severe as the birth

parents trying to steal the child back. He didn't mention anything like that, but it sounded like

the contact that he had with his birth family growing up was not pleasant.

As he was growing up, the patron said that he felt very different in his neighborhood because he looked different.

From his email, my guess was that he grew up in a white neighborhood, and because he's

half native, he didn't look entirely white.

And so he was discriminated against and made to answer a lot of funny questions.

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