Coming out of the Proverbial Adoptee Fog

What is the fog?

In the adoptee community, the fog refers to that time period where you believed, or the belief itself, that adoption does not affect you in any way, shape, or form. 

It's when you answer, "Well, I was a baby, so I wasn't affected because I can't remember." 

Or when you say, "Yes, I'm adopted...but it doesn't matter."

Of course, I still say these things to people who have not earned my trust, but the fog is about more than just saying these things: it is believing with every fiber of your being that adoption is just irrelevant to your life today.

Read this post here by South Korean adoptee on the fog. My one note is that she lauds EMDR, which I have tried and am not convinced it is a legitimate therapy. There is not a cure all. The ancient practice of meditation has much more evidence and much more solid evidence to back it up: and meditation is free.

How, When, and Why do adoptees "come out of" the fog?

Adoptees can come out of the fog at any point in life...though I suspect just statistically there may be some adoptees who die in the fog. Coming out of the fog just means you have come to the realization that adoption has affected you, and not just when you were adopted, but now too, in your everyday life.

Critical moments typically occur around those milestones in life: teenage years, college, marriage, starting a family...but can occur at any time. There isn't a rule for coming out of the fog either. One day you're in it, the next, your eyes are wide open.

Everyone comes out of the fog for different reasons. It might just hit you one day, you might read something, feel something, or hear something that makes you think: huh, I wonder if my adoption has anything to do with this?

For me, I hit rock bottom. I had exhausted all other reasons for why my life was the way it was, and very reluctantly, I turned my eyes towards adoption as the last possible explanation on the planet. Bingo.

Growing up, I was always very open about talking about adoption with my parents, and I was always curious about what happened to me and why. My heart hurt all the time, especially when I was young, but I believed that was the extent of it. Let it also be known that I grew up in an extremely diverse area, so racially, I guess I wasn't starved for culture as some adoptees were. I also grew up with many (about 50) other adoptees, including my neighbors.

For me, my fog hit during the summer after my first year of college. I knew I was affected by adoption, but I didn't know that it was still affecting me. I learned two things: 1) just because you can't see it, doesn't mean other people can't, and 2) just because someone buries something alive, doesn't mean it's dead. I realized that adoption was the reason why I was hypervigilent, which I didn't know was a thing. I also realized that my hypervigilence was visible to others, like blood in the water, and was the reason for why I was consistently bullied from elementary school, all the way to college. It was because people could see I had trauma stored in my body. It made me a target. It affected everything.

Can or should you pull people out of the fog?

The rule is that you should not pull people out of the fog.

Honestly, good luck even trying.

I believe everyone has a right to go through it for themselves, like a rite of passage. I once heard a (probably untrue) story of how a man was waiting on a bench at the train stop and found a chrysalis. The butterfly inside tried to beat its wings to get out, but the train was coming soon, and the man was impatient. Believing he was helping the butterfly, he pried the chrysalis open himself. The butterfly came out and soon died. Butterflies get their wing strength from getting themselves out of the chrysalis. Without that exercise, the wings are too weak for it to fly. The man thought he was helping. He was not.

Coming out of the fog for me was life-altering. It is an experience I would not change for the world. I think we owe it to other adoptees to have that same experience.

Not to mention that forcing someone to do anything doesn't help them in the long-run, as much it it helps you to feel good about yourself. Have you ever seen those shows like Hoarders or The Biggest Loser? Those feel-good, transformation shows?

In Hoarders, they toss out all the garbage in the house and then the house is all clean...and in a week, the hoarder has hoarded all the crap back in the house. 

For Weight Loss shows, they have this big before-and-after transformation...but in a year, it isn't uncommon to hear they've gained all that weight back.

Making people realize adoption has affected them...is not the same as them coming out of the fog. We should respect people's boundaries, and allow them the time and space to come out of the fog themselves.