My Experience with Therapy and Therapists

I will probably only write about therapy once so you don't have to go hunting for all the posts. Therefore, this will probably be long.

I began therapy when I was in elementary school. I'm not sure at what age I began, but it was very early. There were a few (adult) adoptees on my mom's side of the family who had been giving her advice and so she was under no delusions about the adoptee fairytale. She also felt that if I went to therapy when I was older, I might not be used to it and think there was something wrong with it, so it was her way of getting me in early. Other parents judged her for her decision to throw me into therapy at such a young age. I was doing well at school (I knew my ABC's and 123's) and I didn't have any behavioral issues (I colored in the lines in all aspects of my life.) Yet, my mom enrolled me in 1-on-1 child's play therapy with Therapist #1.

Now, I don't remember much about Therapist #1 but my mom says that Therapist #1 invalidated her, and more or less said my mom was crazy for thinking I was suffering at all, from institutionalized care from a year in the orphanage to any trauma about being separated from my birthmom. 

So, we went on to Therapist #2.

Therapist #2 was annoying. I went there once and awhile and it was also child's play therapy. I just went and played board games and talked about my day. It was boring as hell. By this time I was in late elementary school/early middle school. I was being severely bullied in school and was having a lot of anxiety pertaining to my grades and homework. When I was upset, I needed my mom more than ever to be there for me and let me know that I was safe. We did not know it at the time, but my issues were caused directly and indirectly by pre-verbal PTSD and feelings of being unsafe due to the trauma I had suffered as a baby. Therapist #2 instead saw my clinging behavior as "attention seeking" and told my mom that the best way to handle me was to basically ignore me and tell me that I was not seeing things correctly. In other words, the bullying must not be as bad as I was making it out to seem, and I was blowing things out of proportion. Years of invalidation by my mom caused even more problems, as one might imagine--

Good-bye Therapist #2.

Later in middle school, I was already on to my third therapist, Therapist #3. She was (is) a cognitive behavior therapist and I still see her to this day. She helped me to handle my anxiety about school work with different strategies and actually listened to me about my problems without putting me down. With her, I was able to work through finding myself and for the very first time, someone posed to me the question, "How do you think adoption affects you?" As I was raised in a diverse area with lots of other adoptees, I was confident in my identity as an Asian American woman and as a Chinese adoptee. I was offended that she thought adoption would affect me at all. It wasn't like I was suffering. At that point, I was still "in the fog" as the adoption community has termed it. It wasn't until I had a particularly cruel year in undergraduate college where the bullying had started up again that I decided something had to change because my life was falling apart. While I had always expressed a deep sadness about losing my birthmom, ever since I could talk, I never really made the connection between that and why my life was currently sucking.

With cognitive behavior therapy and Therapist #3, I was able to work through my feelings of pre-verbal PTSD, feelings of being unsafe if I couldn't perform (academically, for instance, or as a good adoptee, being "grateful" enough). I understood why I always subconsciously took note of the exits in the room and sat by the door, why I didn't like to study in public places in case someone stabbed me in the back, why I always felt the need to eavesdrop in case someone was planning on murdering me. (See post on Hypervigilance.)

Sometime during college, my mom (still stubborn) decided on her own that two therapists would be better than one. And while it is not unheard of to have multiple therapists with different specialties (or because of location issues), I told my mom that I did not want to see another therapist. But me, still belaboring under my "orphan issues" had a lot of difficulty saying no to my mom because I didn't want to seem ungrateful. And because I'm not a coward and I didn't want to be accused of saying no because I was "scared," went to meet the "challenge" head-on, even though in hindsight I think it would have been healthier to set a boundary. I was over twenty-years-old for crying out loud. My mom should have respected my multiple no's. 

Yet, I was dragged to Therapist #4. 

At the time, I was still working with Therapist #3 about why even though I knew from the One Child Policy I had to be abandoned (at the time, still believing in the abandonment story) I still felt that I didn't "deserve" love. For what kind of terrible baby would you need to be to have your own birthparents abandon you? Even with my parents now, part of me still felt that I couldn't be loved because I was "unworthy" of it. This was only further reinforced by random strangers saying that I was "lucky." 

For instance, on those rare occasions when my parents get seriously angry at me, I would contemplate suicide or at least self-harm because what kind of ungrateful orphan makes their caretakers upset? This mindset I obviously did not have on a daily basis while bitching about everything under the sun, but when I fell into a dark mental place, I would inevitably find myself spiraling down a Dickensian hole filled with orphans, burdens, and gratitude.

Therapist #4 was narrow-minded. Years before, my mom had seen him give some type of talk at a public forum, as she had always been on the hunt to figure out what was "wrong" with me. (Take note that you should not use language like "wrong" or "fix" or "cure.") My mom had given him some sort of summary about my life and mental ailments and by the time I met him, he had already informally "diagnosed" me as someone so hopelessly socially inept that I didn't have an inkling of my surroundings. (Which is ironic considering I was too sensitive to my surroundings.) He stared at me a lot and then basically interrogated me and then had me fill out some kind of questionnaire, which was annoying to say the least. The questionnaire (a diagnostic test) did not confirm his beliefs about my predicament, much to his disappointment. He asked if my college had many relationships, as in boyfriend-girlfriend on the cusp of marriage relationships, and I replied that my school was more into hook-up culture. It was a small school anyway that had just a single cafeteria and a campus that could be traversed in five minutes. People were shagging like rabbits and ghosting each other, but no engagement rings in sight. Despite the fact he had never stepped foot on my college campus, he basically shouted "a-ha" and gave me a lecture on how I was unaware of people and social nuance--even though I think my answer, pardon him, was the very picture of being quite socially aware, thank you very much. 

The next and last time I saw him was after I visited Therapist #3 and we had a long talk about self-worth and "deserving" love. I was proud of my self-growth and ability to put into words so elusive a concept, so by the time I got to Therapist #4 for our appointment, I was eager to have an actual conversation that further explored these ideas. I said that I realized I was struggling a lot with the idea of how my parents now could love me since my birthmom had to abandon me--and then Therapist #4 began to shout at me. He gave me this look like I was either helplessly stupid or playing a practical joke on him, shaking his head furiously, and telling me in a stern tone of voice (like that would help) that Your parents love you. How can you think otherwise? with the implied (you fucking idiot) at the end.  Not only was he unable to engage in complicated issues of the heart, but he point blank refused to consider my words. My mom defends him to this day saying "well, adoption isn't his area of expertise" but I'm still mad at her for dragging me there. She's apologized, kind of, but not really, and I resent her for it. She'll say, "Sorry, BUT I was only trying to help."

Good riddance Therapist #4.

I still see Therapist #3. I think of her like another mom in a way and I know it's going to exacerbate all those feelings of abandonment when I eventually don't need to see her quite as often. I have since been working through all the revelations I've had about Chinese adoption, working through the nationwide network of baby trafficking and about police confiscations. I've had a good deal fewer panic attacks in the last year and I also feel a lot more confident in myself because I had to dig for the truth in order to know who I was. No longer can people push me around, trying to scare me with rumors of "human trafficking" when I know a great deal more about what was really going on in China than they did from some half-assed, clickbait article online. 

It meant the world to me to go through therapy with Therapist #3 and then to have discussions after therapy with my parents. My parents don't always "get it," you know. My mom gets it more than my dad, while my dad still clings to the vestiges of the happy adoptee fairytale and has problems wrapping his mind around why someone raised with the idea that their parents abandoned them might possibly have issues with accepting love. He insists that he explained it well enough that he loved me when I was a child and that I told him (as a child) that I "understood" he loved me--but he can't quite understand that understanding is not quite the same as understanding. That I know he loves me, but there are times I feel unloved, not particularly by him, but by some innate shortcoming of my own.

I've been through a great deal of therapy in my short life, and I see my friends (adopted and not) going to "therapy" now with varying degrees of success. I think it is very difficult to say "go to therapy" because it is very difficult to find a "good" therapist. Not all therapists are the same. Some won't understand. Some will make your issues worse. Some will claim they understand, citing the fact they are adoptees or have adopted themselves, but really they don't. It also worries me to see adoptees in the fog claiming to be able to coach other adoptees when they themselves are unaware of who they are. I've seen adoptive parents dragging their kids (and young adults) to therapy, and I can say that this never works. The adoptive parents are under delusions that the adoptee needs to be "fixed" and that the therapist must "take their side." Some adoptees have been to therapists who slam Dickensian nonsense in their faces, telling the adoptee that they should be "grateful," which is the equivalent of pushing an adoptee to suicide. Therapy and adoption can be tricky, and that's why it is important to know you don't need to see the first therapist you meet.

In lieu of being able to seek a therapist due to money, time, or location, I would say that journaling helps a great deal and I use that between appointments to just dump my ideas somewhere. It helps a lot to be able to complain or write or talk without being judged, and also to know that some physical entity has a record of who you are. It makes it more real.