by Celia Center Voices | Dec 5, 2021 | Blog, Featured
Michael Grand, PhD, C.Psych
Professor Emeritus, Dept of Psychology, University of Guelph
mgrand@uoguelph.ca
And
Monica Byrne
National Director, Parent Finders Canada
monicabyrne@magma.ca
For more than 30 years, the two of us have helped to facilitate a myriad of reunions and reconnections between adoptees and their birth families. During this time, we have learned many things that adoptive parents must consider when their adult child begins the journey to discover the first chapter of life that took the adoptee from one family and led to the formation of a second family. We offer these lessons in the spirit of fostering closer ties between adoptees, and their birth and adoptive families.
For most adoptees, search is experienced as an expansion of a sense of self and not as a rejection of the adoptive family.
The first rule of search and reunion is that search is rarely about dissatisfaction with the adoptive family. The need to know about oneself and one’s roots is primal. In order to have a place in the world, we need to know, first of all, who we are. And if we are ‘shadowed’ by an unknown history, by a set of truths that we know little if anything about, then we may not develop to our full potential. If the adoptive family understands the importance of search for an adoptee’s sense of self, they will not fall victim to the myth that the adoptee is substituting one family for another. In most cases, search draws adoptees closer to the family that raised them and with whom they have had many years of shared experience.
Adoptive parents should support but not direct a search.
There is always a huge temptation for adoptive parents to move from showing support to taking control of a search. Searching can be challenging and will certainly bring out the detective in members of the family, but the fact remains, this is the adoptee’s search and must follow the adoptee’s pace. Adoptive parents may assist by providing information such as the Adoption Order, the social history of the birth family, papers from the agency, and communications from social workers, lawyers and doctors involved in the placement. In addition to sharing facts, adoptive parents are encouraged to support the adoptee through the emotional highs and lows of this process. We also strongly recommend the use of search and reunion support groups whose leaders are well versed in the dynamics of this process. Their skills and experience are invaluable.
When adoptive parents withhold information from an adoptee, this is rarely a sign of love and protection. Rather, it is a sign of two things: the adoptive parents’ lack of trust that the adoptee can make adult decisions; and their own fear that reunion will lead to loss of the adoptee to the birth family. Openness, on the other hand, is the foundation of a secure and loving adoptive relationship that will endure across reunion and reconnection.
There are too many examples of adoptees who learn late in life that they were adopted. Perhaps their parents withheld the truth out of kindness, perhaps out of fear of rejection, perhaps out of fear of public scrutiny. Whatever the reason, this is a very difficult thing for an adult adoptee to discover and to come to terms with. Sometimes they find out at the death of their parents and are completely devastated, believing that their whole life has been a lie. All their medical history is incorrect, all their family history has been fabricated. They truly feel as though the rug has been pulled out from under them. Remember, in the end, openness trumps secrecy every time, no matter what the adoption story.
Speaking ill of the birth family does not discourage adoptees from searching. In fact, the more an adoptive parent disparages the character or actions of the birth parent, the more adoptees desire to make contact with birth parents.
Some adoptive parents speak of birth family in negative terms in an attempt to bring the adoptee closer to the adoptive family. However, adoptees hear a different message: “the source of your DNA is bad and thus, so are you.” If adoptive parents wish to keep their children close, respectful conversation about origins is absolutely necessary.
In search and reunion, “no” often means “not yet” or “I can’t tell you.”
The dynamics of search and reunion are very complex. Sometimes adoptees publicly reject a search for fear of hurting their parents. For some, this means searching out of view of the adoptive parents. For others, it means delaying the search, even though the adoptee has a pressing need to discover more about origins. In neither case does this serve the best interests of either the adoptee or adoptive parents. To delay search or to engage in a clandestine search denies the adoptee the opportunity to receive the emotional support from adoptive parents that will help to mediate the stress of coming to terms with one’s history. Search is a normal developmental part of the adoption. Adoptive parents abrogate their responsibilities as parents if they are not available to assist their adult adopted children in this task.
Immediately following reunion, adoptees may become emotionally over-involved with the birth family, to the exclusion of the adoptive family. They may just as quickly retreat to the adoptive family for support and reassurance. They may have major changes in mood, particularly depression or anger which may be directed to anyone in the inner rings of the constellation. In response to these possibilities, adoptive parents may play many important roles.
This is where the adoptive family can really be helpful and supportive, not by being directive or analytical, but by being comforting and present. Sometimes the adoptee just needs time to assimilate new information or deal with a birth family far different than the one they fantasized about. There may be feelings of being let down. Alternatively, they may wish to spend every waking moment with their newly found relatives. If adoptive parents recognize these responses as an attempt to normalize what is so unique, and they can be emotionally available for their children, they will do much to cement their relationship.
If adoptees desire, adoptive parents may join adoptees in reconnecting with the
birth family. Successful integration of the two families requires stepping carefully
through several minefields.
Adoptive and birth families may differ in social class, ethnicity and life experiences, resulting in awkwardness in reading social cues. In some cases, adoptive and birth mothers make a quick and strong connection, leaving the adoptee to the side as the two mothers pursue their relationship. In the end, successful integration of the two families requires that each family recognize that search and reunion is about the adoptee feeling connected to the two families. Cognizance of this will help lead all to find a way to live together at an agreed upon pace.
All parties to the adoption must face and respond to loss across time. For birth parents, there is loss of the child they did not get to raise. For adoptive parents, there is the loss of the child that they never had. For adoptees, there is the loss of the self they might have been if circumstances had been different. Without search and reunion, adoptees also lose a full social, medical and genetic history that links them to their origins.
All participants in an adoption must face issues of loss that are accompanied by disenfranchised grief, the grief that is neither socially recognized nor whose amelioration is socially supported. For reunion and reconnection to work, there must be mutual recognition of such losses and support for each other while grieving. At this pivotal point of transition in the two families, competition over who has experienced the greatest loss will not serve anyone well. However, expressions of empathy will go a long way to achieving improved relationships.
A vast majority of adoptees, adoptive parents and birth parents, rate search and reconnection as successful.
One of the most common questions asked of search and reunion specialists is “How many reunions are successful?” And the answer is “All of them”. That is, they are all successful because the initial effort was to find and know the missing family of origin. Whether the reunion develops into a reconnection that is marked by positive relationships is another matter and depends on many things: the willingness of the participants to work at it; their patience; and their willingness to accept difference and change. How could an adoptive parent, with the best interests of their child at heart, not wish for such potential riches?
by Celia Center Voices | Sep 17, 2020 | Blog, Featured
Affirming the Adoptee’s Reality: A Way to Intimacy
by Marcy Axness, Ph.D., Adoptee
The young child knows when the truth is being told and when it isn’t. It’s just amazing how much little children know of you, within and without.—Patricia McNulty, adoptee and Waldorf kindergarten teacher
The road leading up to adoption is invariably a painful one for parents, marked by many losses: the children they might have had, but for infertility; the child or children they lost through miscarriage, stillbirth, or death; and sometimes even pieces of themselves feel chipped away – their feelings of competence, wholeness, worthiness, and so many other essential components of self.
By the time their long-awaited adopted child is placed in their arms, parents usually – and understandably – just want to put all the heartache behind them and move on into the joyful realms of mothering and fathering. But the very real feelings of loss that attend adoption need to have a place in the story of the adoptive family, or they can cast ever-lengthening shadows on the relationship between parents and child.
Adopted kids often grow up with the mantra “being adopted is just another way to become a family.” This is a dismissive characterization of a profound experience that has involved not only the parents’ deep losses but the child’s loss of the parents who couldn’t keep him. With the best of intentions, adoptive parents often convey half-truths about the implications of adoption to shield their child from the pain of loss that is inherent in the experience.
Understanding The First Reality
“I lost my mother soon after I was born.” If I were to say this to a stranger, the response would surely be shock and sympathy for my loss: “I’m so sorry for you.” But if I tell that stranger, “I was adopted,” the response is usually, “Really, that’s wonderful, how nice for you.”
If we are to affirm an adoptee’s reality, we need to remember that she did, in fact, lose her mother soon after birth (in the case of an infant adoption). And while she may have been blessed with wonderful, loving, adoptive parents, this blessing was preceded by a profound loss. For a newborn to be separated from her biological mother is a trauma, both psychological and physiological, that is felt and processed and manifested in the lives of adoptees according to their individual temperaments, personalities, and physical, emotional, and spiritual constitutions.
There are two realities that a parent needs to accept in order to have an authentic relationship with an adopted child:
- My child has two mothers and two fathers.
- My child came to me not as a blank slate, but with a history of connection and of loss.
Adoptees – like all other people – have their roads to travel. Our “life journeys” come with certain burdens and lessons which help make us who we are. I believe that I am living exactly the life I was supposed to, and I have no regrets. But whether it was God’s plan or simply my destiny that I came into this earthly life as an adoptee, I still needed and craved compassion and acknowledgment for my losses, and for my reality, before I could truly move on to the business of living my life. The goal as I see it isn’t to try to fix things so that adoptees no longer have a burden, but rather to do whatever we can to help them remain connected with their inner truth instead of alienated from it. We can do this by affirming the adoptee’s reality.
The Heart of Open Adoption
Whether one has an “open adoption”, a “semi-open adoption”, an “international adoption”, or a “closed adoption”, these terms refer to the mechanics of the adoption, not to the way it feels. To have an “open-of-heart” adoption is to have the ability to affirm the adoptee’s reality, without flinching: “It was sad that you had to leave your other mother. I bet you miss her. Yes, you really do have two mothers.” Reality. Affirmed. Ahhh… that makes sense, my feelings make sense, everything makes sense now. I know what’s real.
The Gift of “What is So”
If you go to any park on any day in any city, you will see a child fall and start to cry – and then you will see his mother swoop him up and begin to chant incessantly to him, “You’re okay, you’re okay, no blood, you’re okay!” Meanwhile, the child continues to wail. Only very occasionally will a parent tell a child, “Yes, I saw that you tripped over that bucket and fell down. And that hurt, didn’t it?” Or maybe, “That was pretty scary, huh?” She reflects her child simply what is so – not what she wishes were so, or what she might prefer to be so. Her child’s crying ebbs and he is soon ready to get back to his business of playing. He has been heard.
Sadly, when we respond to our children like the first woman in the park, when we try to impose our preferred reality, our myth, upon them, we insidiously lure them – day by day – away from their own inner knowing, their inner truth. And that is when they become infinitely vulnerable in the world, for then they have lost their intuitive compass.
The other devastating consequence is that we erode our child’s trust when we don’t reflect the truth back to him. When we tell a child, “There’s nothing sad about adoption, it’s just another way to become a family,” he begins to lose his compass, and the ability to distinguish whether or not there are feelings of loss or hurt inside him. He will also lose any sense of trust for – and connection to – the parent who repeatedly discounts his experience and his reality. What incredible blessings come when we are able to affirm our child’s reality, because doing so builds trust, and trust leads to intimacy.
Studies show that this kind of intimate connection between parents and children is the most effective protection for them in a world of peer pressure, drugs, sex, and other high-risk circumstances.
Adoptive Parents Need to Affirm Their Own Reality
Why would we tell a child, “You’re okay!” with such frantic conviction when he has clearly just suffered a hurt? Perhaps it is because we need so desperately to remind ourselves (or convince ourselves) that we’re okay. We have to keep tamped down all of our own hurts and fears and losses that have never been acknowledged, our own reality that has gone unaffirmed. This is the generational legacy of denial.
Jung said, “The most damaging thing to a child is the unlived lives of his parents.” I take this to mean the parts of the parent that have been unacknowledged, unexpressed, and ungrieved: the shadow. For adoptive parents, a critical piece in affirming their adopted child’s reality is affirming their own reality.
“Other mommies and daddies had to take what they got, but we got to choose you,” is another of the well-intentioned but ultimately destructive lies that some adoptive parents tell in an attempt to bolster their child’s positive sense of self. Perhaps these parents are attempting to “polish” the status of being adopted, and compensate for any undercurrents of social stigma to which the child might later be exposed. While it may not be appropriate to discuss every painful detail of their pre-adoptive situation, it is crucial for parents to share the essence of the truth with their adopted children, the feelings that hover beneath the facts.
Annette Baran, the author of the groundbreaking book, The Adoption Triangle, says that “Adoptive parents must weep with their child: ’We’re sorry, too, that you didn’t grow in Mommy’s tummy.’”
“I think parents don’t realize they’re allowed to show these feelings,” says Baran. “They think they have to present an unflagging cheerfulness about adoption, in order that the children will feel positive, too. This is a mistaken notion.”
Parents who demonstrate emotional openness send a healthy message to their child that he or she is allowed to express a full range of feelings, not just the “positive” ones.
“Parents whose children express sadness usually feel that they need to reassure them, rather than feel the sadness along with them. But having lost an original set of parents is something to feel sad about, and the best any parent can do for a child is to allow them to share those feelings of loss with them,” explains Baran.
Saying It Out Loud: “Adoption Was Our Second Choice”
We as a society are two-faced about adoption—publicly we laud it as a wonderful thing, while in our hearts we often scorn it. It’s second-choice. And in the secret minds of many, second-best as well. If we didn’t find adoption so contemptible, so laced with shame, why would our laws be so vehemently constructed to protect everyone from the shame returning to their doorsteps? So…why should adoptive parents feel any differently than others in society? Discovering that you can’t bear children and deciding to adopt doesn’t necessarily obliterate a lifetime of subliminal cultural attitudes about adoption. It may just mean you desperately want a baby in your arms.
Very few people in our society grow up dreaming that they’ll fall in love, get married, and adopt a child, or that they will have a child and give it to others to raise.
Adoptive parents need to address their own ambivalence about the very desirability of adoption if they are to avoid the kind of inauthentic, happy-face approach embodied in dismissive slogans like “adoption is just another way to become a family.”
Another challenge for adoptive parents is the nagging legacy of infertility and society’s ongoing lack of recognition of this as a profound loss. Parents need to be guided and supported in finding ways to do their mourning, so that the adoptive mother can say very sincerely and authentically to her child – not just mechanically following a script – “I’m sorry, too, that you didn’t grow in my tummy. It was sad for me that I couldn’t grow a baby, and it was sad for you and your other mother that you couldn’t stay together. But I am happy that you and I ended up together.” What an amazing, powerful connection can be forged here, on this common ground of loss. Affirming the adoptee’s reality is a key element in the secure, continuing relationship between parents and children.
How Do Parents Affirm Their Adopted Child’s Reality?
1. Affirm the Newborn’s Experience
In my article, “A Therapist Counsels Parents of Babies Separated From Mothers At Birth, “1 a perinatal therapist offers specific things parents can say – out loud – to a baby who has been separated from his mother. Infants who have recently experienced separation from their mothers will show signs of trauma – prolonged crying or almost no crying, flaccid body tone or extreme rigidity, tremendous startle responses, and/or an unwillingness to make eye contact or to be held or comforted. Instead of feeling that the child is rejecting them, parents can say to this baby, “You miss your other mother. You miss your connection. You’ve lost something very important, and I understand, and I’m going to be here for you. It’s all right to be sad.” They can hold the baby, and let the baby mourn because this is what the baby needs to do.
The time to begin affirming an adoptee’s reality is at the very beginning; this lays a foundation of openness and honesty. Using the words, out loud, before the child even has language, it is our energetic message that is conveyed to her, telling her that we are connecting with the knowledge of loss that is in her bones, beyond words.
2. Tell Him the Story of His Birth
Children love to hear about the time in their mother’s womb, the day they were born, and the day they came home. It helps to lay a foundation for them of connectedness to their family and to this earth. It grounds them. Typically, it isn’t a story that adoptees get to hear. We grow up with the vague sense that we were hatched from a very special, top-secret file. This is one of the beauties of open adoption, in which it is possible to create a child’s “life book”, containing the birth parents’ pictures and information. This can lead to natural conversations about the birth parents: what color eyes the birth father has, what his hobbies are, the birth mother’s favorite song, whether she rides horses or likes to rollerblade, what she liked to do during her pregnancy. All such conversations are opportunities to affirm the adoptee’s reality.
3. Offer Her Stories, Songs, and Images that might Resonate with her Experience
As with all children, parenting an adopted child is not an exact science, but an intuitive one. It asks that you look deeply into your unique child and find what will resonate with her. Trial and error is often the path to gold in this realm. There are many great stories of separation, self-discovery, loss, and redemption. There are many great stories about children without their biological parents—Moses, Pinocchio, Merlin, and Arthur all were fostered away from home toward great destinies. These kinds of more symbolic, literary, artistic representations are wonderful to use. It invites the child’s imagination in. For me, Thumbelina, the story of a perfect little girl who was delivered from a flower, provided me with a powerful connection that — at age four or five — I didn’t begin to understand cognitively, which was its beauty. Thumbelina gave me a symbolic context for the primal feelings that lay at my core. That story, in some way, gave me a home for my soul.
Stories, drawings, and other types of creative expression can inspire the child’s imagination, and that is critical in supporting the development of a child’s healthy will forces. These approaches offer the child as many different colors and brushes and textures as possible with which to envision his own life, his experience, and himself. (Be careful not to undermine the value of this approach by “narrating” or over-commenting on the child’s expressions. more »
4. Take A Spiritual Approach
Holding an awareness of a child’s experience, without even saying a word, can be tremendously healing for the child and for the entire family. There is a growing body of evidence for the healing power of prayer, or of simply holding a vision of the person as a whole, healthy, completely loved, and at peace.
Another way to work on this level is to sit by the child’s bed while he sleeps, and “talk” to his unconscious, either silently or aloud. “I am safe in my world. It is safe for me to trust and to give and accept love. My mother and father will always be here for me. It is alright for me to feel sad or angry and to talk to my parents about it… they will affirm my true experience and my feelings.” This is a simple but incredibly powerful way to affirm a child’s reality.
Reality is A Personal Affair
In a sense, we cannot know exactly what any particular adoptee’s reality is, since an individual’s reality is a product of many subjective perceptions, filtered through her unique emotional, psychological, and spiritual lenses. But if we affirm an adoptee’s honest experience – what it is that really happened to her – and offer her a palette of contexts through which to own that experience, we will weave a vital connection with that child. Our gift in return will be her sense of trust and her resulting willingness to share with us her reality, and her life. And that is called intimacy.
by Celia Center Voices | Jun 8, 2020 | Blog, Featured
We Come From A Place Not So Safe
by Paula Free, Adoptee
The Darkness Inside Me
There is a quiet rage burning through my soul. It’s lived inside me for years. Buried. Deep beneath the layers of abandonment, rejection, worthlessness, self-pity, and self-hate. I’m trying to get to the good part inside me, but all I feel is bad. It stretches through my heart and burns its way into my mind. I feel like I want to tear out my hair or scratch off my skin. This ache is so intense I could vomit. But instead, I sit in it and let it burn through me. Circling inside my belly. I can feel it intensify and grow more unbearable to handle. It has a hold on my soul and doesn’t want to let me go. I can’t move. I can’t speak and I can barely breathe. But I sit here. I am waiting to find a release. It keeps changing from one emotion to the next. All equally as evil and dominating. It’s as if they feel they have a right to live inside me, and now I belong to them. They own my soul and they have no intention of letting me go. I have slipped away under their power where I am lost and wandering, and alone, having settled into a life as a slave to the force of darkness that has replaced Me. She has established her domain. And I have submitted to her power. Not knowing where she came from or how to get rid of her, she is now me and I slowly lose the awareness of the good that I once knew existed inside me. She’s not so obvious to the world. I have been trained to put a smile on my face to mask the darkness covering my soul.
I feel only the abyss of pain deep inside and it consumes me. It is big and it is heavy and it feels like I am dying under the weight of it. I try to fight my way out but become exhausted and buried deeper still. I give in and stop and for a while walking around like this, feeling totally helpless to find the way out. What I have tried hasn’t worked. And then, I will read something, or hear something and I will feel it penetrate the negative weight around me, and for a moment I can remember how it feels to be safe, secure, and loved and I don’t want it to end. The feeling starts to fade and I try to keep it, hold onto it and make it mine. I want to stay here forever. I want to believe it is my right to belong here. And I can, for a while. I get comfortable here. Thinking it is my place; my home. I’ve fooled myself somehow finding a way to convince myself this is mine. Warmth grows in my heart. A smile grows on my lips and I am alive again. It’s love. I forget that I don’t own this place. I am only a visitor. I don’t know how long it will last or when it will be stolen away. For now, I live like it’s mine determined to hold on to this place I can’t seem to find, on my own.
I Need to Find You
To know where I belong. It has to be here somewhere. Who will accept me and keep me strong? If you, give me the strength, I don’t know for how long. I don’t know who I am or where to be so I look around for you to remind me. It’s still always temporary, and I am getting tired of the up and down is steadily getting tossed around. I feel at your mercy. I’m only OK when you like me. Because who will bring me to that place if it isn’t in your face. If I disappoint you I get cut off, and I am beginning to not know how to fit in. I need to know where you are. I think when I find you I will now be complete and get from you the entire suit. The pieces I can’t find inside I will get them from you and begin to rise. Now I know I must find you and I begin to look at everyone I see. Perhaps YOU will notice me. Then I will be found and the story will be that YOU in searching, found, and restored me. Time passes and nothing happens and I am certain I will never know how to become safe and whole. I look harder and become more aware that I will need to pay money to finish this stare. I know it is a big commitment to make the find move. I begin to panic and get stung by fear. What if you’re not available to give me your ear? I do it anyway. What have I got to lose? It must be done before I become a permanent member of the blues. I get the call you are willing to talk to and meet me to see what I have become. You happen to have been waiting for me all these years hoping I would find you to quell your tears. Tears you’ve cried for me since I’ve been gone. Not realizing the pain would always belong.
We Meet
I am never more unsure and certain at the same time. This meeting was meant to be for us to climb out of the emptiness created after we separated. You cried when you saw me. We talked. and you tried to fill in the blanks of how there came this big divide. I listened and waited and thought it would be a magical moment of you and me; together again, bonded and strong reunited to sing our old song. It wasn’t the same. How could this be? I thought you were the answer to me. I didn’t really know you, but I was glad to see, there was some resemblance looking back at me. I wanted so much more but what I got would do. I had made some progress in finding you. I left not sure of what to feel. My completeness not seeming anymore real. I didn’t know how to fit you into my life. I definitely didn’t need another mom in my life. I came to you. I thought it would be the replaceable part that went missing from me. I realized there was nothing you could say to give me back what I felt stolen away. So, I stick to what I know works, keeping others happy to get the praise I’m worth.
Lost in Pleasing
It doesn’t take long before I’m exhausted and you seem to have found the pleasure in manipulating me to get your way. It’s so easy. I’m so needy. You see the power you have over me and begin to withhold the praise you see I need, watching, waiting to see if I bleed. I get weaker than I’ve ever been. Addicted to praise I work to please, every move draining me, I fall to my knees. Begging. Pleading. Desperate for you to see me, praise me, love me. Is this all I am? All that’s left? A life of deprivation I’m forced to accept. The more I need you the worse it gets. You strengthen as I weaken. You grow as I die. You no longer care as you watch me cry. I am lost more than I’ve ever been to. What I once held onto holds onto me. I am trapped in a space; falling, falling away from the first place. The pain has compounded; your rejection upon my lack of affection. Death to my soul; deeper than the deepest hole. I am now completely out of control. How do I fight the desperation I feel. I struggle. I’m trying to become more real than this pain inside getting harder to hide.
The Destruction
It has grown and has a life force of its own. I am fighting you. I am fighting me. I can’t find a place to let me just be. Chaos in my soul. I have no idea where to go. I am afraid. I am alone. I feel my heart will never find its home. I need someone to love me; feed my exhausted soul. I can’t go on like this. I’m not made for this abyss. I collapse. I am sobbing. I cry out in pain “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” over and over again. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry why did you have to go? I feel so unloved and unloveable.’ Was I too bad to kiss? Why wasn’t I worth the risk? “Please come back, come back, I need you in my life. You need to come back and make it right.” Oh God! Oh God! What am I going to do? I am alone and nobody can help me through. Nobody can help me through. NOBODY can help me through. I don’t know if I can make it like this anymore. It has to be me that gets up off this floor. I am now lying there, still. Waiting to receive the invincible pill. I roll to my side and curl up like a ball. Holding myself tight, I wait for the call. I am waiting for something inside me to change. Please help me, I need you… I need you…please help me find my way.
The Awakening
I open my eyes and jump up off the floor. I’m not giving up. I’m trying some more. I set out to see what has become of me. I can do this. I can do this. I have to believe. Things will be different just wait and you’ll see, a certain strength has come over me. I am determined to figure this struggle out. I know one thing is perfectly clear; this is about me and my enormous fear. The fear that has controlled me since my birth. Thinking I will never be loved for my true worth. I hear…and I’ve been told… I am worth more than gold – simply because I’m made from a one and only mold! Can it be; who I am, has nothing to do with how YOU feel about me? I’m getting excited and jittery. This thought alone is setting me free and releasing power from deep down within. This might be the first time I feel, I will win this race, and not forever be a victim to the constant chase. I have a sense that I’m on top, giving myself permission; it’s time to stop- hurting myself by not being clear; there is a reason I was sent here. No one can take my life away. It’s mine to choose what to do, what to believe, and what to say. I close my eyes. I go back inside to figure out my soul’s divide. Could it be I’m OK? You didn’t leave with my heart that day? I still have all my pieces intact? I have my heart. I have my worth. They belonged to me from before my birth.
I am Priceless
Complete by Design
Given to the world,
with you in mind.
My destiny is
FOREVER MINE.
