The Empathetic Adoptee: Oh, the Burden

I'm a recovering people pleaser. So, it appears, are many awakened adoptees. Some are at the stage of discovering that they spent most of their lives trying to please others and are trying to figure out why and how to stop.

It's an exhausting business, this people pleasing. All that smiling, all that listening, all that saying the right thing, rushing around try to fix the unfixable, leaping before we look, offering up our time and energy for the sake of other's goals, all in mindless pursuit of that ever elusive intangible that is Approval. Which is doubly ridiculous because, if we stopped to think about it for even a second, we often don't even like the person we're trying to please.

Paula O. wrote eloquently on people pleasing in a recent post about playing the grateful transracial (Korean) adoptee and it reminded me how far I've come conquering my own PP tendencies in the last seven months of intensive therapy (thank you, insurance!).

This takes being very mindful of WHAT I WANT and HOW I FEEL. It is so simple, really. But so FOREIGN. You basically have to reprogram yourself, like a computer.

In the old days, for example, my sister-in-law would have called me, crying over her troubled marriage. I would have spent endless hours on the phone with her, even going so far as finding a good divorce lawyer, perhaps sending money and offering my home as a place of refuge. Never mind that she doesn't even really like me (She resents me because I "stole" her brother, she's admitted.) But I so desperately want a sister that I scramble around, trying to win over someone who's not capable of a reciprocal relationship.

Today, whenever an in-law drama flares up, I may listen sympathetically - briefly - but I do not attempt a rescue. I no longer get emeshed. That's her problem. Not mine. In fact, I don't much like her and she's not worth my time and energy because she's a needy user.

It takes being very calm and quiet before we can stop long enough to ask the essential questions, "How do I feel about this? What do I want? What do I want to do? What's right for ME?

That's what I do now. I get a phone call, an email, read a blog post, listen to a friend or a pitch and ask those basic questions. What am I feeling? What is my reaction?

And I realize how much I was "out of touch" with myself. I had no idea how I felt because I only really cared about what others wanted or needed or thought. I was more in tune with them. So in tune they were running me.

But why? How did I get this way? And it appears I'm in good company. Many adoptees seem to be afflicted with the burden of people pleasing.

And then, completely by chance, my daughter knocked my battered copy of Betty Jean Lifton's "Journey of the Adopted Self" off a table and it fell open to the last chapter, "Becoming Whole." It had been ages since I read it so I sat down to reread it and there it was, this explanation:

"Adoptees heal by becoming healers.

We could say that adoptees have always been healers. As babies, they healed the birth mother by going off to be raised by another clan. They healed the adoptive parents by sacrificing their own history and heritage so that the adoptive family line could be continued. By becoming replacement children for the child who never was or the child who died, they healed the adoptive parents infertility.

Because as children they have to have empathy for their adoptive parents' needs, adoptees develop an enhanced sensitivity for the feelings of others."

Ah, the loud ring of truth.

Thank you, Betty. I think you nailed it.