5 Chapter Five – Ancestral Healing and Adoptees

Introduction

I am an adoptee. I don’t know how to talk or think about myself without adoption being at the core. I was born in Hilo, Hawai’i and adopted by two third generation Japanese Americans in Seattle. I was raised with a lot of love and support. I have a lot of love and respect for my adoptive parents as well. Additionally, I always wondered about being adopted.

Without going into the complicated narrative that surrounds adoption, I find myself on the positive receiving end of many adoptee circumstances. It feels important to give voice to the diverse experiences within the adoptee community. By sharing and contrasting my background with those of others, I hope to shed light on some significant differences that shape our varied journeys.

• I was adopted at 2 weeks old. Therefore, I didn’t lose my first language, country, and culture as a child, like older adoptees do.
• My adoptive parents raised me with the knowledge that I was adopted. I never had to learn I was adopted, like many kids and all late discovery adoptees.
• I am racially Japanese and was raised by Japanese Americans. I ate Japanese food, was surrounded by Japanese culture and language, and learned how my family suffered and survived in the U.S. Japanese Internment camps during WWII. I do not have the experience of a transracial adoptee, someone who is raised in a family that is a different race than they are. I know of very few Asian adoptees raised by Asian parents, who stayed connected to the culture of their biological parents.
• I was domestically adopted from Hawai’i and born into US citizenship. I was born in a hospital, and know the exact date and time of my birth. When I searched for my birth parents, I was able to communicate in English and jump on a plane to Hawai’i to look for them. Some international adoptees had to get citizenship as adults, and some were deported. Almost all international adoptees have no access to the exact date or time of their birth, and need a passport, visa, and translator for their search.

Hawai’i opened their adoption records in 2016, and I got access to my court records (and therefore my biological parents names). According to Adoptee Rights Law (https://adopteerightslaw.com/maps/) there are still 17 states that don’t allow adoptees access to our original birth certificate without a court order. Nineteen states (including Hawai’i) allow some level of access to our records.

There is a concept in our community called “being in the fog,” which roughly means that one is not aware of the impact adoption has had on them. When someone is “out of the fog,” this implies they are actively processing what being adopted means to them. I don’t think I was ever in “the fog.” I constantly fantasized about the town I was born in and my birth parents. I wondered what my life would have been like if I hadn’t been adopted. I lived a parallel life, half in the life I knew around me, and the other half in an imagined town with imaginary parents and imaginary friends.

I always knew I would search for my birth parents. After more than 20 years of searching for them in my adulthood, I started to confront the reality that I might never meet them. I was out of my mind. I didn’t know how to prepare myself for the end of a dream that I had my entire life.

To cope, I took a course on grounding and energy healing with an organization called Intuitive Mind. In these classes, they mentioned our ancestors, and how important they are. The word “ancestor” sent chills down my spine. I didn’t know if I had any ancestors because I was adopted. Did my biological ancestors know I existed? Did my adopted ancestors consider me part of their family?

This was not the first time I had these questions. Growing up, my family celebrated Obon, an annual Japanese holiday when people celebrate and honor their ancestors. Both sides of my family were Christian, so we did not learn about the Buddhist traditions behind Obon. In my childhood, the ancestors were a noun, and I was not in a mental place to process what that meant. Confronted with the concept of ancestors once again, I discovered a new area of adoptee unknowns – the realm of the ancestors, and how I might relate to them.

Like many adoptees, I was exhausted from contending with all the unknowns in my life. To now face yet another unknown realm felt devastating and overwhelming. Having to deal with the familiar feelings of not belonging and not knowing who to turn to made me annoyed and angry. But as I watched my non adopted classmates have blissed out experiences with their ancestors, my curiosity grew. The ancestral world seemed so alive and tangible to them. I wondered if I could find grounding and rootedness in the ancestors too.

Questions flooded my mind. How would I identify my blood ancestors if I had never met anyone from my living family? How could I be sure of connecting to the correct group of people? Does only DNA count for ancestry? Since I don’t share their DNA, do my adoptive ancestors even know who I am? How do they see my role in the family? Will it be easier to connect with these adoptive ancestors because I know people from the line? Would they even want to connect with me? How do adoptees fit into the world of the ancestors?

I learned the ancestors are a big, complicated entity, a powerful force that holds family patterns, strengths, pains, memories, and desires. Historically, cultures across the world have had ways to connect with their ancestors. Through traditions and rituals, people had deep and meaningful relationships with them. For many of us, it has been multiple generations since anyone in our family looked after our ancestors. We may carry the residual impact of ancestral trauma – harms suffered or harms inflicted on others, or both. It is important to take care of our dead and make sure their souls are at peace. We, as their grandchildren, carry their DNA.

This all made sense to me, but I still did not know how adoptees fit in. I did each ancestral repair exercise twice, once for my birth family, and once for my adoptive family. Since I knew my adoptive family, the information that I got seemed to make sense. But with my birth family, I had no idea whether the information was reliable or accurate. In fact, it hurt and made me feel alone because it reinforced that they were not around to talk to.

While taking these classes, I was secondarily rejected by both birth parents. I had to confront the fact that the biggest desire in my life, the thing that took up the most space in my brain, will never come true. So, I became obsessed with connecting to my ancestors because they would likely be the only birth family I would ever meet.

I used mediums, energy workers, and healers to help me connect to my ancestors. Over time, I began to get a general sense of each of my birth family’s lines. I felt like I was onto something big. However, I wanted more targeted and specific ancestral healing work.

I found Dr. Daniel Foor on a keyword search for “ancestor adoptee.” He and his practitioners were the only ancestral healers who consistently included adoptees in their practice. This surprised me, and I wanted to know more. It just so happened he was accepting applications for his training program. I applied in the fall of 2019, was accepted in 2020, and graduated in the spring of 2021.

Healing my Biological Ancestors

I started healing my biological ancestors because they were the ones I most wanted to understand. As I got into the work, I was surprised by how angry I was at them. I expressed my rage, frustrations, sadness, and disappointments with no filter. I felt so abandoned by them and was angry that they allowed me to be given away. If they were so powerful, why did they not urge my biological parents to talk to me? They did not give me a chance to work with the living, the people I dreamed about my entire life. The only ones left for me to work with were the dead. This was the first time I got angry at my birth parents or birth family. I was used to taking my anger out on my adoptive parents. It felt strange to direct my adoptee anger away from them.

After a while, I noticed that my biological ancestors kept showing up for me with love, patience, understanding, consistency, and genuine care. It was hard to stay mad at them when they met me with such empathy. They all empathized with my pain and how rejected I felt. They recognized things were hard on me. They apologized for my circumstances. This was exactly what I needed to hear. I relaxed around them and let myself take in their support. It was a big healing.

This shift created an opening for me to see how much I had taken out on my adoptive parents. I felt like they had ripped me away from my blood family. I resented that I was the black sheep, and I hated that the adoption industry led them to think that adopting was simple. When I was born in the late 1970s, the understanding was: you want a baby, you get a baby, you raise a baby, and the child will be fine. My parents were not prepared to raise an adopted child with all the nuances that come with that process. I started to forgive them for all they were not equipped to handle and for how hard they tried. I forgave myself for not knowing any better either.

Another big healing came in seeing myself reflected in my bloodlines. Adoptees do not typically grow up in families with similar physical, emotional, or personality traits because no one shares their same genetics or DNA. Therefore, we do not have any “mirrors.” It can be isolating, awkward, and confusing to not see ourselves reflected in the world around us.

Incredibly, in getting to know my biological lineages, some mirrors appeared. My birth mother’s father’s ancestral guide showed up as a bright star. One of the blessings of this line was that these people embody bright shiny energy. I recognized this bright shiny energy as something in myself, too, but I had never considered that it was a family trait. For my ancestral guide to mirror this quality back to me was so unexpected. I had never been able to say: “this thing within me comes from this place.” Such a mirror was incredibly healing and validating, and made me feel connected to something bigger than myself.

My birth mother’s mother’s guide told me the major burden of the lineage was anxiety. Anxiety has been a lifelong issue for me, and I always saw it as a huge shortcoming. It never occurred to me that my biological family might struggle with anxiety, too. This was the first time that I could compare a part of myself to another family member. I felt seen and normal.

My birth father’s mother’s guide told me that the women in this line can either crumble under pressure or use that pressure to become a diamond. I had never heard of a personality trait of mine so accurately described. When I admitted struggling with that, she laughed and said we all do. It was a relief to laugh about this with someone who understood. She encouraged me to channel diamonds when I feel like crumbling, which has proved a powerful antidote. I believe the ancestral medicine is so strong because it comes from a healthy blood family member who understands what it’s like to have this trait, and also knows how to heal it.

My birth father’s father’s guide was a mountain. He said our people were mountain men, skilled in solitude and meditation. I am naturally very good at isolation and have to push myself to open up to others. Growing up, I felt like my introversion was a major failure because I was surrounded by extroverts. But my guide told me that we were known for our inner knowledge. When I learned that my introversion came naturally I could begin to view this trait in myself in a far more positive light.

I could not believe these messages came from the dead, the ones that I was so angry at being “left with.” If I had not directly experienced these ancestral messages, I never would have believed them. These are only a few examples of the mirroring and answers that I have received. Having relationships with my ancestors makes me feel less alone. I feel like I belong somewhere and am part of something bigger than me because I can trace personality traits back to a lineage. I no longer feel like I am walking by myself in the world, all alone in my DNA.

Ancestral Healing makes me feel empowered because I know I have done everything I humanly and energetically can to get answers about my past and where I came from. I might not have the living to talk to, but I know I have access to the dead.

Healing my Adoptive Ancestors 

I approached my adoptive ancestors with apprehension. Without knowing how they felt about me meddling in their bloodlines, I felt like an intruder in their space. Also, because I brought my biases, judgements, and lived experiences to each of their lines, it was harder to heal my adoptive ancestors’ lineages. Trusting my intuition with neutrality was much more difficult.

However, they greeted me with love and familiarity. They told me they already knew me and my people. They thanked me for being the black sheep because I was bringing change to their lines that would not have been possible from their own people. As an adoptee, I challenged their understanding of family and acceptance. The ways I expressed myself were so different from them. They made concessions in their minds and room in their hearts for me, even though they did not quite understand me. Receiving gratitude from them was like a salve.

They told me my biological ancestors also had lessons by placing me outside of their bloodlines. In the ancestral world, they all worked together. My biological ancestors told me they needed to break their fixation with control. I was something they could not control, though they tried with my adoption. However, my persistence in trying to find their family over the past decades was not in their control. They had to learn to lean into the unknown with me, never knowing when I would show up, or to whom. Learning about this made sense, but I felt like a pawn in their game.

As I continued to work with my ancestors, I was reminded of something I had heard from many healers over the years – that my spirit was on a long journey to learn how to love myself. They all saw this as the biggest lesson I needed to understand in this lifetime. I had not fully processed what that meant. However, hearing the ancestral stories made me realize that if this is my lesson, then my spirit had chosen the perfect families to be born into. In one family I felt worthless because I was given away, and in the other I felt so wrong because I was so different. I began to see the possibility of a collaboration with my ancestors to bring healing and growth to us all, instead of being their pawn. This shift in perspective helped breathe new life into the old, well worn, adoption story that I had told myself.

Healing my adoptive ancestors gave me deeper insight and understanding about my adoptive family. I thought I knew them. But I knew them only from my own perspective. I knew their recent stories, but what I was missing was their ancestral history. I did not know where they sourced their goodness from, what they carried as innate blessings, or how they came into their burdens, and what the remedies were.

My adoptive mother’s mother’s ancestral guide showed up as a DNA strand, the building block of everything. The DNA strand contains all the energies of the human experience, from the suffocating darkness to the blinding light of goodness. The difficulty is when someone gets stuck on one end of that continuum. The guide helped me understand the wide range of emotions and experiences on my adoptive mother’s mother’s lineage. Now when I see emotional stuckness acted out in my family, I can see it with empathy instead of judgement. When I get stuck myself, I remember to move energy to get things flowing again.

My adoptive mother’s father’s guide represents the steadiness, stillness, and tranquility of a Japanese stone garden. He told me this line has determination that seems to be “set in stone.” I had always heard that stubbornness came from this line, a trait spoken of with an eye roll. But from an ancestral point of view, that sentiment showed me that being determined and stubborn has a positive side as well. My guide showed me how steady determination could enable me to sit in this stone garden as an antidote to my anxiety.

My adoptive father’s mother’s guide said this lineage had “ice in our veins.” I was confused because I would never have associated coldness with my grandmother. But I learned this quality was more about the ability to stay cool, calm, collected, and chill, even in situations that are heated and fiery. I used to view my adoptive father’s mother’s side of the family as aloof, but this pivot helped me better understand their behavior. Now I use the medicine of ice when I am in a heated or uncomfortable situation to help myself cool down.

My adoptive father’s father’s guide showed up as a spark of fire. This line is constantly lit up with sparks of ideas, brilliance, energy, and light. Their gift is being a flame that can light the way for others, but can sometimes burn too brightly and burn things down. I recognized this energy and had newfound empathy for the balancing act that this lineage has managed. They suggested I imagine sparks of fire when I need inspiration, which has become another powerful medicine in my life.

The information I got from my adoptive ancestors provided a depth to my family that permanently changed my opinion and attitude towards them. Ancestral Healing gave me a macro view of who they are. I saw a deep, raw humanness in them. They were people who came from complicated lineages. They had their own ancestral challenges, pain, hardships, gifts, and strengths, just like my biological lines. I was humbled by this realization. I relaxed towards them. I felt less of a victim to their actions, because they were doing the best they could, being downstream from their own ancestral patterns – just like the rest of us.

As I mentioned, I had taken out a lot of my anger on my adoptive parents. As I healed their lines, I saw parallels in how my biological ancestors and adoptive parents kept showing up for me. None of them gave up on me. It was hard to stay angry at people (living or dead) who were so consistently there for me.

Benefits of Ancestral Healing

One of the reasons I love this work so much is because, as practitioners, we empower our clients to make connections with their own ancestors. The process is unique because it combines two seemingly different endeavors. First we return to the ancient tradition of connecting to our ancestors, and we also gain access to their powerful ancestral medicine, the tools we need to take personal responsibility for our life and healing. Out of these connections come many opportunities to heal.

Adoptees have additional support and love from the ancestors, because we have both our four biological lines and up to four adopted lines, depending on who adopted us. While I was in training, a few people in my cohort told me they envied my “extra” lineages. They wanted to have more ancestors to support their life, too. I never liked being adopted and certainly never had anyone tell me they wish they were adopted before. This point of view was a powerful reframe.

Support and love may not be around you from your biological and/or adopted family here on earth, but our well ancestors are available and here for us. For some, the ancestors might be the only healthy family members we experience.

We can receive medicine from our ancestors (biological and adoptive) that is time tested and specific to our people’s needs. Just as I was told to channel diamonds in times of struggle or use ice in heated situations, everyone has their own ancestral medicine.

Ancestral Healing involves truly going back to one’s roots. A common theme in the adoptee community is that we are “rootless.” But ancestral healing revives ancient traditions and allows us to reconnect with the wisdom of our elders through the timeless art of storytelling as a way to know and honor our people. Biological children of adoptees can find similar healing, belonging, and comfort in learning about the biological ancestors of their adopted parent(s). They might have similar questions and unknowns about their biological family too.

Ancestral Healing provides a way of connecting to our people that is different from face to face interactions with the living. Connecting with living family members can be scary, uncomfortable, or as in my case, impossible. Conversations can become too charged, or we avoid a topic because we fear how someone will react. We can bring all our questions to our ancestors for perspective, insight, and guidance. While not the same as conversations with the living, talking with healthy ancestors can feel safer and more supportive.

Harmonizing our ancestors together gives them a chance to find peace with each other. We then get to internalize that peace. Throughout history, our ancestors might not have gotten along. There could still be grudges, traumas, or issues between them. I found the harmonizing process especially potent with biological and adoptive ancestors because it brings everyone together in the spirit and physical world. Whether or not the lineages in an adopted family come from all over the world or one country, harmonizing them is an opportunity to bring healing across cultures, languages, land, and races.

Ancestral guides can work as a council of elders. You can call them in and ask for guidance and advice, or just talk with them. It is a beautiful way to stay connected to your people. It is one of my favorite parts about this work, and I consult with my council all the time.

As mentioned, adoptees can learn the ancestral sources from which we inherit some of our traits or characteristics. It was indescribably impactful for me to get the genetic mirroring I did not have growing up. We can also understand our families better by understanding where their magic, medicine, and burdens come from. This can potentially open the door for empathy, understanding, healing, and growth. I absolutely would not have experienced the growth with my adoptive family if I had not done this work.

For me, all this boils down to one main theme for adoptees. We are not alone. We can find deep belonging and support from our well and healthy ancestors.

So Much Potential

From the ancestral point of view, adoption is a unique event that ties humans (and their lineages), cultures, races, and lands closely together. People from seemingly unrelated parts of the world can join in one family through adoption. However, this is not without its challenges. One statistic that haunts me is from a 2013 study from Pediatrics Journal. The article states that adoptees are 4 times more likely to commit suicide than non adoptees (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3784288/#:~:text=The%20odds%20of%20a%20reported,(odds%20ratio%3A%204.23).) This would indicate the likelihood of vulnerabilities in the mental health of adoptees.

While Ancestral Healing may not be the ultimate cure, I wonder what a difference it could make if adoptees knew we are not alone because we have the support of our well and healthy ancestors. In fact, with both biological and adoptive ancestors, we potentially have even more ancestral support than the general population. Adoption statistics have been and continue to be difficult to track, but there are millions of adoptees out there in the world (https://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/topics/adoptionstatistics.htm). I have grown and healed so much from this work. As a practitioner, I want to be a safe space for my community to experience Ancestral Healing with someone who has walked the adoption journey.

As I healed my ancestors, I was reminded a few times that people in my lineages also had been displaced from their biological parents, family, land, culture, and language. I was not special in this sense. This humbling message helped me shift attention away from my hard-wired adoptee narrative. I am still trying to figure out my new narrative, and let go of the past to walk joyously into an unwritten future. I hold hope and space in my heart for other adoptees to find healing, love, growth, and belonging in their ancestors as well.