Guest Post - Trauma-Informed, Hope Obsessed by Simon Benn

Simon Benn is the Founder of ‘Thriving Adoptees’ and I discovered his fascinating podcasts through a friend on Facebook. He admits that although he has his own book started he’s never been fully happy with his writing and prefers to use his voice. 

I of course ignored this fact and asked him to be a guest blogger for ‘Who’s Wally?’ regardless.

Thank you Simon, Over to you….

I was adopted at 5-weeks-old and told so young that I doesn’t ever remember not knowing. The adoption went well, and I had a happy childhood apart from some bullying. I joined the family business after university and took over when my parents retired.

Success proved elusive and when it finally came, a hollow victory. Around that time I found out that my childhood teddy bear was a gift from my birth mother.

This led to an eruption of anger and feeling unloved. It kick-started a search for healing, answers, and solutions and eventually a desire to help others with all I had learned. I chose to do this through the ‘Thriving Adoptees podcast’, training, and speaking.

Trauma-Informed, Hope Obsessed

As mentioned I was adopted at 5-weeks-old, in February 1967. I was told so young that I don't ever remember not knowing. My mum said recently that they told me when I was 2 and that we were on the way to collect my sister from the adoption agency. 

I didn't come out of the fog until 2007, when I found out that my teddy bear was a gift from my birth mother. That unleashed an eruption of anger, feeling rejected and unloved. That led to a quest to heal, healing, and eventually, a desire to help others in different ways and finally coming into ‘adoptionland’ in November 2020.

Since then I’ve noticed a weird, worrying trend in conversations with over 400 fellow adoptees, adoptive parents, adoption professionals, and therapists:

The adoption sector and the adoptee community in the UK, USA, and Canada are trauma obsessed. 

The pendulum has swung a LONG way from the unicorns and rainbows view of us adoptees being blank slates who’ll be totally ok because we have no conscious memory of our birth mothers.

Now it’s trauma at every turn. Trauma as events and trauma as something retained in the body because it ‘keeps the score’ as Bessel Van Der Kolk talks. That seems scary to me. Like it’s going to stalk me for the rest of my life and jump out every so often to scare the bejesus out of me.

Most of us spend our time exploring our feelings, our thoughts, and the reasons for all of those. We dissect our stories and pontificate what issues are adoption-related, and which are not. 

We compare primal wounds – mine is a paper cut, yours is a shark bite, and yours is more like Mel Gibson being hung, drawn, and quartered at the end of Braveheart.

We wonder how we might have turned out if things had been different if our birth mothers had kept us. We fantasise about living happily ever after when we’ve successfully reunited or endured a living nightmare because our birth mothers reject us again.

So where’s the hope then?

In seeing that we are not our trauma...

Trauma seems, to me, to be a toxic cocktail of anger, fear, and insecurity. But we are the glass, not what’s in it. We are not our trauma. How we think and feel isn’t who we are. Let's end our fixation on our psychology and shift our focus to our identity.

It's hard to define identity in words so here's a metaphor:

'We are the diamond hidden in a clenched fist'

Our thoughts and feelings appear on the screen of our awareness before we pour them out into a memoir. We are that awareness, not the thoughts and feelings which we are aware of.

We are not the content that we are aware of, we are the consciousness in which that content appears.

You can find Simon Benn on Youtube

Check out his podcasts

Or, find him on his website 'Thriving Adoptees'

Image: © Simon Benn