Sherrie Encourages Younger Fellow-Adopted Children

Sometimes, adopted  children  get discouraged about numerous meltdowns and need encouragement from someone who's been there--author Sherrie Eldridge. Eldridge crafted this short message just for the children by sharing the reason for meltdowns, which is trauma. Children are taught that because of the repercussions of trauma, oftentimes love from others and from God doesn’t translate as love.  Eldridge shares several personal examples and encourages children to:
1. Remember that God has a wonderful purpose for their lives.
2. Be hopeful that meltdowns can diminish and healing from trauma can occur.
3.  Trust that they're not alone--they have one another. 
(Age 9 and up)

All Rights Reserved. @sherrieeldridge

Transcript

Hey friends, through adoption. It's Sherrie. I'm thinking about you foster and adoptive families, and adopted kids of all ages. I just want to encourage you today, it's a hot summer day and here in Indianapolis, and I'm sure that you are very busy with activities, sports activities, art and craft activities, all kinds of things that you're taking the children to, and children, you may love what you're doing and at the same time, you may be tired of it.

Who knows? But there may be a time when you feel a little bit discouraged. Maybe as an adoptee you've had a meltdown, and maybe as a parent you've had a meltdown. It happens to the best of us, but you know what? We all can get better, and especially adopted and foster kids. I wanna talk especially to them today.

They have a, a place in my heart that nobody else can. And, that was crafted long, I think before I was ever born. God put into me the desire to be a advocate and author for adoptive and foster families. But anyway, you may all be tired and I just want to encourage you, especially the adoptees.

We can get better. We can get to the point where we're not having meltdowns all the time. We're not sealing clothes from the neighbor's houses. We're not wild and crazy and acting inappropriately with other people. We can get better and we can enjoy peace and joy and have a wonderful life purpose ahead of us. I know that is true for each one of you.

As adoptees and foster kids, oftentimes our self-awareness is missing. Why is that? Is there something wrong with us? Absolutely not. There's nothing wrong with us. But what causes this is trauma. The pain of trauma, and so the only thing really that we're aware of is pain. And how we deal with that pain is what we're gonna talk about today.
We can deal with it in a very healthy way, but we do have difficulty with self-awareness. I look back on my life and you know, sometimes fellow adoptees, I, we need to laugh at ourselves when we get to the healing point. I guess that's a sign of healing that we could laugh at ourselves, and I've kind of gotten to that point and I encourage you to do that.
I look back at some of the things I've done and it's like, oh my goodness, no, that was really funny. But anyway, I'll share a couple of those with you today. One of the behaviors that I have been characteristic of and is characteristic of attachment disorder, is I am super friendly, just I don't know a stranger, and I will go up and talk to anybody.

For example, when my husband and I went on a cruise, I was having a cup of coffee, latte, whatever all those fancy words are for coffee. And I was talking to the waitress, female waitress, and then I said, oh, can I take a picture with you? And she said, Sure. So she took a picture with me and then she said, I don't know why you wanted to do that, and I don't know why either, friends, it was part of my attachment thing if I can attach to them, I don't know what the thinking is behind it, but that is one example of it.
And so I may be a greeter at church cuz I'm always smiling. Everybody loves my smile and it sometimes comes from attachment disorder. Parents don't get defensive. If your child is friendly, don't get defensive. Okay. All right. So I'd like to talk also about my inability to recognize love. So many people reached out to me my whole lifetime, and I didn't recognize love.

I felt like I'd been shot out of a cannon. I had no awareness, no recollection or no realization of being loved. I remember one time when my husband and my two young daughters and I, we were staying at a cottage in Michigan and my cousin and famiy were staying at another cottage on the same lake, and they asked us to come over and visit, have dinner and everything, but I said, no, I couldn't do it.

I just could not go. And I was that way with social things at large. I guess maybe it was because of anxiety. I had terrible anxiety, social anxiety, which many of us have, and so I couldn't enjoy the friendship and the love that my adoptive family wanted to show to me. If you're suffering with the anxiety, I would encourage you to get help and talk with your doctor about it. Get some help and you can get it calmed down so that you will be able to see that there's a different way to look at life instead of abject fear and anxiety.

So anyway, another time was when my Aunt Maria and Aunt Norma, they were two best friends of Aretha, my adoptive mom. Well, when my mom and dad had already passed away, I was into my author stuff and my speaking stuff, and I was speaking at a gig in Lansing, Michigan. Suddenly Aunt Norma and Aunt Mariel drove up in a car and had come to listen to me speak and share my story. Isn't that the sweetest thing ever? I mean, they were probably in their late seventies or late eighties. I don't remember. Many old ladies look when they're driving a car, they were so little, but they drove, you know, very confidently up to see me and you know, how did I receive them?
I was irritated. I thought they were just being absolutely weird, so I couldn't receive their love and it was so loving.

I think what I might do as a result of all this in my process is to start a journal and to make it a gratitude journal and look back and write down all the times where people showed love to me, where God showed love to me and I couldn't receive their love or God's love.

One time, God showed love to me many, many different times, but a special time when I was searching for my birth family, I wanted to find the doctor who delivered me as a newborn, and you know that my birth mother was yelling and screaming, take me away. And so anyway, I wanted to find the doctor who delivered me. He had passed on, but his granddaughter was available and she chatted with me and she said, you know what? My grandfather was an orphan himself and he wept over the birth of every baby. So over my newborn body that was experiencing rejection from my birth mother. A fellow adoptee orphan was weeping tears of life over me.

He was welcoming me, and I believe that was a sovereign stamp of God upon me, that I belonged to him, and I was an unplanned, unwanted, unnamed baby. But God, he met me right there. I couldn't learn about that until I was in my forties and doing birth family research and searching. I met just about all of my birth family on the maternal side, and I just found my birth family on the paternal side three years ago.

So that was something I thought I would never, ever find that I would ever find my birth father, but I did. And, uh, I have a couple of wonderful siblings as a result. So loving siblings. I mean, my brother Jeff is pastor in Portland. He just is a wonderful person. My sister Candy. And then on the maternal side, there's my birth brother John, who I found at the very end.

I didn't look for him initially because. My birth mother said, oh, well he was a drug addict. You don't wanna find him. Well, eventually I did, and I found him, and eventually it was through Facebook because his name was spelled j o n. So anyway, we had a wonderful reunion. I drove to Reno all by myself, drove to the back country where all the trailers were, and found him and his current wife or partner or whoever she was.
But anyway, we had the best time together. It was my birthday, and he managed to get hospital records for me that had been prohibited by the person in charge of records at the hospital where I was born. Don't ask me why. So we got all cleaned up and had our pictures taken.

And then, you know, every day after that and every day before that, John, I talked to John every day and he would say, SIS, I love you with all my heart. And so I was able to receive that love. Yeah, I really enjoyed that love and he died unexpectedly. We had every hope that he would recover and get well, but he didn't, and his addiction took the best of him.

But I have very warm memories of him. So anyway, those are some of the ways that I couldn't recognize or receive love. So we need to learn to work through our stuff. But what does that mean? It means that there are steps that we can take. I'm just like in a recovery program like Alcoholics Anonymous or all those different self-help groups, we can do that for one another and also parents can do that along with us because parents also need to heal. They need to heal from the hurt that we've inflicted on them. They need to heal from the grief of their adoption, not turning out the way they had dreamed of.

And, we need to heal from our past wounds. We can be free fellow adoptees, and so let's work together for that. I have a blog out. It's at Sherrie Eldridge adoption blog where I will be writing about this.
I'm going to be having a different company design it because the one that designed it prior to this has not done a good job, and it's not easy for me to put a blog up for you. But if anything, I'd like to write a book about all this. But if I don't get to do that, it will be a podcast and a blog. So be sure and follow me.

The name of this podcast is 20 Things Adoption with Sherrie Eldridge, and the name of the site is sherrieeldridgeadoption.blog. So go to that site, follow me. There's lots of articles up there for you to read. Listen to other podcasts. I think this is about the 15th or 17th one that we've done. 

So be encouraged, fellow adoptee. You can make it. You will do well. And be aware also that there's hope. There's hope, that your life can have a purpose. That you can learn how to receive love. Learn how to enjoy love, learn how to see God's purpose in your life. You can do all that because you were created for a purpose and designed for a purpose long before you were ever born.

Isn't that amazing? Long before you were conceived, long before you were born, God knew you. He loves you and he created every part of you and has a special plan for your life. So hang in there. I love you fellow adoptees and foster kids. Bye.