February 17, 2025 • 26 mins
"So the piece that I most resonate with the Dialectical Behavior Therapy is it's one of the therapies that really understands this core feeling of feeling overwhelmed and like you don't want to be alive." - Sharon Stein McNamara
EPISODE SUMMARY:
In this episode of Unraveling Adoption, I had the pleasure of speaking with Sharon Stein McNamara, a licensed psychologist and adoption-competent therapist. Sharon, an adoptee herself, shared her personal journey and the profound impact of adoption on her life, particularly during her adolescent years when she faced suicidal thoughts after a breakup.
We delved into the complexities of adoption and how they can lead to feelings of self-loathing and overwhelming distress, especially among adoptees. Sharon introduced us to Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), a therapeutic approach that has been particularly effective for adopted adolescents and young adults. She explained how DBT incorporates mindfulness and distress tolerance skills, which are crucial for individuals who may feel their emotions are too intense to manage.
Throughout our conversation, Sharon emphasized the importance of recognizing and validating these feelings rather than dismissing them. She shared her own experiences with DBT and how it helped her and her clients navigate the challenges of attachment and self-worth. We discussed the significance of shifting core beliefs about oneself, especially for adoptees who may struggle with feelings of being unwanted or unworthy.
Sharon's insights provided hope and practical tools for families and individuals impacted by adoption. She encouraged listeners to never give up hope on adoptees, as the right support and understanding can lead to healing and growth.
I hope this episode resonates with anyone who has been touched by adoption or is seeking effective therapeutic tools to support themselves or their loved ones. Thank you for joining us, and please share this episode with anyone who might benefit from Sharon's expertise.
===============
📘Get our new book Adoption and Suicidality: amazon.com/Adoption-Suicidality-Healthcare-Professionals-Unraveling/dp/B0DCBCTSLL
📆 Community Calendar: UnravelingAdoption.com/Calendar
✨Healing the Adoption Constellation database: UnravelingAdoption.com/Healing
💌Sign up for our Unraveling Adoption email list: http://eepurl.com/hVIAVX
===============
RESOURCES:
Sharon’s information:
-
Look up Sharon’s website: Sharonsteinmcnamara.com
Other resources mentioned in this episode:
-
Here’s the book Sharon referenced: How to Break Your Addiction to a Person: When--and Why--Love Doesn't Work : https://www.amazon.com/Break-Your-Addiction-Person-When/dp/0553382497
===============
Unraveling Adoption is produced and hosted by Beth Syverson
Music written and performed by Joseph Nakao
Email questions or comments to Beth@Unraveli
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
Welcome to this episode of Unraveling Adoption, an intentional space
to delve into adoption's complexities together. I'm Beth
Syverson. I'm an adoptive mom of a vibrant and insightful
young adult son, Joey, who is on
his own healing path. I'm walking beside him while
working on my own personal growth and healing. Joey and
(00:23):
I are committed to helping anyone impacted by adoption, And we
want to help the general public understand adoptions complexities better
too. I'm also a certified coach, helping seekers who want
to move their lives forward. Today's guest is
Sharon Stein McNamara. She's an adoptee from
Minnesota who is one of the practitioners in our
Healing the Adoption Constellation database. There's a
(00:46):
link to the database in the notes below. She
is a licensed psychologist, an adoption-competent therapist,
a certified mediator for family conflict, and she has a
doctoral degree in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard Graduate
School of Education. And today, Sharon is going
to help us learn about DBT, Dialectical Behavior
(01:08):
Therapy, and how it can be a particularly helpful tool
specifically for adopted adolescents
and young adults, but for more people than that too, but especially for that specific
contingent of people who really can sometimes use some particular help. So
(01:30):
Yeah, we've intersected many different ways at different events and
things, and I'm happy to bring you on with your definite expertise.
And I love to provide tools to families and to
adoptees. And I wonder if before we
get into DBT, I always want adoptees to be able to share their
(01:51):
Yes. I don't know if we need to do trigger warnings at all
about, you know, I was thinking, I know that you have
co-written a book on adoption and suicidality and
I have read that book and I'm grateful that
people do talk about. One of the biggest issues in
my life was overcoming an adolescent period
(02:12):
in which I was suicidal after a breakup. So
my story is I was adopted at about six weeks
old, and I was back in the baby scoop era, you
know, in the late 50s, early 60s. So
my birth mother was an unmarried 19-year-old
woman in Minnesota who I've
(02:35):
now been in reunion, and I can share her story. has
passed and so is my birth father and my adoptive parents. So
I can freely speak about all the
secrecy about I was the first grandchild in
that family and my grandfather,
(02:56):
my birth mother's father, was ashamed that his
daughter got pregnant out of wedlock. And so back
then, this was before Roe v. Wade, and there wasn't any
options for women except for basically to have
a child and relinquish it for adoption. So she was
sent to an unwed mother's place and then went
(03:18):
to the Booth Salvation Army Hospital in St. Paul,
Minnesota. And then I was relinquished to
a waiting family through Children's Home Society of Minnesota. But
the piece that I most resonate with
the dialectical behavior therapy is it's one of the therapies that
really understands this core feeling of
(03:43):
feeling overwhelmed and like you don't want to be alive. The
pain is so big that it becomes
overwhelming and so DBT is specifically tailored
Wow. Yeah, that's that's so great because that feeling
is pretty dangerous, right? Yes. If people aren't around that
(04:05):
can help with that feeling, it can lead to suicide or
self-harm or other sort of self-abusive behaviors. So.
Yeah. ABT, I feel like it's pretty new, or maybe
Well, it's been around since the late 90s, early 2000s.
I believe Marsha Linehan's first book came out then, and
(04:27):
she did a pretty big research project. But it
has become much more widely used because
there's evidence-based practices that she worked
hard to get research to say, you
know, it used to be that therapists would be like, well, I don't really get
why you feel that way. So why don't you just stop? Why don't you stop doing
(04:47):
that behavior? And dialectical behavior therapy,
she recognized that you can't just do cognitive behavioral therapy
to talk them out of it. It doesn't make sense. So the piece
that I think is the most beneficial of her therapy is
that there's a mindfulness component. and
a distress tolerance component so
(05:09):
that instead of being shamed like, knock it off, why are
you so upset? They were like, oh, you're upset.
That means your brain isn't working right now. You need to
use distress tolerance skills. So we'll give you
some skills." And as a young therapist
in the 90s when I was first learning this, I was like, oh
(05:30):
my gosh, this is the best therapy ever. This actually works for
me personally too. Because as
an adoptee, I would easily get into either panic
experiences or shame experiences and
then realize that the distress tolerance
skills of like actually naming, oh,
(05:52):
you're in a shame spiral right now. That's okay. You
can work with that. You can put cold water on your
face. You can take a walk. You can do some exercise.
You can listen to music. So rather than
just cognitive behavioral, it used these
(06:13):
Oh, that's so great. Yeah. As many know that have listened to
this program, our son has been struggling for many years with
kind of chronic suicidality. And I'll tell you, cognitive behavioral
therapy doesn't touch his pain. It doesn't get anywhere close to
it. It does nothing. It probably just adds shame. I
don't, I'm not saying that it's not useful for some things, but when he's
(06:33):
in one of those spirals, Trying to make sense out of it
with his frontal lobe is going to go nowhere. Yes. Completely useless.
Yes. Yeah. So those things that you mentioned are mostly physical
Yeah. So the distress tolerance component of dialectical
behavior therapy says you are past the
(06:54):
point of being able to think logically. We can't do
cognitive behavioral therapy now. We need to get
you safe to a space where you can do something
to not make things worse. So, once
the client realizes that, because a
lot of clients will be like, well, I don't know what happened. My brain shut
(07:17):
off. And it's like, yes, your brain did shut off. And
rather than fading it, let's go. You
can excuse yourself from your board meeting or wherever you are.
You can get out of your work environment, go sit in a cooler or
go to the bathroom and put cold water on your face. Rather than struggling
to make your brain work when it doesn't, go
(07:39):
do something to your body to get your brain
Aha. So you're kind of shocking your system a little bit and saying,
OK, brain, I know you're offline. I'm not going to talk to you right now. I'm just
going to put you on hold and keep my body safe. Yes.
And do something that keeps my body safe kind of reminds me that I'm in
(08:00):
my body. So those kinds of things that are grounding, and
body-based somatic. It seems to be the key
word nowadays is finding out what's happening in our body.
We've been so mind-focused, or maybe just me, but the
Right. No, there's this whole other level
(08:22):
of intelligence that is your body-based intelligence.
And My personal story is that I
was raised back when they told parents that you
should just let your baby cry themselves to sleep, you
know, the fervorizing or that. And what I
believe I did then was I sort of like dissociated
(08:45):
or I learned that that was a coping mechanism. What
I found out as an adult is that that is
a really bad coping mechanism. You need to be able to
stay present with yourself, you know, you
can't just space out. And so this distress
tolerance skill helped me in having
(09:10):
Okay. So in DBT, that seems like maybe the first step,
right? To kind of get yourself into your body, kind of everyone get
on the same page that that person's brain is offline. We're
trying to keep them safe. We're present. We're nonjudgmental.
And then that probably is not the whole hour of therapy though. What
(09:30):
So then once you are joining with
the client, getting them back, you can then be,
there's this re-regulation experience of
breathing with your client. And so many
times, once the person feels like, oh,
this person isn't going to shame me for having a shame
(09:53):
attack or having an anxiety attack, they're going to actually help
me, then they trust you and then you
can reform a positive attachment experience.
So then, then you can talk about like,
wow, you know, you're at this job where you
keep having these panic attacks and you keep going offline. Maybe
(10:16):
this isn't the best environment for Maybe we should problem-solve on
finding you a more nurturing environment for you to work
at so that you don't keep having these
Well, that's so great. And do you have a lot of adoptees in
your client base? Is that your typical client are adoptees at
Yes. I love working with adoptees
(10:39):
from all ages, teens and adults. And I
do occasionally work with kids, but what I have found that
is where I most enjoy is with teens and
How do you think DBT is particularly useful
for adoptees? What is their particular intersection that makes that particularly
(11:02):
Well, the piece that I feel Marsha Linehan
was able to name and was able to talk
about was this feeling of this absolute self-loathing.
And almost every adoptee I have
worked with says, Yeah, when
I really get down to it, there's a part of me that
(11:25):
is like, they gave you away because you must have
been disgusting or you must have been not worthy or you must. So
there's this core attacking the self. And
so when you can name that and talk
about it, it makes it just so much easier
to work. And I thought Marsha Linehan
(11:47):
was the first one to really, I mean, not just adoptees have
that, many survivors of trauma have it too. So,
for example, if somebody had sexual or physical abuse as a child,
they will often have that self-loathing because they have
attached to the perpetrator thinking that they must be
Linnehan was not an adoptee or a specialist in adoption, but
(12:09):
she just understood that worthlessness piece. Yes. Yes.
That so aligns with so many adoptees. And so you
found that this really fits that dissonance beautifully.
And it sounds like it really does. I don't know how to ask this. So
maybe it's something from your own personal life, but give us a specific example
of an adoptee who is struggling with something. came in and
(12:31):
you worked with DBT for, I don't know, days or weeks, and
Sure. I mean, this happened to me personally as
well, so I really do resonate a lot with it. But with
many teen adoptees, there's this thing
that happens when you first fall in love. So you
fall in love and you for an adoptee to fall
(12:54):
in love, they didn't have that normal
separation from the mother that is supposed to have happened like
over a period of years where you form a sense of self and
that you have this severing and then you're supposed
to reattach to this adoptive family, and
you do. Most adoptees don't have severe
(13:17):
reactive attachment. They are able to attach, but
it's what I found. So I'll just tell my personal
experience, then I'll tell how I helped with a teen that had this
same issue. Okay. So when I was 17, I
met the love of my life. He was 19, two
years older. He chatted me up. I was a waitress. He,
(13:39):
you know, was very, just, I fell in
love completely. And there was just this sense
of like, I would do anything for him. I would, you know, so, so
many adoptees also don't have good physical boundaries.
And then the feeling of like, you're in love, it becomes, you'll
have sex, you know, you won't think about like boundaries. It's
(14:01):
like this person is your safe person and then you'll do whatever they want.
And sometimes you'll be put into situations that
might be good for you because there's this agreement
to get this love. So I
did that and then he got nervous about like,
oh my gosh, I'm not ready to get married and he
(14:23):
broke it off with me. And I had
no preparation for the experience of having this
kind of first breakup. So I went into this.
I now know as a psychologist that this is a natural thing
that people do is they obsessively keep thinking about the person that
they wish that they were with. And I couldn't help
(14:44):
myself. I would call him and ask, why did you break up with me? Can't
we get back together? And he was, of course, you know, he was a
19 year old boy. He was like, you got to give me a break. girl.
I'm not going to keep reassuring you all the time. I mean,
we're done. This is over." And so then it turned
into a, if he doesn't love me, I don't love myself.
(15:06):
I'm not lovable. And then that turned into like
an obsessive thought about suicide. So
I have now learned, there's actually another
book that I really like called How to Overcome
Your Addiction to a Person. I'm not sure if I'm saying it
exactly right. I can look up the exact title, but How
(15:27):
to Cure Your Addiction to a Person. Anyway, people with attachment
issues have this. It's like a breakup becomes
this obsessive I have to get this person back
or I'm not going to be okay. I mean, I couldn't sleep. I
had trouble. So for me, I had
a couple of months of this. My parents kind of knew that something
(15:50):
was wrong. And what happened is
I had sort of this healing dream where
I don't know if it was a person from my ancestral, whatever,
but I had this experience of a feeling of
like some woman came to me in a dream and just said, you're
going to be okay. You're going to end up helping a lot of people. You
(16:13):
need to just move on and let go. And somehow
that helped me. But as a therapist, what
I've done with people is I've just reminded them, you have a
bigger purpose here. This feeling that your life
is over, it's because of the pain from that. Basically,
it's a reenactment of that original mother loss of
(16:36):
that first love. Because all of
us, our first love is our, we're attached from the
moment we're born because that nine months in the womb. is
a love story between you and this person that's holding you.
Even if it's not consciously aware of it, your
(16:56):
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I know my son has
talked about breaking up as literally like
death. He'd rather stay with somebody, even if it's
not the right person, because the idea of being alone is
death to him. And he's not kidding. It's
no hyperbole. It's just, And I bet that a
(17:18):
lot of adoptees feel that because of that primal wound, that initial
severing of that bond with their birth mother. And a lot of people
in the community and a lot of adoptive parents don't quite get that.
So I'm trying to help people become more aware of that, but it's
helpful to hear your story. And it's totally understandable
when you think about that bond and then it was severed at
(17:40):
such a young age for many adoptees or even in childhood for someone
that was fostered or adopted later. Anytime from
like zero to, I don't know, I guess
anytime even as an adult, to be severed like that is
Yeah. And many adoptive parents, they're like, why are you
(18:01):
hanging out? This person isn't good for you. They're not really that nice
to you in the relationship. And the adoptee is
like, I have to stay because of this attachment thing.
They have this thing. But DBT can
help with that too, where you learn. So
having that distress tolerance, like, okay, I'm having that
(18:22):
compulsion again to call my ex or to try to get
in touch with them, but I know they're not good for me. I need to
hold on to that feeling and know that I can do
things to help myself to get through and it
will pass. So DBT also is,
you can use it for addictions as well. So it's
(18:44):
like when you have this craving, the craving for a
substance or to drink or to use, you hold
on and say, this will pass if you
do these other things to get through this
craving period. And then it retrains your
brain to be able to know you think you're going
(19:05):
to die, but you're not, and you can get
through it. But it takes having like a higher,
in DBT they call it the wise mind. Your wise mind has
to watch and observe. See, you got through
this last time when you wanted to use, you
got through this last time when you wanted to, you know, hurt yourself. in
(19:27):
your life and you didn't die and you
can do it. And so that building of
that awareness over time is what helps
I love how DBT just goes forward through it. It
doesn't try to talk around it or it doesn't like try
(19:48):
to deflect it. It goes right into it, right
Yeah, and it doesn't try to minimize it. It's like, no, you do
feel like you're going to die. That's right. Your
feelings are valid. And you
need to do these other distress tolerance things to
get through it. Both and versus either
(20:10):
That's so great. Now, are all therapists DBT
Well, there are quite a bit more opportunities to
learn it now. And they call it the third wave cognitive
behavioral therapy. So like, for example, acceptance and
commitment therapy also has components of DBT in
(20:31):
it. And I would even go so far as to
say, like, I know you've talked with other people about internal
family systems. Well, internal family systems is what
you do once you have enough skills so
that you're not suicidal anymore. When you're like,
Oh yeah, that part of me that gets really upset when
(20:52):
I get rejected. Okay, so that's your exiled
part of self or whatever. And then, and so you can use
the DBT skills with your parts. So
it's like a nice internal family systems is a nice addition
after you've learned. You have to learn how
to not be so out of control that you can't not
(21:18):
Yeah, so there's that baseline that DBT tries to get you
Oh, that's great. I know in the Healing the Adoption Constellation database, we
have a little category for people to check if they are DBT
practitioners, but it might be good if people are looking for a
therapist in their area to ask if they are
(21:43):
Yeah, there's several certifications and
I think as long as the person knows how to
do, it's called a chain analysis. So the biggest
thing you want to do is be able to, can they see when
the, whatever your teen or the person who's in
treatment goes past the point of being able
(22:05):
to calm themselves and then they need to have like
intervention or distress tolerance skills or something like
that to to intervene. So that's called
a chain analysis. So once the therapist can figure that
out, then they can teach the person how to prevent
(22:27):
Okay. Yeah. So let's take a hypothetical client
that had a breakup like you had and was in so much distress. So
you teach them how to sit with it, how
to acknowledge it. You get that wise self coming in,
being mindful, bring some body awareness. And
then over the weeks or months, what is
(22:49):
the outcome usually or what is a possible outcome for that?
Well, the core issue, and this is what's so hard
for adoptees, I think it's possibly one
of the worst things that you can be born into is this
feeling of self-rejection. So staying loyal
to your birth mother means you're saying, I must
(23:12):
not be valuable. And so we
have to shift that to even
if my birth mother didn't want me, other
people want me. And what I found is
I had to change my, I had a core belief that
I was just an accident. I was just a random accident. I
(23:33):
was just a product of two people having sex or whatever. And
a wise therapist helped me reshape that
core belief to, wait a minute, people don't come
into this world by accident. There must have
been something bigger like the life force or,
and that's what Gabor Mate talks about, life wanted you.
(23:56):
For me, I do have a religious belief system of
believing in God, so I changed that to, on
some level, my higher power or God. did
Ah, so you really changed that core belief. You changed the script
in your head that was running probably subconsciously for
(24:17):
a long time. Yeah. And you, you went and did surgery on that and
said, no, I'm going to believe something different. And
that, that helped you to literally stay alive. Even if
you got broken up with, or even if something felt, maybe you didn't get
a job you wanted or something, I bet you'd run into that And then you
remind yourself, oh no, I have this core belief that I have decided
(24:37):
to hang on to. That's lovely. That's lovely. And I
can see how that could really, really help adoptees. Well,
I hope that people are listening that maybe weren't so
familiar with DBT or didn't realize how therapy
can really get to those core wounds that a lot
of adoptees have. I hope maybe they'll reach out to you. Yeah. I
(25:01):
For me to be able to take health insurance as a licensed
psychologist, they have to be in Minnesota. But if they wanted
to reach out to me for training or
a form of coaching, I do do some parent coaching
Gotcha. Gotcha, gotcha. Okay, so people can reach out to you.
(25:23):
So I have a web address. It's basically SharonSteinMcNamara.com,
Okay, I'll put that in the show notes so people can get a hold of you. And
oh man, I really appreciate this. We kind of did a
fine tuning on this one tool, but it gives people
(25:44):
lots of hope and lots of lots of ideas for how to
help themselves or maybe their child or
a loved one or somebody they knew who's struggling. Thank
you so much, Sharon. Do you have any other last words, anything that I should
I guess the piece is to just please don't
ever give up hope on an adoptee. You never
(26:06):
know when there's going to be that whatever magic
formula of people who are surrounding them that can
Yes, yes, yes. And it does take a village sometimes
and just continuing to believe in their inner strength
and their inner coping and inner tools and external
(26:27):
tools too that we all come along with next to them. and
provide them like what you do for people, so. Oh, that's beautiful. Well,
thank you Sharon for being on. I really appreciate it. Thank you
everyone for listening. Please make sure and find
Sharon or share this episode with someone you know who might need
to hear it. And Sharon and I really hope that
Welcome to this episode of Unraveling Adoption, an intentional space
to delve into adoption's complexities together. I'm Beth
Syverson. I'm an adoptive mom of a vibrant and insightful
young adult son, Joey, who is on
his own healing path. I'm walking beside him while
working on my own personal growth and healing. Joey and
(00:23):
I are committed to helping anyone impacted by adoption, And we
want to help the general public understand adoptions complexities better
too. I'm also a certified coach, helping seekers who want
to move their lives forward. Today's guest is
Sharon Stein McNamara. She's an adoptee from
Minnesota who is one of the practitioners in our
Healing the Adoption Constellation database. There's a
(00:46):
link to the database in the notes below. She
is a licensed psychologist, an adoption-competent therapist,
a certified mediator for family conflict, and she has a
doctoral degree in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard Graduate
School of Education. And today, Sharon is going
to help us learn about DBT, Dialectical Behavior
(01:08):
Therapy, and how it can be a particularly helpful tool
specifically for adopted adolescents
and young adults, but for more people than that too, but especially for that specific
contingent of people who really can sometimes use some particular help. So
(01:30):
Yeah, we've intersected many different ways at different events and
things, and I'm happy to bring you on with your definite expertise.
And I love to provide tools to families and to
adoptees. And I wonder if before we
get into DBT, I always want adoptees to be able to share their
(01:51):
Yes. I don't know if we need to do trigger warnings at all
about, you know, I was thinking, I know that you have
co-written a book on adoption and suicidality and
I have read that book and I'm grateful that
people do talk about. One of the biggest issues in
my life was overcoming an adolescent period
(02:12):
in which I was suicidal after a breakup. So
my story is I was adopted at about six weeks
old, and I was back in the baby scoop era, you
know, in the late 50s, early 60s. So
my birth mother was an unmarried 19-year-old
woman in Minnesota who I've
(02:35):
now been in reunion, and I can share her story. has
passed and so is my birth father and my adoptive parents. So
I can freely speak about all the
secrecy about I was the first grandchild in
that family and my grandfather,
(02:56):
my birth mother's father, was ashamed that his
daughter got pregnant out of wedlock. And so back
then, this was before Roe v. Wade, and there wasn't any
options for women except for basically to have
a child and relinquish it for adoption. So she was
sent to an unwed mother's place and then went
(03:18):
to the Booth Salvation Army Hospital in St. Paul,
Minnesota. And then I was relinquished to
a waiting family through Children's Home Society of Minnesota. But
the piece that I most resonate with
the dialectical behavior therapy is it's one of the therapies that
really understands this core feeling of
(03:43):
feeling overwhelmed and like you don't want to be alive. The
pain is so big that it becomes
overwhelming and so DBT is specifically tailored
Wow. Yeah, that's that's so great because that feeling
is pretty dangerous, right? Yes. If people aren't around that
(04:05):
can help with that feeling, it can lead to suicide or
self-harm or other sort of self-abusive behaviors. So.
Yeah. ABT, I feel like it's pretty new, or maybe
Well, it's been around since the late 90s, early 2000s.
I believe Marsha Linehan's first book came out then, and
(04:27):
she did a pretty big research project. But it
has become much more widely used because
there's evidence-based practices that she worked
hard to get research to say, you
know, it used to be that therapists would be like, well, I don't really get
why you feel that way. So why don't you just stop? Why don't you stop doing
(04:47):
that behavior? And dialectical behavior therapy,
she recognized that you can't just do cognitive behavioral therapy
to talk them out of it. It doesn't make sense. So the piece
that I think is the most beneficial of her therapy is
that there's a mindfulness component. and
a distress tolerance component so
(05:09):
that instead of being shamed like, knock it off, why are
you so upset? They were like, oh, you're upset.
That means your brain isn't working right now. You need to
use distress tolerance skills. So we'll give you
some skills." And as a young therapist
in the 90s when I was first learning this, I was like, oh
(05:30):
my gosh, this is the best therapy ever. This actually works for
me personally too. Because as
an adoptee, I would easily get into either panic
experiences or shame experiences and
then realize that the distress tolerance
skills of like actually naming, oh,
(05:52):
you're in a shame spiral right now. That's okay. You
can work with that. You can put cold water on your
face. You can take a walk. You can do some exercise.
You can listen to music. So rather than
just cognitive behavioral, it used these
(06:13):
Oh, that's so great. Yeah. As many know that have listened to
this program, our son has been struggling for many years with
kind of chronic suicidality. And I'll tell you, cognitive behavioral
therapy doesn't touch his pain. It doesn't get anywhere close to
it. It does nothing. It probably just adds shame. I
don't, I'm not saying that it's not useful for some things, but when he's
(06:33):
in one of those spirals, Trying to make sense out of it
with his frontal lobe is going to go nowhere. Yes. Completely useless.
Yes. Yeah. So those things that you mentioned are mostly physical
Yeah. So the distress tolerance component of dialectical
behavior therapy says you are past the
(06:54):
point of being able to think logically. We can't do
cognitive behavioral therapy now. We need to get
you safe to a space where you can do something
to not make things worse. So, once
the client realizes that, because a
lot of clients will be like, well, I don't know what happened. My brain shut
(07:17):
off. And it's like, yes, your brain did shut off. And
rather than fading it, let's go. You
can excuse yourself from your board meeting or wherever you are.
You can get out of your work environment, go sit in a cooler or
go to the bathroom and put cold water on your face. Rather than struggling
to make your brain work when it doesn't, go
(07:39):
do something to your body to get your brain
Aha. So you're kind of shocking your system a little bit and saying,
OK, brain, I know you're offline. I'm not going to talk to you right now. I'm just
going to put you on hold and keep my body safe. Yes.
And do something that keeps my body safe kind of reminds me that I'm in
(08:00):
my body. So those kinds of things that are grounding, and
body-based somatic. It seems to be the key
word nowadays is finding out what's happening in our body.
We've been so mind-focused, or maybe just me, but the
Right. No, there's this whole other level
(08:22):
of intelligence that is your body-based intelligence.
And My personal story is that I
was raised back when they told parents that you
should just let your baby cry themselves to sleep, you
know, the fervorizing or that. And what I
believe I did then was I sort of like dissociated
(08:45):
or I learned that that was a coping mechanism. What
I found out as an adult is that that is
a really bad coping mechanism. You need to be able to
stay present with yourself, you know, you
can't just space out. And so this distress
tolerance skill helped me in having
(09:10):
Okay. So in DBT, that seems like maybe the first step,
right? To kind of get yourself into your body, kind of everyone get
on the same page that that person's brain is offline. We're
trying to keep them safe. We're present. We're nonjudgmental.
And then that probably is not the whole hour of therapy though. What
(09:30):
So then once you are joining with
the client, getting them back, you can then be,
there's this re-regulation experience of
breathing with your client. And so many
times, once the person feels like, oh,
this person isn't going to shame me for having a shame
(09:53):
attack or having an anxiety attack, they're going to actually help
me, then they trust you and then you
can reform a positive attachment experience.
So then, then you can talk about like,
wow, you know, you're at this job where you
keep having these panic attacks and you keep going offline. Maybe
(10:16):
this isn't the best environment for Maybe we should problem-solve on
finding you a more nurturing environment for you to work
at so that you don't keep having these
Well, that's so great. And do you have a lot of adoptees in
your client base? Is that your typical client are adoptees at
Yes. I love working with adoptees
(10:39):
from all ages, teens and adults. And I
do occasionally work with kids, but what I have found that
is where I most enjoy is with teens and
How do you think DBT is particularly useful
for adoptees? What is their particular intersection that makes that particularly
(11:02):
Well, the piece that I feel Marsha Linehan
was able to name and was able to talk
about was this feeling of this absolute self-loathing.
And almost every adoptee I have
worked with says, Yeah, when
I really get down to it, there's a part of me that
(11:25):
is like, they gave you away because you must have
been disgusting or you must have been not worthy or you must. So
there's this core attacking the self. And
so when you can name that and talk
about it, it makes it just so much easier
to work. And I thought Marsha Linehan
(11:47):
was the first one to really, I mean, not just adoptees have
that, many survivors of trauma have it too. So,
for example, if somebody had sexual or physical abuse as a child,
they will often have that self-loathing because they have
attached to the perpetrator thinking that they must be
Linnehan was not an adoptee or a specialist in adoption, but
(12:09):
she just understood that worthlessness piece. Yes. Yes.
That so aligns with so many adoptees. And so you
found that this really fits that dissonance beautifully.
And it sounds like it really does. I don't know how to ask this. So
maybe it's something from your own personal life, but give us a specific example
of an adoptee who is struggling with something. came in and
(12:31):
you worked with DBT for, I don't know, days or weeks, and
Sure. I mean, this happened to me personally as
well, so I really do resonate a lot with it. But with
many teen adoptees, there's this thing
that happens when you first fall in love. So you
fall in love and you for an adoptee to fall
(12:54):
in love, they didn't have that normal
separation from the mother that is supposed to have happened like
over a period of years where you form a sense of self and
that you have this severing and then you're supposed
to reattach to this adoptive family, and
you do. Most adoptees don't have severe
(13:17):
reactive attachment. They are able to attach, but
it's what I found. So I'll just tell my personal
experience, then I'll tell how I helped with a teen that had this
same issue. Okay. So when I was 17, I
met the love of my life. He was 19, two
years older. He chatted me up. I was a waitress. He,
(13:39):
you know, was very, just, I fell in
love completely. And there was just this sense
of like, I would do anything for him. I would, you know, so, so
many adoptees also don't have good physical boundaries.
And then the feeling of like, you're in love, it becomes, you'll
have sex, you know, you won't think about like boundaries. It's
(14:01):
like this person is your safe person and then you'll do whatever they want.
And sometimes you'll be put into situations that
might be good for you because there's this agreement
to get this love. So I
did that and then he got nervous about like,
oh my gosh, I'm not ready to get married and he
(14:23):
broke it off with me. And I had
no preparation for the experience of having this
kind of first breakup. So I went into this.
I now know as a psychologist that this is a natural thing
that people do is they obsessively keep thinking about the person that
they wish that they were with. And I couldn't help
(14:44):
myself. I would call him and ask, why did you break up with me? Can't
we get back together? And he was, of course, you know, he was a
19 year old boy. He was like, you got to give me a break. girl.
I'm not going to keep reassuring you all the time. I mean,
we're done. This is over." And so then it turned
into a, if he doesn't love me, I don't love myself.
(15:06):
I'm not lovable. And then that turned into like
an obsessive thought about suicide. So
I have now learned, there's actually another
book that I really like called How to Overcome
Your Addiction to a Person. I'm not sure if I'm saying it
exactly right. I can look up the exact title, but How
(15:27):
to Cure Your Addiction to a Person. Anyway, people with attachment
issues have this. It's like a breakup becomes
this obsessive I have to get this person back
or I'm not going to be okay. I mean, I couldn't sleep. I
had trouble. So for me, I had
a couple of months of this. My parents kind of knew that something
(15:50):
was wrong. And what happened is
I had sort of this healing dream where
I don't know if it was a person from my ancestral, whatever,
but I had this experience of a feeling of
like some woman came to me in a dream and just said, you're
going to be okay. You're going to end up helping a lot of people. You
(16:13):
need to just move on and let go. And somehow
that helped me. But as a therapist, what
I've done with people is I've just reminded them, you have a
bigger purpose here. This feeling that your life
is over, it's because of the pain from that. Basically,
it's a reenactment of that original mother loss of
(16:36):
that first love. Because all of
us, our first love is our, we're attached from the
moment we're born because that nine months in the womb. is
a love story between you and this person that's holding you.
Even if it's not consciously aware of it, your
(16:56):
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I know my son has
talked about breaking up as literally like
death. He'd rather stay with somebody, even if it's
not the right person, because the idea of being alone is
death to him. And he's not kidding. It's
no hyperbole. It's just, And I bet that a
(17:18):
lot of adoptees feel that because of that primal wound, that initial
severing of that bond with their birth mother. And a lot of people
in the community and a lot of adoptive parents don't quite get that.
So I'm trying to help people become more aware of that, but it's
helpful to hear your story. And it's totally understandable
when you think about that bond and then it was severed at
(17:40):
such a young age for many adoptees or even in childhood for someone
that was fostered or adopted later. Anytime from
like zero to, I don't know, I guess
anytime even as an adult, to be severed like that is
Yeah. And many adoptive parents, they're like, why are you
(18:01):
hanging out? This person isn't good for you. They're not really that nice
to you in the relationship. And the adoptee is
like, I have to stay because of this attachment thing.
They have this thing. But DBT can
help with that too, where you learn. So
having that distress tolerance, like, okay, I'm having that
(18:22):
compulsion again to call my ex or to try to get
in touch with them, but I know they're not good for me. I need to
hold on to that feeling and know that I can do
things to help myself to get through and it
will pass. So DBT also is,
you can use it for addictions as well. So it's
(18:44):
like when you have this craving, the craving for a
substance or to drink or to use, you hold
on and say, this will pass if you
do these other things to get through this
craving period. And then it retrains your
brain to be able to know you think you're going
(19:05):
to die, but you're not, and you can get
through it. But it takes having like a higher,
in DBT they call it the wise mind. Your wise mind has
to watch and observe. See, you got through
this last time when you wanted to use, you
got through this last time when you wanted to, you know, hurt yourself. in
(19:27):
your life and you didn't die and you
can do it. And so that building of
that awareness over time is what helps
I love how DBT just goes forward through it. It
doesn't try to talk around it or it doesn't like try
(19:48):
to deflect it. It goes right into it, right
Yeah, and it doesn't try to minimize it. It's like, no, you do
feel like you're going to die. That's right. Your
feelings are valid. And you
need to do these other distress tolerance things to
get through it. Both and versus either
(20:10):
That's so great. Now, are all therapists DBT
Well, there are quite a bit more opportunities to
learn it now. And they call it the third wave cognitive
behavioral therapy. So like, for example, acceptance and
commitment therapy also has components of DBT in
(20:31):
it. And I would even go so far as to
say, like, I know you've talked with other people about internal
family systems. Well, internal family systems is what
you do once you have enough skills so
that you're not suicidal anymore. When you're like,
Oh yeah, that part of me that gets really upset when
(20:52):
I get rejected. Okay, so that's your exiled
part of self or whatever. And then, and so you can use
the DBT skills with your parts. So
it's like a nice internal family systems is a nice addition
after you've learned. You have to learn how
to not be so out of control that you can't not
(21:18):
Yeah, so there's that baseline that DBT tries to get you
Oh, that's great. I know in the Healing the Adoption Constellation database, we
have a little category for people to check if they are DBT
practitioners, but it might be good if people are looking for a
therapist in their area to ask if they are
(21:43):
Yeah, there's several certifications and
I think as long as the person knows how to
do, it's called a chain analysis. So the biggest
thing you want to do is be able to, can they see when
the, whatever your teen or the person who's in
treatment goes past the point of being able
(22:05):
to calm themselves and then they need to have like
intervention or distress tolerance skills or something like
that to to intervene. So that's called
a chain analysis. So once the therapist can figure that
out, then they can teach the person how to prevent
(22:27):
Okay. Yeah. So let's take a hypothetical client
that had a breakup like you had and was in so much distress. So
you teach them how to sit with it, how
to acknowledge it. You get that wise self coming in,
being mindful, bring some body awareness. And
then over the weeks or months, what is
(22:49):
the outcome usually or what is a possible outcome for that?
Well, the core issue, and this is what's so hard
for adoptees, I think it's possibly one
of the worst things that you can be born into is this
feeling of self-rejection. So staying loyal
to your birth mother means you're saying, I must
(23:12):
not be valuable. And so we
have to shift that to even
if my birth mother didn't want me, other
people want me. And what I found is
I had to change my, I had a core belief that
I was just an accident. I was just a random accident. I
(23:33):
was just a product of two people having sex or whatever. And
a wise therapist helped me reshape that
core belief to, wait a minute, people don't come
into this world by accident. There must have
been something bigger like the life force or,
and that's what Gabor Mate talks about, life wanted you.
(23:56):
For me, I do have a religious belief system of
believing in God, so I changed that to, on
some level, my higher power or God. did
Ah, so you really changed that core belief. You changed the script
in your head that was running probably subconsciously for
(24:17):
a long time. Yeah. And you, you went and did surgery on that and
said, no, I'm going to believe something different. And
that, that helped you to literally stay alive. Even if
you got broken up with, or even if something felt, maybe you didn't get
a job you wanted or something, I bet you'd run into that And then you
remind yourself, oh no, I have this core belief that I have decided
(24:37):
to hang on to. That's lovely. That's lovely. And I
can see how that could really, really help adoptees. Well,
I hope that people are listening that maybe weren't so
familiar with DBT or didn't realize how therapy
can really get to those core wounds that a lot
of adoptees have. I hope maybe they'll reach out to you. Yeah. I
(25:01):
For me to be able to take health insurance as a licensed
psychologist, they have to be in Minnesota. But if they wanted
to reach out to me for training or
a form of coaching, I do do some parent coaching
Gotcha. Gotcha, gotcha. Okay, so people can reach out to you.
(25:23):
So I have a web address. It's basically SharonSteinMcNamara.com,
Okay, I'll put that in the show notes so people can get a hold of you. And
oh man, I really appreciate this. We kind of did a
fine tuning on this one tool, but it gives people
(25:44):
lots of hope and lots of lots of ideas for how to
help themselves or maybe their child or
a loved one or somebody they knew who's struggling. Thank
you so much, Sharon. Do you have any other last words, anything that I should
I guess the piece is to just please don't
ever give up hope on an adoptee. You never
(26:06):
know when there's going to be that whatever magic
formula of people who are surrounding them that can
Yes, yes, yes. And it does take a village sometimes
and just continuing to believe in their inner strength
and their inner coping and inner tools and external
(26:27):
tools too that we all come along with next to them. and
provide them like what you do for people, so. Oh, that's beautiful. Well,
thank you Sharon for being on. I really appreciate it. Thank you
everyone for listening. Please make sure and find
Sharon or share this episode with someone you know who might need
to hear it. And Sharon and I really hope that
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce
Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.