It’s increasingly about them, our kids.  They’re approaching 18, or are already, but it’s not easy.  It’s about their choices and their wishes, but we’re the ones who are endorsing whatever that is by paying the money that floats it all.  Do I intervene, do I do something, do I let it go, do I wait until they ask me, do I trust that they’ll be able to figure it out, can I rely on them knowing what they need when they really need it?

Where young-adulthood gets toxic is when there’s all the responsibility of an 8th grade Summer and all the freedom of an over 21 driver’s license and somebody else’s credit card. No limits, no obligations.

Do the work as best you can, and recognize that the outcomes will not be entirely up to you.
There is a load of pressure on you to make their lives go well. They’re not newborns anymore. Far from it. Now they’re doing their own thing, driving your car, making up their own minds. There’s still a whole load of pressure on you to make sure they’re getting the best opportunities, recognizing those opportunities, and utilizing them. And they’re going to do what they’re going to do.

Some things they haven’t told you: where you’re headed isn’t so different than what you’ve known, and it doesn’t all happen in one day. You’re not going to be the only one that feels overwhelmed or disoriented. The only people who won’t have someone who showed them. It’s not about knowing everything, it’s about recognizing when you don’t know or need support and engaging the supporting people around you.

That lonely, grabby feeling is a part of you. It’s the part that might wonder, why am I so antsy, lonely, anxious; why am I so needy; what’s wrong with me; what makes me impulsive sometimes; why can’t I be alone? We think we solve the problem when we fill the space with things we need to do, things that are useful, things that are maybe fun, but there’s a part of you that is being ignored, replaced with stuff, distraction, noise, busy-ness.

Trauma or PTSD is like an ancient brain technology.  I know that sounds really weird.  Trauma is not fun.  But, yes, it works to think of it as a blunt but natural defense mechanism.  Bad experiences that cause trauma have to be automatically recalled because they correlate to things that would threaten human survival.  Nature baked in an automatic replay system that would give you echoing re-experiences to keep you alive by thinking about the threats.

Complex traumas develop from negative events that keep repeating or become normal life. The traumas start to connect into a single emotional matrix. They become the new normal and our personality starts to include them.

The trouble is that Nature wants you to be anxious. I’ll always be real with you: it designed you that way. And recognize that we live in a culture where everything is telling us we’re meant to be happy, even ecstatic a good 70-80% of the time. This is crazy and misleading. We’re all being set up to feel bad about something that’s quite normal by design, and that’s if things are working right. Not everything works right all the time.

It’s old and not at all uncommon.  But that doesn’t say what the experience is for a person who is adopted.  As much as you are not alone, you may feel that you are when you look around you at people you know.  If your adoption was across race, that can have particular dynamics.  If your adoption is not obvious, that can have its own dynamics.  If your adoption was international, that can have particular dynamics.  Both closed and open adoptions have their own dynamics.  Each person is different, so each experience will be different, and the meaning and feel of that experience changes in time as you grow and live your life.

All this is to say we are super complex beings.  Your story is unique and this story is a living thing that you determine the meaning of.  The facts may stay the same, but the meaning will alter their significance and meaning as you discover yourself and actualize your life.

No one ever signed up to be an addict. It has never been an aspiration for anyone. It’s something that happens to some people slowly, it’s something that some people exhibit right out of the gate. More than coming from any particular substance, it is the symptom of unresolved pain within a person.

Our culture is on a honeymoon with THC. I reckon it’ll last for 7-14 years. Academic research has been all but forbidden until recently, so it’s going to take some time for the picture to develop. In the meantime, we, as a culture, are going at it like it’s some kind of magical panacea. As in, weed couldn’t hurt you if it wanted to; it only does good. All I’m going to say is, there is no free lunch. Nothing’s that good. We wouldn’t believe that if they were talking floor polish.

The way culture talks about drugs is as if the interaction between a substance and different individuals is always the same. That’s what was funky about the way we were taught about drugs: as if, because that person over there is a mess because of drugs, then all people who take drugs will end up a mess. We knew this was false when we were 15. But the inverse also applies: just because something is fine for one person, doesn’t mean it’s going to work the same way for everyone else.