Becoming Enough with JJ Rett

Video Event Date: March 5, 2025
Video URL: https://youtu.be/-75ukHV0f30
Language: English

Introduction by Betsie

And now I've got the pleasure of introducing JJ. JJ Rett is a certified life coach who finds much of her joy in working with people with lived experience in adoption as they navigate their own journeys. She provides coaching on contract through Adoption Network Cleveland, and JJ is also a volunteer with Adoption Network Cleveland.

She's been a member since 2015, when she and 400,000 other Ohio adoptees were granted access to their original birth certificates. Prior to her work as a coach, JJ was the assistant director of admissions at the Juilliard School. She holds a BFA in stage management and earned her coaching certificate in 2024.

JJ is in reunion with both sides of her birth family and currently resides in Dayton, Ohio with her husband and her three young children. And with that, I give you JJ.

JJ's Presentation

Thank you, Betsie. Hello everyone. I want to thank FSY and Adoption Network Cleveland for inviting me here tonight. It's really an honor to be with you all, 10 years after becoming a member of Adoption Network myself, as Betsie said, when I received my original birth certificate thanks to the dedication and devotion of Betsie and everyone here.

I've received so much support from this organization and from the people who make it so special, from support groups to personal development, and I'm honored to be serving as the life coach for Adoption Network.

My hope for tonight is that in sharing some of my story with you, you will see in our shared experiences, you will be inspired to embrace or continue your own path toward healing, and that you will know you are capable because you are enough.

I'm going to talk with you about my life as a relinquished person, a survivor of childhood abuse, and as a late-discovered adopted person. I say relinquished, but what feels truer to me is the term "severed" person. I was severed from my birth mother, severed from my original family, my bloodline, my culture, and ultimately severed from myself.

The moment I realized I was becoming enough was the moment I learned about the eight C's of self and just how connected to self I really was. But this awareness came many years after engaging in various types of healing modalities.

What Does It Mean to Be Enough?

So let's begin. What does it mean to be enough? I imagine that for some of you here tonight, this talk on becoming enough prompted a curiosity of "what is enough?" or maybe the question "am I enough?" I wonder how many of you have ever asked yourself this question before. How many of you have ever felt that you weren't enough at some point in your life?

Does being enough relate to what you have - material things, or enough money, or the perfect job? Or is it what you do? "I'll be enough once I've checked off everything on my to-do list today," or "I'll be enough when I've completed the lifetime bucket list." Or maybe being enough has to do with how you'd like to be seen by others: "I just want them to know how smart I am" or "how funny I am" or "how lovable I am."

Many of us believe that we aren't enough at some point or another, and underneath this belief is the way in which we live from a place where our ego has been in charge. We've been giving our ego power when we live in accordance with who we think we should be or who others think we should be. We are not living from our true selves, and that can cause a lot of pain and suffering.

But when we become aware of who we truly are and we move away from our ego, we begin to reconnect with our true selves and discover that we are enough. We are capable of having whatever our heart desires - joy, peace, love, abundance, compassion. It's a very powerful thing.

I want to share how this happened for me - how I suffered from living in a place of who others wanted me to be and who I thought I should be, which I think is a very common experience for adopted people.

Part of the work I do now as a life coach is I help people who have experienced this disconnect from their true authentic selves, and not just adopted people, but anyone, because we are all in some way managing life with our egos. I help us reconnect to ourselves because when we do that, we can authentically connect to each other, and to me, that is world-changing.

The Eight C's of Self

Some of you may be familiar with IFS, or Internal Family Systems therapy. In IFS, there's a model called the eight C's of self, and that helps us recognize how much of our self is available to us at any given moment. These eight C's are meant to demonstrate qualities that we embody when we're living from a higher, more creative consciousness, or from our true authentic selves.

So I'm going to share with you the eight C's of self:

1. Curiosity

2. Compassion

3. Calmness

4. Clarity

5. Courage

6. Confidence

7. Creativity

8. Connectedness

I believe that we are enough and that being enough is something we all always are. Because many of us lose the connection to our sense of self, these eight C's are a way to recognize how close we are to living from self.

Questions for Reflection

I'm going to start with a few questions that I had to ask myself in order to reflect on who I was becoming:

• What happens to our sense of being enough when we are severed from the birth mothers who grew us and gave birth to us?

• What happens to our sense of being enough when we are placed into a family of strangers who don't necessarily share or mirror the personality, physical and emotional traits, or culture that we came here with?

• What happens to our connection to self when we experience abuse and further traumas in childhood at a time when we need to have safety and security in order to grow and thrive?

• What messages about being enough do we receive when our entire world turns out to be a fantasy that someone else created?

I'd like you to hold on to these questions during our time together this evening.

Severed from Birth Family

To my first question: what happens to our sense of being enough or our connection to self when we are severed from the mothers who grew us and gave birth to us?

I was born to a 19-year-old girl in 1984. Based on what we know about what babies pick up in utero and what my birth mother told me she was experiencing, I gathered that I was immersed in feelings of fear, anger, and anxiety well before I was born.

My birth mother was taken out of school and sent away from her home to live with an aunt while she was pregnant with me. Although her older sister had asked to adopt me, their mother refused to allow that. Being Catholic, this pregnancy out of wedlock brought shame to the family, and additionally, my being half Black brought further shame to my birth mother's family, who were taught by their mother (my grandmother) that Black people were less than and to not befriend them.

If I had been enough for my birth family, would they have kept me? My birth mother told me about our time in the hospital together and how I was a quiet and very peaceful baby. She would go down to the nursery to check on me in the evenings and see that I hadn't been placed in a bassinet close to the viewing window with all the other newborn babies, but rather I was placed in the back corner, alone in the shadows, separated already from my little nursery room community of newborns.

On the third day, the social worker came to take me to a foster home. My birth mother says she thinks I knew what was about to happen because as soon as the social worker entered the room, I began wailing and I remained inconsolable. And this is the baby that I grew up hearing about - my adoptive father often told the story of how I was a terrible sleeper and I would cry all through the night.

I was no longer two of those eight C's: connected and calm. I endured recurring nightmares throughout my childhood, and I admittedly am still afraid of the dark sometimes.

Placement with Adoptive Family

My second question: what happens to our connection to self when we are placed into a family of strangers who don't necessarily share or mirror the traits or culture that we came here with?

My childhood was not what I would describe as a happy one. I had many moments of happiness, but those were scattered through a time regularly filled with fear and discomfort, pain, shame, disconnect, and confusion.

My adoptive parents brought me into their home when I was 2 months old, and only two weeks later I was in full-time daycare. My birth mother had requested an interracial couple so that my racial identity would match that of the parents who raised me. My dad is 100% Hungarian American, and my mom is multi-racial with straight brown hair and medium brown skin. However, she didn't consider herself to be Black, and she told us that her father was white even though I learned years later that he actually had Black blood.

She told me that her mother was a mix of Chinese, Native American, and some other things, but those other things were very clearly African-American ancestry. My adoptive mom looked down on Black American culture and people, and so in a way, I not only lost my connection to my birth family, but I also lost my connection to my culture, even though my birth mother did her best to try and give me access to that part of myself.

Childhood Abuse and Trauma

What happens to our sense of self when we experience abuse in childhood?

By the time I was three years old, my parents had divorced, and my brother and I moved out of our house with our mom. My mom was verbally and physically abusive to us as far back as my memory goes, and my earliest memories are from around age two. She often berated us, yelled at us, and made comments that made me tremble, if they didn't bring me to tears. Many nights I cried myself to sleep.

If I had been enough for my adoptive family, would I have still been abused?

I want to share a picture with you. This is a picture of me from the first grade, and I want to share how this photo was a reminder for a long time of something very deeply hurtful, and how I used it to rebuild my connection to myself.

When the school pictures were delivered to my house, my mom opened the package, and I saw her face change, and I saw her brow frown, and she looked down at me and she said, "Why did you make this face in your school photo? What's wrong with you? I paid for these pictures, and you had to go and make an ugly face like that. I ought to have you retake these. What is wrong with you?"

Six-year-old me internalized the life out of that moment. From then on, I knew there was something wrong with me, there was something wrong with how I looked, that I was ugly on top of being stupid and lazy, as I was often told, and I knew that I'd wasted my mom's valuable money.

So you can imagine what this did to my sense of self-confidence, one of the eight C's, and my sense of self-worth as I grew up.

A few years ago, a box arrived at my home. At that time, I'd been estranged from my mom for over 10 years, but by then her sister, with my permission, gave her my address so that she could send me a few things from her store that she was cleaning out. The box contained some old artwork and trinkets from my childhood and a few old pictures, and one of the pictures was this first grade school photo.

As soon as I saw it, I heard my mom's cruel words again, but this time I was also able to see who she'd been speaking them to. How could someone be so hurtful to a child? I took the picture of little six-year-old me and I set it up in my bedroom, and I made a point every time I looked at her to tell that little girl how beautiful she is, how perfect she is, and how loved she is.

I told her multiple times a day, until those times grew fewer and fewer, and I eventually realized I wasn't telling her out loud anymore because she didn't need to hear it - she felt it and she knew it. And so I found this to be an unintentional yet very effective way of reparenting myself and beginning to reestablish my connection to self.

Now, one of my mom's earliest teachings was "what happens in this house stays in this house." She parented with a mix of fear tactics, manipulation, and lies. I was 13 the last time she tried to hit me, but by that time I was nearly her size, and I grabbed her hand before it came down on my face, and that was the first time I'd ever stood up to her, and it was the first time I'd ever felt my own power.

When I was 15, I was subjected to sexual abuse when my mom's live-in boyfriend exposed himself to me one day after I came home from school. I was terrified. I locked myself in my room until my brother came home from his school about 30 minutes later, and I wrote about this incident in my journal, and I would lock myself in my room every day after school until my brother was home.

This went on for as long as I could bear it, and one day, about 3 months later, I decided to leave my journal laying out on my dresser and intuitively knew that if my mom saw it, she would violate my journal's privacy, and this was the only way I could manage to ask for help with what had happened. I was too afraid to tell my mom in person, and I had already learned that "what happens in this house stays in this house," so there was no way I was going to tell anyone else other than my best friend, and I had sworn her to secrecy.

So my mom did find my journal, and she did read about her boyfriend, but what I thought would be a cry for help answered turned into the most devastating moment of my life as far as I could remember. My mom confronted me about what I'd written, and she asked me, "Is it true?" and I said yes, and I asked if she would kick him out of our house now. She threatened to kick me out when I was only 10 years old because she hadn't liked my attitude that day, and she told me she would think about it.

This answer to my question cut through my heart and shattered it. But in the days that followed, I contemplated my world and what kind of life I was living. I became aware that my own mother didn't love me, at least not in the way I needed to be loved - to be protected and cared for - and everything society told me about what a mother is was profoundly untrue for me.

This realization loosened the chains that I felt had bound us together as mother and daughter. What I learned was that when I stepped into my own power and began to choose me - for example, by physically preventing my mom from hitting me or by refusing to be alone with her boyfriend ever again - I had to sever my connection to those who hurt me, and this severing on my own accord would eventually provide for me the foundation to begin reconnecting to self.

The Late Discovery of Adoption

So now I'd like to tell you about my adoption discovery. What messages about being enough do we receive when our entire world turns out to be a fantasy?

In addition to being a survivor of childhood abuse, I'm also what we call in the adoption community a late discovery adopted person. I'd suspected something was off from an early age, but I didn't have the language for it.

When I was about six years old, I learned it takes nine months to have a baby. Well, my brother and I are only 7 months apart. I remember being told quite often about my brother being born premature, and so it's possible we were told this as a way to manage whatever questions might come up.

By the time we were in high school, we'd make jokes about him being adopted because he didn't look like anyone in our family, and the thought that I was also adopted crossed my mind. But there were so many people in my family, friends, and even strangers who remarked on how similar my mom and I looked, and we were often mistaken for sisters.

I recall a pediatrician appointment where my mom was giving her and my dad's family medical histories as our own, and I was silently wondering, would she really lie to a doctor?

The Discovery

As teenagers, when we started asking our mom if we were adopted, she responded with anger, sometimes rage, telling us that we were stupid for asking such a thing. But one night when I was 20, my dad heard my brother and I making jokes, and he finally decided to tell us the truth.

Not only was the rug swept out from under my feet, but my whole sense of reality dissolved with the confirmation that I was not who I thought I was, and that everyone I loved and trusted had been lying to me my whole life. The room started spinning, and I found myself in the middle of what felt like a hurricane for a minute. When the room stopped spinning, my dad was asking me if I was okay.

How does one answer that? Am I okay? I'd just learned that I'd been living my own version of The Truman Show, and I felt like I'd just been thrown off a cliff and was expected to save myself. But on the other hand, I felt immense relief because I finally had confirmation of something I'd suspected for so long. I wasn't related to my mom, and I was so happy to not be related to someone as cruel as she was, so I hung on to that feeling of gratitude.

I didn't know if I was okay. This lie told me that I wasn't enough for them, so they created an identity for me. The only thing I knew was that I needed to find out who and where I came from, and I had to find out who I truly was.

I spent about a week feeling depressed and disoriented and very alone. I was trying to make sense of my life and what I thought I knew and who I thought I was. Then I asked my dad to tell me where they had adopted me from.

Searching for Identity

I contacted Catholic Social Services and asked for my birth certificate. I was only able to receive my non-identifying information, but receiving this made my being adopted much more of a reality to me. There was actually documentation that I was born into another family and sent to live in the one I'd been raised in. I read those two pages over a hundred times because it was all I had to anchor me to my new reality.

I was told by Catholic Social Services that I could petition the court for the release of my original birth certificate, so I did just that. After a couple of months, I learned that my petition was rejected. I'd never felt so hopeless. I was angry, I was hurt, and I was even more confused. I cried into my pillow for an hour because I'd never wanted something so badly, and it was excruciating not to have it.

I'd spent my whole life being lied to by my family and not being trusted with my own story, my own history, and then the government was telling me that I had no right to my own information either. I felt completely devalued and powerless.

As for the eight Cs, I had absolutely no clarity about anything. I wish I could say that I reached out for support with all of this, but at that time, I didn't know support existed for someone in my position. So I focused my attention on graduating college and getting as far away from my hometown and family as I could. It didn't matter to me what I did with my life anymore, but how I did it. I wanted to be free. I wanted to be free from responsibilities, expectations, and attachments. I wanted to disconnect.

Synchronicity in New York

I'd always been drawn to New York City, and essentially that's where I ran away to. Just a quick note on synchronicity: when I moved to New York in 2006, I didn't know anyone, but when I left in 2021, I left a home that went deeper and further than just me. I had learned that my birth father and his entire family were from New York City, and during my time there, I reunited with his cousins and extended family. My cousin even gave me a tour of the neighborhood where they grew up, so I got to experience New York with a new connection to it. Since my two boys were also born there, I just feel like there's a deeply synchronistic meaning to the role that city has played in my life.

Healing Modalities

Journaling

Journaling was something I started doing in second grade because my teacher incorporated it as a weekly exercise. After my mom read my journal in high school and blamed me for her boyfriend's sexual misconduct, I stopped writing, and I didn't start again until my mid-20s.

Journaling allowed me to reflect on the past and who I'd been. I think this was my own way of mirroring—sort of like mirroring old versions of myself—since I didn't have any biological relatives to reflect that back to me. I could read what I wrote months or years prior and then use that as a guide for who I wanted to become.

Support Groups

Support groups were another healing method for me. I attended my first support group and was very intimidated because I didn't know what to expect. It was at that time emotionally draining to tell any part of my story because so much of it was still an open wound, and I hadn't yet learned how to care for it.

But over time, I met more adoption constellation members, and I became more aware that sharing my story was a crucial part of connecting with others and facilitating my own healing. Even more powerful than sharing my story is the chance to hear someone else share their story. Some of my most challenging roadblocks in my reunion have been smoothed by talking with or listening to someone else's birth parent.

We are all in our own stages of healing and processing life's traumas, and I deeply believe that each of us is here doing the best we can.

Therapy

Therapy was something I'd always been curious about. As a teenager, I had taken to cutting my arm when my emotional pain became too much to hold in, and I knew this wasn't healthy. So I showed my mom a pamphlet on therapeutic services and asked if I could see a therapist, but she told me no. So that was the end of that.

But in 2016, I was one year into reunion with my birth mother and her family, and I knew that I was going to need help with the emotional weight of whatever was going to happen on this emotional roller coaster. Adoption Network put me in touch with a well-known therapist. She was an adoption-competent therapist.

In the beginning, I could barely speak when trying to answer some of the questions I was asked. It was so painful to revisit the memories of my past that my throat would close up, and I hadn't understood just how much I'd been holding on to. But what therapy gave me was validation that I'd actually suffered, language for what I'd been through, and methods for healing some of my old wounds.

Shamanic Journey

About a year and a half after I started therapy, I was introduced to shamanic journeying by a friend of mine who gave me Sandra Ingerman's book "Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self" (published in 1991).

After my friend shared her own experience with soul retrieval, I became very curious, and I began to consider this as a healing method for myself. The beginning of the book states: "The shamanic way of healing using Soul retrieval presented in this book should not be considered an exclusive method for confronting psychological and/or medical problems. It should be viewed as an adjunct to orthodox medical or psychological treatments."

By this time in my journey, I felt that I was ready for something more, and I had felt stuck in my healing process. I'd been journaling, I'd been attending support groups, I'd been an active member in my late discovery group on Facebook, and I'd absorbed a lot from therapy, but I felt like there was still something blocking my progress.

So I booked a session with the shaman who had helped my friend. She was a native of Dublin, Ireland, and she practiced Celtic shamanic healing, which I was drawn to because of my Irish, Welsh, and Scottish ancestry on my birth mother's side.

I was instructed to stay off the news for a few days beforehand. I was instructed to meditate, pray, and keep my intention for myself in my heartbeat and in my breath.

In the session, the shaman asked me some questions, and I talked about my childhood briefly, but I mostly spoke about being a late discovery adopted person and having just entered reunion with my birth family. This healing session took place about one month after I'd found out who my birth father was, and at the same time, I'd lost him all over again. I learned that he died the year before Ohio opened closed records, but his entire family immediately accepted me with open, loving arms.

The session was broken into two parts:

1. In the first part, the shaman would take a spiritual journey to introduce me to my power animal.

2. In the second part, she would search other dimensions for parts of my soul that had been fractured from trauma and had left, and she would bring them back to me.

I laid down on a massage table and was instructed to close my eyes as drumming played in the background. The shaman told me to envision a place on Earth where I had been before and where there was a natural opening to the underground. So I envisioned a small bridge over a river in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, where I'd worked for two summers. I saw myself travel under the bridge and go to the edge of the water and then go underneath the Earth.

For a while, it was dark, as it is when we close our eyes, but slowly the darkness became a vast landscape. It was tinted with the reds and oranges that you can see when your eyes are closed but there's a light on. So I began seeing these shapes and blobs appear and disappear, ebbing and flowing.

Suddenly, I could see above me the wings of a bird. It was like an eagle or a hawk. I saw more shapes for a while, and it felt like nothing much else was happening. Then in the distance, I saw a shape, more like a silhouette, became recognizable as a horse, and it was running very fast across the landscape.

Then I saw the profile of the same horse very close to my face, and I realized that it was a black horse with shiny, smooth-looking hair. I saw this black stallion running and running again and again, and it didn't seem very interested in me, but I knew that it wanted me to know how wild and free it was. Then the horse ran off into the distance, and the shapes and blobs began to recede.

In the landscape where I had been standing in my vision, it became more of a tunnel, and I was aware of the drumming still playing in the room, but I focused my attention on this tunnel and how the reds and oranges and yellows were ebbing and flowing like a pulsating tunnel. This happened for a while, and then the tunnel became a bright flash of white light. Mind you, my eyes were still closed, but it was as if somebody had opened the curtains on a sunny day with the room being dark.

Soon after this bright light flooded my vision, I felt the shaman blowing into different parts of my torso and my head where your chakras are located. When we finished, she asked me what I'd experienced, and I told her about the wild black horse running, as well as the wings that I had seen above me. Later, I learned that her power animal was a hawk.

She confirmed that my power animal was indeed that horse that I'd seen, and she felt it from the moment I walked through her door. The horse's energy brings power, strength, confidence, and freedom, and she was not surprised, given what I've experienced in my life, that horse was helping guide me.

We talked about the tunnel that I saw, and I explained how it felt like I was coming through a birth canal, like being reborn into this bright white light. As we wrapped up, she told me she'd check in on me in a few days, and she left me with one piece of advice: to remember that time is not linear but cyclical. What comes around comes back around, and the lessons we experience in life will show up in different ways until we've learned what we need to in order to grow into the next cycle.

A few days later, I responded to my shaman's check-in with this: "The words that come to mind right now are grounded, present, solid, stable, and I feel like I'm here in a new way. I've also noticed that for the first time, I have an inner joy, and it's amazing because I've never actually felt joy from the inside before. Like it's just here, this warm happiness that is so new to me and wonderful. And I'm starting to notice a new sense of being calm, like feeling I don't have to rush through interactions with people or rush through tasks like I've done my whole life."

This was as if I could finally take up space, and I felt two more of the eight Cs: courageous and confident.

In the months that followed, I experienced what I can only describe as a reintegration with the soul parts that the shaman brought back to me. She did not tell me what parts those were, but at various times, I could feel the energy of a happy, confident, self-assured teenage version of me. Another time had me feeling like a child but without the fear and anxiety that had accompanied me my entire childhood, and I felt free from those gripping emotions. I realized I've never actually been a child without those feelings.

Another time, I felt a warm, nurturing sense come over me, one of protection and caring, and I thought of cradling a small baby, one that knew it was safe and loved. It took many months for me to put words to these experiences and these feelings, but to me, these were the ways that I knew my soul parts had been returned to me.

As a life coach now, I've come into the awareness of parts work as it relates to internal family systems. As I'm learning more about this, I'm reminded of how soul retrieval can be another way to recapture these lost parts of ourselves, another way to reconnect to self.

Meditation

I want to briefly touch on meditation, which is a healing modality I'm sure many of us here have used. The practice is called RAIN, and I will just share briefly. RAIN is a meditation practice that was started by Tara Brach. She's a clinical psychologist and Buddhist meditation teacher, and she's the creator of this practice, but it's also in alignment with the coaching training program that I took.

RAIN is an acronym for:

• Recognize what's going on

• Allow the experience to be there just as it is

• Investigate with interest and care

• Nurture with self-compassion

This practice of radical compassion has brought me more of the eight Cs: calmness, clarity, and compassion.

Coaching

Of all the modalities that I've explored, coaching has given me the greatest insight into my journey toward becoming enough. As a client who received coaching, I did some of my own inner critic work. The inner critic is defined as the mouthpiece of our ego, and as I mentioned before, the ego is defined as who we think we should be rather than who we truly are.

So I worked with my coach to discover what my inner critic or ego wanted for me and how I could live more from my true self rather than from the place of who I thought I should be or who others wanted me to be. I learned that my inner critic kept me safe during my childhood experiences, and it provided protection, and it fought for my well-being.

As a child, I needed a safe space, I needed boundaries, and so I made myself smaller and nearly invisible in order to achieve this sense of safety. My natural exuberance was squashed, and my authentic connection to self was severed.

In one coaching session, after doing some somatic work with my coach, my body received the realization that I am no longer the unwanted baby, and I became aware of the ways in which I am now held by my family, by my community, and by my own future self.

So in my experience, becoming enough was a spiritual realization. Coming to this understanding requires us to abandon our attachment to our egos. As an adult, I no longer need the protections my inner critic was imposing. Through coaching, we can shift our relationship with our inner critic to one where we recognize what it's trying to do for us but continue to live from a place of our true selves.

For me, this often looks like acknowledging what my inner critic needs to tell me and then sending it on its way with a gentle pat on the head, sort of how you'd send a puppy or a small child along, like, "Okay, thank you, off you go now."

For example, when I take the risk of being vulnerable with others, I step into the possibility of being seen, accepted, and held. We must not give our power over to the inner critic, but instead, we allow whatever feelings and thoughts come up, and then we choose where to put our focus.

I focus on knowing that I don't need to make myself small in order to feel safe anymore. I am capable of being vulnerable and safe. I can live from the place of my true self. I am enough.

The Eight Cs

When we choose to develop these eight Cs, we are practicing becoming enough. You can use the eight Cs as a way to become aware of your connection to your true self, and you may notice that when we are disconnected or severed from ourselves, many of the eight Cs are not very present.

To review, the eight Cs are:

1. Curiosity

2. Compassion

3. Calmness

4. Clarity

5. Courage

6. Confidence

7. Creativity

8. Connectedness

Conclusion

As you've heard, there are many ways that I reconnected to self: therapy, journaling, attending support groups like we have here at Adoption Network, soul retrieval and shamanic healing, and coaching. Receiving coaching was so meaningful and transformative for me that I decided to become a professional coach myself.

What I've learned was the transformative power coaching can have and how it connects us to ourselves and to each other in the simplest yet most profound ways. As a coach, I help my clients become their best selves. I serve the person rather than fixing a problem, and I guide clients away from a destructive or controlling mindset toward a more creative, life-giving one.

I am gathering the tools to continue on my own healing journey, and in my work, I hold a lantern for others who are walking their own path by helping them identify who they truly are and by guiding them on their path to realizing that they too are enough.

As the shaman told me, time is cyclical, and I believe that when we live from a creative level of consciousness, becoming aware of our true selves, then we're always growing. We are not today who we will be tomorrow, but in each moment, we are who and what we need to be in order to get to the next moment.

I like to think of this as ripples in a pool of water. Each ripple cannot be without the one that came before it, just as each of us cannot be who we are today without the experiences that got us here. We are exactly who we need to be in this present moment, and I've learned that I deserve to live boldly, abundantly, and joyfully, and I believe we all deserve this.

Q&A Session

Q: What motivates people who are abusive to adopted children?

I think there's the phrase we all know: "hurt people hurt people." When you come from a place of compassion and when you've been able to develop your sense of compassion for everyone, then you have to understand that they are hurt, and they don't have another way of being. So the cycle continues. People who haven't healed their wounds of abuse themselves tend to repeat abuse to others. It's not maybe something that we want to understand, but if we hold compassion that they too were a child at some point, they too came into the world like we all did, and things happened to them, then there's maybe a little bit of compassion to be found. That's what I did in my experience.

Q: Why do you think your adoptive parents chose to adopt?

That's an interesting one. My mom was a collector of things, of things and people. When my parents were getting divorced, they were actually in the process of adopting a third child, and they didn't—I don't remember being told much about it—just one day she was gone. This was when I was three and a half, four years old. As I grew up, I would have memories of this baby, and I would ask what happened, and they said, "Oh, she went away" or "She went to live with another family." My mom was a shopaholic; she liked to buy things and accumulate things, and I think that transferred over to people.

Q: If race was a factor in your struggle, how would you advise adoptive parents of children from another race?

In my experience, I'm not a transracial or transnational adoptee. Race has always been a part of my life. I grew up looking like a biracial person. I experienced this world as a biracial person. But I would default to someone that I've actually learned a lot from, which is Angela Tucker. She's amazing and has a lot to say for parents of adoptees who are of a different race. She's written a book, and she's got a blog, and she also has a company or a nonprofit called Adoptee Mentor Society, which is mentoring specifically for adoptees. So I would look into her as a resource.

Q: Do you have advice for reunion with birth family?

My first advice is to take your time. I know from my own experience how badly you want to rush and meet the person and meet the people and meet the family and know them and get information. Often, it's an overwhelming need, but you've got to take your time. You owe yourself time.

Even when time may seem to be working against us, there is a lot of value to be found in going at your own pace. When I first reunited with my birth mother, I remember her saying, "I just wish we could rush through the last 30 years," and my feeling was, "Oh, that's a lot. I'm really overwhelmed by that," because that was 30 years of my entire life. That was my whole life. I couldn't rush through it.

Now it seems like sometimes the tables have turned. I want more and more from her, and she's got to go at her own pace. As I was saying, we're all here doing the best that we can, and we're all on our own trajectories, our own paths. Sometimes the timing lines up, and sometimes it doesn't. So what can you do? You can go at your own pace and communicate that to the people that you are in relationship with.

Q: Were you born and raised in Dayton or some other part of Ohio, and were both you and your brother adopted?

I was born and raised in Dayton. I live in Dayton now. I went on a whole journey. I left, went to New York, went to North Carolina, and I didn't know North Carolina was going to be two years of really profound healing for me, but I'm now back in Dayton. I've changed my name and found my family and created my own family, so I feel like I've come back to my hometown, but I'm a whole new person. That's where I live now; that's where I'm from.

My brother and I are both adopted from separate families, and people used to think we were twins because we're so close in age and we look similar.

Q: Can you tell us about changing your name?

Growing up, I was Jamie, and I spent most of my life as Jamie. When I got my original birth certificate, I learned that my name when I was born—my mother named me Jennifer. I never really felt comfortable with Jamie. Even as a child, I wanted to change my name to something else. I would ask my mom, "Why did you name me Jamie? This doesn't feel right."

I remember talking with Betsie about how I wanted to change my name, wanted to create my own identity, but I didn't know what to do or what I would choose. I had come into awareness of other people who were changing their names or combining their birth name and their adoptive name.

So Betsie had this lovely suggestion to create an acronym, and so JJ is Jamie and Jennifer combined. "Rhett," my last name, is an acronym of my birth mother's last name, my birth father's last name, my adoptive family's last name, and my husband's last name, and I love it.