Coming Home to Ourselves - Adoption, Identity & Healing with Dr. Hollee McGinnis

Jennifer Norman:
There's a certain kinship that forms between people who share the invisible thread of adoption, that deep, complex journey of belonging, identity and rediscovery. Today's episode feels especially personal for me because, like my guest, I was adopted from South Korea into a white American family. Our paths may have unfolded differently, but the questions we've carried who am I? Where do I truly belong? Have shaped so much of our lives work. My guest today, Dr. Hollee McGinnis, has devoted nearly 30 years to exploring these very questions through the lenses of scholarship, social work and lived experience. She's a visiting professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Rudd Adoption Research Program, where her groundbreaking work centers on the lives of people who experienced family separation, adoption and institutional care, particularly those of us adapted from South Korea. With a PhD in social work from Washington University in St. Louis and a Master's from Columbia University, Hollee's research digs deep into the social and cultural forces that shape identity, belonging and mental health across the lifespan.

Jennifer Norman:
She is also the founder of Also Known As, one of the first adult inter country adoptee organizations in the United States, which has been a lifeline for so many navigating the terrain of adoption and self discovery. It's in this episode we'll talk about what it means to come home to ourselves after being uprooted, how adoption and identity intersect with race and culture, and how we can transform pain into purpose. Whether you're an adoptee, a parent, or simply a seeker of truth and healing, this episode will expand your understanding of family resilience and the beauty of reclamation. This is one of those conversations that reminds us of even when our beginnings are written in separation, our stories can still become bridges of connection and wholeness. And now let's welcome Dr. Hollee McGinnis to the show. Welcome Hollee. How are you?

Hollee McGinnis:
Good, thank you. Jennifer, thank you so much for inviting me onto your podcast.

Jennifer Norman:
I am really, really excited for our conversation. Now, I first would love to start with your story about your early beginnings. How did your journey of adoption shape your sense of yourself growing up?

Hollee McGinnis:
I would say that I knew my story growing up, so I came to America in 1975 at the age of three and a half and I was adopted into a nice Irish Catholic family outside of New York City, the McGinnis household. I had an older brother and sister who were both biological to my adoptive parents, so I was the youngest in the family. And because I was the youngest, my parents had moved from Pittsburgh to New York a while ago. Before I came, I was well known in the community as well. So I really grew up mostly not thinking about my adoption at all, except for that was how this Asian girl got to be part of the McGinnis family. And I often like to describe it like knowing that you're breathing. Adoption and being adopted was kind of like knowing that you breathe. And it was only when it was pointed out to me that I became really aware of it.

Hollee McGinnis:
And I had some experiences when I was in high school that made me realize that the world did not see me as Hollee McGinnis. The world saw me as someone different. And one very clear moment was when I was in high school and my senior year, somehow me and seven of my girlfriends from my Irish Catholic high school convinced my parents or our parents to let us go to Disney World by ourselves. So there was These group of eight 17-18 year old girls going to Disney World and we went to Epcot. And so this was one of the first times that I was traveling outside of the bubble and the protection of my adoptive family. And, and I remember going to China in Epcot and people working there started to speak to me in Chinese. And then I go to buy something in Japan and the person working there tells it to me in Japanese. And so I look at my Irish friends and German friends of those ancestries, and I said, well, why isn't anybody speaking to you in Celtic or German? Why am I get a hold of the answers? And that was really a moment of, oh, the world doesn't see me the way I see myself.

Hollee McGinnis:
And I knew myself very well, I thought, but I didn't see what the world saw. So when I went to college, I thought I would major in Asian Studies because it seemed that some people assumed that I spoke those languages, but I didn't. And so I did take Mandarin for my first year. And then when I was a sophomore, I said, wait a minute, I might look the part, but I have not lived that part. And that was in part going into Korean Student Association meetings and being like, oh, I look like you, but I do not have the same lived experience as you. So I changed my major to American Studies because I really wanted to understand how I was an American with an Irish last name, a blonde hair, mom, and a Korean face, which Jennifer I think you can relate to.

Jennifer Norman:
Same.

Hollee McGinnis:
And so I ended up doing a senior thesis just interviewing seven other Korean adopted women who were in college, asking them what was their racial ethnic identity. I said, did they identify as American? As Korean, as Korean-American, as American-Korean. And in many ways I've just been kind of asking that same question over and over again. Who am I? And I like to boil down my research and my life work really to two essential questions. How do we love across difference? And how do we love across loss? Because the only way an adoptive person can enter into a family is to... is through a very difficult experience of losing another one. It's just you can't have one without the other. And I know that a lot of my childhood bringing I was only filled with the gain of another family, that there wasn't much space for me to mourn the family that I had lost. And it's hard to lose something that you don't know. So I think that that's why it can be particularly challenging for adoptees to name the thing that they're mourning.

Hollee McGinnis:
Because for many of us, we are just filled with, oh, well, this is the life I have. And that other life was like, who knows? And I think in that process, that's how I really got interested in adoption. When I finished college, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to help people, but I realized I did not want to be a physician and I was too afraid of like killing someone. So I had two years of just working. I was an editorial assistant. And then I was invited to do a leadership program. And in the leadership program, it was a self expression and leadership class.

Hollee McGinnis:
And they said, look at your community and build something. And so since I majored in American Studies, really focusing on 20th century race relations, but the history of international adoption, I knew that were there were like 200,000 Korean adoptees, but I had only met maybe a handful like in my lifetime. And then I was living in New York City at the same time too. This is like 1994, 95, 96. And I was hearing all the news stories of all of the Chinese adoptees and I said, oh my gosh, there's a whole new generation of young children growing up in complicated families like the one I grew up in. And so I decided that I would start a mentorship program because I thought, well, growing up it would have maybe been nice if I had had a role model or someone whose family looked like mine. And that was really then the impetus for starting also known as. And the reason why the name is also known as is because after kind of exploring a lot around my racial identity in college, I realized that the conflict that I felt about my identity was really because I felt like I had to fit myself into a box.

Hollee McGinnis:
But I didn't fit into little boxes, so I would never be white. Even though culturally that was what I grew up and kind of knew and I didn't fit into the Asian or the Korean box because again, culturally I was taken out of that culture and didn't remember anything. So I really wanted to embrace who I was. And the truth of who I was was that I was both. Even though I didn't have memories of Korea, Korea still lived in me in some ways. And that spent a lot of my 30 year journey of reclamation. But the name also known as was really a way of embracing and saying I have many identities that go beyond just the surface. So I'm Hollee McGinnis, but I'm also known as Lee Hwa Young and that is my Korean birth name.

Hollee McGinnis:
I'm also known as an artist, as a mom, as a professor. And I just love the idea giving us all some freedom to name for ourselves who we are rather than having to accept the imposed identities that are placed on us.

Jennifer Norman:
Hit subscribe right now for more soulful stories and inspiring conversations with me and The Human Beauty Movement Podcast.

Jennifer Norman:
Oh my gosh, what an amazing, amazing journey you have been on. And thank you so much for all of the work that you've been doing to mentor and to help others that you recognize the way that you felt and then you extended that to others to, to help others feel like they could belong as well. And I think that that's a big part of being adopted. I know when I was young I often felt that I didn't belong. I often felt like I didn't fit into those boxes that you were we're talking about. And there was a bit of shame, actually, not just a bit, there was quite a lot because I think that the idea of being adopted itself, sometimes a lot of people are like, oh, you were adopted. Or you know, some people just don't even like to talk about it.

Jennifer Norman:
If they are inter country, then it's almost like let's keep it a secret. But us being adopted into white families, it's not like you could necessarily hide it because it looks so different. Although some it confused a lot of people that couldn't figure it out, which is also kind of amusing. But just feeling like there's something in your nature that is just feeling like it just doesn't fit in, that there's just something like that just doesn't want to culturally assimilate because there is a difference. And then there was also, I'm not sure if you were teased. It seems like you had a great friend group and that everybody got along, which is wonderful. I know, when I was young, I was teased quite a lot for my looks. And I think that even to this day, the idea of looking or being Chinese is somewhat seemed strangely as derogatory.

Jennifer Norman:
And so people would do the... the eyes, and call you names and all of those things. And so it also made you feel othered and like an outsider and that you were ugly and that. That you were less than from an early age. And that gets into your psyche that you just literally don't belong in your family, in your community and all of those things. I mean, it's a blessing when you can find a community that accepts you and embrace you and you feel good. But a lot of adoptees don't have that, and a lot of adoptees have a whole lot worse, frankly. I would love to hear what you've learned over the years in terms of like, the adoption psyche and any kinds of words of wisdom that you might extend to parents or communities in order to help understand this a little bit more.

Hollee McGinnis:
Yeah, well, I mean, there's been a lot of research on it, but I think the biggest takeaways, and I think for us who we're kind of in the middle of the pioneering of international transracial adoption. So the first adoptions happened in large mass after the Korean War. And so those of us who came in the 60s and the 70s, we're really part of Korea's like, compressed modernity. But there was a huge cost, that rapid industrialization, urbanization. And so I think that we have the imprints of all of those early childhood experiences. And I think one of the shifts, I think that are happening is realizing that infants are not born a blank slate. And I think there was this premise, and I know there was this premise that children are born blank slates. You can kind of do anything to them and they'll be fine.

Hollee McGinnis:
And there was a time when it was believed that infants couldn't be depressed. And that is shifting. But there's still some thoughts that we can do things to children and they'll be fine. And what is really coming forward is that no, before you're even born, children know the sound of their mother's voice. They know the sound of people around them. They have, especially that third trimester, they're eating the food, they're tasting the food. There is a rhythm that they know that when a newborn baby is born, they know the smell of their mother. And so there's all of these memories, there's all of these experiences that we carry, but we don't have memories of.

Hollee McGinnis:
And then the most important part is that as an adoptee, we don't have anyone to remember it for us, because those who were there in the time of moments of our birth, of our first steps of these moments, we've been separated from that. So we've been separated from those knowing as well. So I always like to remind adoptees and anyone who's raising an adopted child to start where we all start, which is we're all born into the world. I don't know about you, Jennifer, but my story and my narrative always started at John F. Kennedy Airport at the age of three and a half, because I had no other information earlier than. But I was born into this world too. I just didn't have information about it. So it's so critical for us to, even if we'll never know, to still recognize our humanity, which is that we're all born into this world.

Hollee McGinnis:
We carry that with us. A lot of my current work is really helping adoptees to reclaim who they are, because I know I walk around a lot with an imposter syndrome. I wasn't oral Korean. Those people over there who lived in Korea or those who were born to their Korean parents and they're living with them, those are the real Koreans. I was like a fake Korean. And then I had this moment making kimchi about four years ago. And I love Korean food. So Korean food has been one way that I like, would reconnect.

Hollee McGinnis:
So we would have meetings with also known as. And we would always end at a Korean restaurant in New York City because that's where we were doing a lot of organizing. And I just laughed because I was like, were we trying to eat our way back? I just want to say, if you are Korean adoptee and you don't like Korean food, that does not make you less Korean either. But there, there is a part of also accepting and being open to like, oh, this could be my food. So I ended up living in Korea for a year and a half doing my dissertation research looking at the mental health and school outcomes of adolescents growing up in orphanages in Korea. And at that time, my husband and my oldest son were. Was able to come with me. So we lived there for a year and a half eating Korean food every day.

Hollee McGinnis:
And when we got back, we were like, we have to eat that food. So we doubled down on, like, trying to make Korean food. And part of that was making kimchi. So I've been making kimchi for about eight years using this recipe on the Internet. And I'm a very type A personality. I think someone who has a PhD tends to be very cerebral and in their head. So guilty as charged.

Hollee McGinnis:
He went to the kitchen, so. And I was so afraid I'll always do a recipe wrong. So I know there are folks who are just very natural. And I was not. I was like, I had to follow the recipe. If it was two teaspoons of salt, I put two teaspoons of salt. My husband's much more natural in the kitchen. He's like, Hollee, you don't have to measure the salt.

Hollee McGinnis:
You just taste it. I'm like, no, no, no. I'm following the rule. But I had this moment of making kimchi, and I let my head go, and I just allowed myself to actually drop into my body. And as I was rolling around the Napa cabbage with all of, like, the red pepper and everything, I just got to experience this beautiful, flowing, warm energy through my body and made this connection, like, to the food. Like, oh, my gosh, the ancestors are here. Because I stopped thinking that was saying, I'm making someone else's. This is not mine.

Hollee McGinnis:
This is somebody else's. You're the imposter Korean. So how can you be making real Korean kimchi? And when I let those thoughts just evaporate into kind of. I like to say, kimchi is a somatic practice. Oh, in the cabbage. I got to feel how very Korean I am. And that was really the impetus for this, these classes that I now teach, because I. As I was rolling around and I just got to feel it and feel that connection.

Hollee McGinnis:
I was like, I want anybody who has ever felt disconnected from their roots to have this experience of getting rooted back. So I've been doing kimchi healing classes for anyone who wants it in their home, and I love doing it in the home, because the tradition of making kimchi was the village would get together and they would make enough kimchi so that every home in a village would have enough food to get them through really harsh Korean winters. And so making it in a home, in community, those are all the other pieces of healing, but also of reclamation. So those have been kind of my inspirations. And so I. I guess to those who are adopted or raising adopted children, there's so many doorways back to our true selves. And maybe the first step is letting go of some of the thoughts that you can't.

Jennifer Norman:
Now you've just inspired me to go get myself some napa cabbage and some garlic and some hot red pepper and make some kimchi. That is so beautiful. I can't believe I haven't made kimchi yet, but I will eat it in pots and droves. I absolutely love it. Yeah. As soon as I tasted kimchi as a child, I was like, oh, yes, I am definitely liking this. Korean food is definitely in my DNA.

Hollee McGinnis:
Yeah. Yeah. And I love it because I didn't grow up eating kimchi in my Irish Catholic family. My mother is mostly of German ancestry. So, like, the spiciest spice in our house was black pepper. And that wasn't meant to bite me, but I always loved pickles. I always loved soups. Yeah, my mom would say that I was a soupy kid.

Hollee McGinnis:
And then when you look at Korean cuisine, it's like the jjigaes, the stews... There's all the pickling things. And fermented food is a pickle is a preservation across all cultures. But yeah, how wild.

Jennifer Norman:
So you talk about the concept of coming home to self. Is that part of it, this ritual of making kimchi and dropping into your body, or is it something else?

Hollee McGinnis:
Yeah, I think that is a huge part of it. What I have seen often is children don't have a lot of tools to cope with difficult, challenging things. Essentially, I like to say they can either act out or shut out and shutting out in the language of trauma, we can need fight or flight. And flight can show up in a lot of different ways. And I think for myself, flight, I flew up into my head and out of the body. And I think that can have really dangerous effects when you're only living up in your head and not in your face. Full wholeness, which is your body. One was just as you had said earlier, when you don't have a lot of racial mirrors and you don't know, then, like, okay, am I pretty compared to, like, okay, I don't look white, so I can't compare myself to whiteness.

Hollee McGinnis:
Right. But am I beautiful? You can internalize and over intellectualize and get into kind of a very negative thought patterns about. About who you are. And so to me, to become more embodied, to feel into the body, to love the body is a part of being whole because you're not just your mind, you are a body. And then you also are a spirit. And that connection, I think, to spirit has been something that has returned to me more recently since my late 40s and my diagnosis. I was diagnosed with breast cancer in early 2020. And that really led me to do a 2.0 dive into what was I carrying with me that caused dis-ease in my body.

Hollee McGinnis:
And I have been doing a lot of research. My PhD doctoral training was looking a lot at early childhood adversity, trauma, ptsd, complex ptsd. But one of the things that I was really struck with on the early research on adverse childhood experiences that were conducted in the late 1990s is that on these samples of mostly white, middle upper class individuals, those who experienced three or more adverse childhood experiences were greatly at risk for adverse physical health problems later on in their life. And it was a very, very strong correlation. Wow. And I then dug into the research because I said once I could, anybody who has a cancer wants to know why they have it.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Hollee McGinnis:
And for adoptees, we don't have family medical history, so that's a huge barrier for us to know. So I was able to get like, genetic screening and I wasn't, didn't have any precursors like Brock positive or. So I had to really figure out, well, what else was going on then that maybe contributed. And knowing that the first three years of my life I had met my birth family, I've been technically reunion for 30 years. But it's an on again, off again connection. But even having that connection doesn't mean I know their family history. Like, they haven't divulged that necessarily. And.

Hollee McGinnis:
And so. But then I had to also think about, like, all the adversities. And I know that the first three years of my life I had at least three to four caregivers. So my birth mother raised me for my first year, roughly, and she left me with my birth father to care for, but he largely left me in the care of my grandmother, which is his mother. And then my grandmother got very sick and then she left me at the orphanage. So I had at least three caregivers before I came to my family. And I think because my story always started from when I arrived, I didn't think about much about what those disruptions earlier on, like, how they showed up in my life.

Jennifer Norman:
Right.

Hollee McGinnis:
And that's what I really began to unpack. Jennifer, in the last five years. There is, on paper, it's like, oh, Hollee has a PhD. She's so successful, she's so educated. But I'm like, I was trying a little too hard, compensating, you know, so, like, these successful, quote, unquote, yes, adoptees. I'm like, that could be unhealthy too, because I got to drop in and say, oh, I tried so hard because I never thought I was enough.

Jennifer Norman:
Yes.

Hollee McGinnis:
Never lovable enough, smart enough, good enough. That recording had been like, laid down at such an early, primal, unconscious stage. That I wasn't conscious that that was a driver. So on the one hand, great, it didn't drive me. But on the other hand, it took me too far often because no matter what I achieved would never be it. And that gets toxic. And that can be toxic.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah, it's almost like we try to overcompensate and that perfectionism is part of that. It's like, I need to prove myself. I need to show that I am enough. I need to people, please. I need to overextend. And so it really does run deep. And it can lead to burnout. It can lead to all sorts of issues if you don't identify what that root cause is.

Jennifer Norman:
And a lot of people just think, oh, I'm just an overachiever. I'm just a type A personality. And it's interesting that over time you're able to say, okay, I was the kind of person that didn't act out. And I think because we have similar families in that. My mom was British, actually, and she married my father, who was, I guess he was more of like Scottish Irish descent, raised on Long Island. But it was the kind of household that was "children are seen and not heard." And if we did ever act out, then we would get beaten.

Jennifer Norman:
I mean, it was like, it was just like a very, like, domineering kind of religious upbringing that we had. And so I just kind of shut in to your point about acting after shutting out, I shut out and I did the same thing. I just would burn the candle at every single end. Didn't know how to say no. Always was the one that volunteered for anything extra. And it really did lead to me becoming such a workaholic for so much of my life and really not knowing how to have, like, meaningful relationships.

Jennifer Norman:
I think that was also part of that feeling like I was not comfortable in my own skin. And so I would never feel good about getting close to people because it felt almost like I felt like, well, it's just going to end anyway. There was just something that was unnamed. I couldn't really figure it out, that I just didn't feel like, okay, I don't want to really necessarily have a long term commitment relationship or divulge too much. Maybe that's why I'm in podcasting now. I get. I get to talk about all of these things. This is my form of therapy.

Hollee McGinnis:
There are many ways to heal. So. And I do think being trained mental health too, the first step to healing is being able to name it and then naming it and then being able to Sit with it. And in terms of, like, healing from trauma, the metaphor is to digest it, you have to digest the things that happen to you. And if you can't even name it, how can you digest it? So all of these are such critical steps toward processing, digesting. Because the bad things that happen to you are not meant to happen to you, to hurt you. They're kind of happening to digested so that they can become kind of the fertile soil for your ongoing growth. And I think that one of.

Hollee McGinnis:
I want to say that, like our culture in the west of capitalism, we're rewarded for being workaholics and basically that we are just machines.

Jennifer Norman:
Yes.

Hollee McGinnis:
And so it's not just adoptees. It's just like we're all kind of enculturated to just be this one particular way. But it's not human, it's not humane. Our humanity is that we get tired, we need to rest, that we need to digest, and then we can come back and work again. So I do feel like a big part of my healing in the last five years is not only interrogating kind of these stories and scripts that definitely happen at a personal level, but also got reinforced culturally as a woman, as an Asian woman, as in capitalism. You know that there's a lot of reasons why we don't think we're enough. They go so far beyond. And as I see the world and the unsustainable way that capitalism is has reached its kind of end.

Hollee McGinnis:
Like, I think we're all thinking of, we need other models and ways of being in the world that goes above, beyond our productivity. So our worth and our value, our enoughness, we don't have to be what to show.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah, it's really an interesting lesson, and I do fear that we're starting to backpedal from that a bit with what's going on in the west right now, particularly in our country. And it's interesting that, like, I had had a guest on Angela Tucker, brilliant. And was an expert on transracial adoption, and she wrote a book called You Should Be Grateful. Because she was always split between this feeling like, I don't belong, and this is...it's like, something is wrong here. But she was always told, well, you should be grateful that, you know, your parents adopted you and that you're here and that you have this life. And so there was this interesting dichotomy of, yeah, we're living in, like, this wonderful, rich, opulent country, but we still feel like there's something wrong. Like, we overcompensate you know, we mentally tell ourselves, like, logically, yes, I should be grateful, but emotionally, it's hard to name and accept, express what it is we're feeling that causes us.

Jennifer Norman:
And then we feel bad about feeling that way because we should be grateful.

Hollee McGinnis:
Yeah, I like to say, stop shoulding on yourself.

Jennifer Norman:
I do that, too. That's one of my favorite phrases.

Hollee McGinnis:
Yeah. And then the other question I would often ask my students is, is it your thought or is it a condition? And that takes a lot of discernment to be able to even ask that. But so much of our responses in the world are. Is often a conditioned response. It's a one that we've been told by society. It's appropriate way. And I think that, you know, if you are on a journey to know your own truth, you do have to shed all the ways that you have conditioned so you can understand the true who I am. And maybe after you shed, you can say, okay, well, I'll take that one back again.

Hollee McGinnis:
I'll take that one back again. But maybe I'm going to invent a whole new part. So I think identity work is just such a ongoing spiral of trying on and removing. But if we never take the risk or the courage or the chance to kind of take off some of the identities that we have held or even think that we can, because often people are like, oh, I just am who I am. Right. But there's a story in the who you are, and that part can be narrated differently or seen through different lenses. And I just encourage people to find the story that resonates most with you, because whether it's good or bad could be just like moving ocean. Right.

Hollee McGinnis:
Like, one day it's good, one day it's bad. But the truth is really, ultimately what you say to be true for you, and that's going to be then the life that unfolds for you. And I think that's very hard for adoptees who often feel like there's a truth out there that they'll never know because they don't have access to certain information. And I would agree we might not know with actual information or data points. And. And that is to be mourned, that is to feel anger or. But in many ways, too, there is a part that is totally our agency, and that is the meaning that you're going to make out of the life you've been given. And I think that can be really challenging for many people.

Hollee McGinnis:
Right. Because again, I think the thing for adoptees is that, like, that other potential life actually is A real thing. People who are born into their families and they wish they had another family or adoptees are like, well, I did have another family. And then we project all of these fantasies onto that other family that could have been whatever. And it could have been whatever.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Hollee McGinnis:
But I think to. To have vitality though, and to find meaning not in the fancy or the life that you could have had, but the life that you're actually having. I think that that tremendous effort and also a true doorway to healing and knowing who you are.

Jennifer Norman:
Wow. Yeah. I love that you have so much knowledge about the concept of post traumatic growth and the first naming and identifying and being able to move past that into some form of acceptance or some sort of agency. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of these steps of post traumatic growth that has help people really thrive after they've gone through a lot of these questions in their own minds?

Hollee McGinnis:
Yeah. So this is, you know, I've been. I've been digesting some of these concepts of like post traumatic growth in the context of adoption. And what I appreciate is how a trauma lens has helped us shift from what's wrong with you. So a lot of the earlier work was really like, there was something pathological about the adoptee that was wrong with them was why they behaved externally or internally and kind of acted out.

Jennifer Norman:
Interesting.

Hollee McGinnis:
The trauma lens said, no, maybe it's nothing wrong with that person intrinsically, but maybe something happened to them to which they are responding to. And that to me is really more of the truth that if you are removed from your family, your country, your land, I think you might have a reaction and it might be crying and acting out and fighting. Right. And that's a normal and an appropriate response. The problem is, is that when we get stuck in those responses, and often little children get stuck in those responses, they become our default way of coping with the things that have happened to us. I read the really interesting article about how attachment styles show up at work. So if you. I'm an avoidant attachment style.

Hollee McGinnis:
So when I get an email, I avoid it. I don't respond right away.

Hollee McGinnis:
People like, I don't need to be protected. It's an email. But if they go unconsciously. Right. And if they, if they don't get a little loving and attention, we can just be operating on these unconscious default programming. Right. That maybe helped us when I was 2 or 3, but does not need to be carried adult like dealing with an email.

Jennifer Norman:
Right.

Hollee McGinnis:
So. And then what I realized is that in the trauma lenses like understanding what happened to you. A lot of the ways that adoption is, adoption myths get perpetuated. It prevents us from actually naming the thing that happened to us. You know, oh, you're so lucky. Like he said, that means that we don't have to talk about what happened on the other side of being unlucky and how that feels to maybe be unlucky. Right. Or love is enough.

Hollee McGinnis:
Love is a lot. But a love in and of itself can't heal us from, from the parts that we've lost or forgotten if we don't name those parts that have been lost and forgotten. And so really, I think the journey from a trauma informed to post a traumatic growth is being able to have the time, the space, the naming, the acknowledging of what had truly happened to you and not in only just the good way and the way that you came into a family, but also in the way that you lost a family. But the post traumatic growth also is moving through that is that digestion of the, of what has happened to you so that you're not bypassing those feelings and emotions. And that's really what I got to see in hindsight was that in my 20s and starting, also known as I was making sense of my experience, but not the depths of the emotions and the feelings that were still lying there. And that for me had to come 20 years later for me to really do that deep, deep level healing and acknowledging, because that was very. Makes you very, very vulnerable to truly be able to enter into the depth of loss and grief and abandonment feelings, you know. But that's where the post traumatic growth really happens and that's where you have digested, composted, integrated these things that had happened to you so that you actually understand how they have now happened for you.

Hollee McGinnis:
And I bypassed, wanted to do the hard dive. I just often was like, oh, adoption was great. This is how it happened for me. Right. But that was just a surface level. It's only when you really, and hopefully you do this work in community in connection with a therapist. But it can happen in many ways for us to walk through those emotions to really get to the other side so that we can truly see how the challenging parts of our lives are really also our doorway to our inner gold and returning back to our true selves. Yeah.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah. Hit subscribe right now for more stories and inspiring conversations with me, Jennifer Norman, the host of The Human Beauty Movement Podcast.

Jennifer Norman:
It sounds like there's a lot of work that adoptees themselves do. What about the parents? I'm just curious because the rate of adoption has dropped dramatically for numerous reasons over the past 20, 30 years. But there's still a lot of inter country adoption and domestic adoption. What are good things for parents to know and to maybe incorporate as they're bringing up an adopted child?

Hollee McGinnis:
I say for parents, and I'm a parent too, of two boys, to be the best parent is to do your own work.

Jennifer Norman:
Yay. Amen.

Hollee McGinnis:
So one of the ways I like to to describe it is, is that if you haven't done your work on something, that when your child then is having that emotion, it's going to trigger you and you're going to be responding then more from your hurt rather than a larger capacity to hold whatever emotion is that your child is feeling. So in the context of adoption, all members of the adoption triad, adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents, have experiences of gain, losses and search. So when the adoptee is mourning the losses and the adoptive parent has not yet mourned their losses of having a biological connection to the child that they are raising, who they adopted, or their loss of maybe a biological child who was miscarried or something, that when the adoptee is feeling their losses that adopt a parent, if they have not done their work to digest, compost, integrate their losses, they're going to be reacting from a very different place, right? More from their hurt rather than from the capacity to hold what it is that their adopted child might need. So that's just my example. So I think that is the hardest. I think our children are our best teachers because children are really honest and often our reaction and responses to them. If we're not discerning about what our own triggers are, we can blame children when it's really our own recognized hurts or pains that are simply being triggered. So that to me is for any parent, but I think that for adoptees is particularly, or adoptive families, we need to particularly be aware of the gains, how we've benefited.

Hollee McGinnis:
And I think many of us want to stay in that area, like, because that feels good to emphasize, like, oh, how we all benefiting, oh, whatever, you got a family, I got a kid, all that kind of thing. But loss is like the front of the hand, back of the hand. We can't gain unless we lost something. And so the loss is the harder part. And then for adoption it is about searches too, like searching for who I am. And so in a lot of the adoption literature, adoptive parents are not able to join their adoptive children when they are searching for those questions about who I am because they feel more threatened by it because they have not maybe resolved their own search for who they are or how the adoption fulfilled an aspect of who they are. And now that the adoptee is saying, yeah, but my life incorporates a whole nother family that no longer fits into what the adoptive parent was seeking. And, and I like to really say that adoption means more.

Hollee McGinnis:
So it means more love, so, you know, two families, whatever. But also means more heartache, more loss, more of the bad stuff too. So it is a complicated kind of family and I think it just means more. Yeah.

Jennifer Norman:
I heard Peter Crone having a conversation with this woman who was adopted and she was crying because she felt like she couldn't have these relationships. And she was saying, it's because I was adopted and I'm not loved. And he said, how can you flip that around? Adoption means, man, you were loved, you were wanted. And just like that little mindset shift is so empowering compared to the shrinking that can happen with the mindset of I'm just like, I don't belong, I'm not loved. And so doing that work to really reintegrate and to your two point compost and really rehash and release like those feelings of, of sadness and frustration and loss and turn it into, this can be such a positive way forward. This is how I can convert that pain into my purpose going forward. And then doing that healing work so that you can then be a better partner, a better parent to the next generation that you might have, just as you have learned. It's so beautiful. Really, really beautifully said.

Hollee McGinnis:
And I think the other part where I'm moving to is like, how can we move away from a binary into a flow? And so I, I keep thinking I, I want to be done. Like I don't want to have to deal anymore. But they keep coming back.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah. Yeah. That doesn't mean like the fully healed thing.

Hollee McGinnis:
It's like, I feel great.

Jennifer Norman:
Doesn't mean the triggers will completely go away.

Hollee McGinnis:
Exactly. It's. It's just like, just know that some days you're gonna feel like, this is not so good. And then you're gonna flow back another way. And both of them are true, and then both of them are not true because it moves from one into another. And so that's been something that I've been really trying on because I think I've been so stuck in what I like to call is a model of cure, which is like, I'm going to eradicate these symptoms and feelings of guilt, shame. Not enough. And you're just not.

Hollee McGinnis:
Because it's part of your humanity that we're going to have doubts and our ego is very fragile and, you know, needs a lot of love. And so really making friend with that part of you that feels vulnerable, that feels like not enough. That part of you is not something to banish or to. To kick out the door, but it is something to befriend and let her know or him know or them know that part of you that you belong here too, because that's the thing that they're afraid of. Your ego's like, oh, don't annihilate me. You keep pushing me out. So how can you befriend those parts that are really trying to protect you, but they're just a little bit outgrown and befriend them as you say? No, you can come with me. As we heal, as we become whole, as we know that I am my husband.

Hollee McGinnis:
I am also this power and beauty and love and compassion. I am both.

Jennifer Norman:
Oh my gosh, that is such gold wisdom. And I think that the more that we can live in that kind of flow, the more we are aware, we're more. More self aware. And so more often we can make decisions and act from a place of love rather than a place of sadness and that torment and those feelings of unhealed wounds. And I think that that's what part of it and recognizing, oh, I didn't act from a place of pure love and from healing. I acted from a place of a wound and being able to forgive yourself for that and to have a conversation with another about the fact that, yes, I realize what I've done and I accept that and I own it, and I'm sorry. And that is so much more of a powerful, healthy relationship. It's never going to be perfect.

Jennifer Norman:
And we are not perfect. To your point, this is humanity. But that awareness that I can always strive to be a little bit better. I'm going to have off days and stress is going to get me and tiredness and all of the things that happen in life, but if I can more often make decisions that are from a place of clarity, from a place of love, from an understanding that I had these wounds. But maybe tomorrow and the next day and the next day, they're not going to be as deep and they're not going to be as painful, and I'll be able to showcase that to my kids and teach them healthy coping mechanisms rather than the unhealthy ones that so many have resorted to.

Hollee McGinnis:
Exactly. Because I mean, again, our culture is so entrenched in, numbing out those feelings.

Jennifer Norman:
That quickly feel good to us.

Hollee McGinnis:
Yeah.

Jennifer Norman:
And quickly ignore it.

Hollee McGinnis:
Eradicate. Right. And those are all just forms of running away. But the gold is like, no, you're gonna feel those things and being able to face into them. And again, like you said, what a wonderful role model of. For young people. Like, we feel things. That's part of being human, and it's part of what makes us beautiful because we feel great things and we feel really dense things, too.

Hollee McGinnis:
But one is not better or worse, but it's all just something to move through. Because even those happy days, the rainy day, comes. So realizing that that's just the nature of being human and our job maybe is just to be great surfers of the emotional waves that come around and then calling in enough of a core that can ride in this. Because I think a lot of people who. Especially who are highly sensitive people, they're moving with the emotions of the whole, and they lose themselves. So I'm not saying that either. But cultivating whatever practices work for you that help you to retain and know that whatever wave of emotion comes through you, there is still a selflessness and a core that can't be moved or changed. And I know in my healing over the last five years was really searching for new stories and different narratives of healing and wholeness that were not based on capitalism and getting to some place and some finish line and eradicating something and, like, beating everybody else, you know? And there was this beautiful story, and it's a true story, actually, of this golden Buddha in Thailand.

Hollee McGinnis:
It's solid gold, and this was maybe a couple hundred years ago, and the monks knew there were some, like, marauding groups of people coming, that if they saw this gold Buddha, it would be stolen. So they cover the gold Buddha all up in cement and stone. And, you know, the marauders come, they just think it's a stone Buddha. Of course it stays there. But then time goes by and the monks forget, and they just think that they have a stone Buddha. Until one day, a monk is cleaning the stone Buddha, and a part of it falls off, and underneath he sees the gold. And then they remove all of the stone, and there is this beautiful golden Buddha. And I actually happened to go to that temple, so I have this little golden Buddha.

Hollee McGinnis:
It's right here. Let me see if I can show it to you. So it's beautiful.

Jennifer Norman:
Oh, look at that. So pretty. Wow.

Hollee McGinnis:
But what I love about it and why it's kind of shared is really that it's a metaphor. Of our own evolution and growth, that we are all born golden. And. But life happens. Things we start to pile on. We try to protect with our stone and cement, but then in that process, we forget who we are. And so I think the journey of healing is removing all of the stones and sticks that we had put on to protect ourselves so that we can know the true gold of who we are.

Jennifer Norman:
Wow. What a lovely, lovely story. And I think that that was one of my quests toward more spirituality rather than dogma of religion, because I felt like there were so many restrictions and there's so many different identities that happen. And if we lift out of that place and we think of ourselves as just these souls on this magical journey in these human forms, then there's so much more that connects us, and there's less of a need to have that power over, rather than having that power with, as you talk about in some of your work, and just understanding that we are all in this and we're having these interesting experiences because we've been called to contemplate, to discover, to be curious, to enjoy, enlighten all of these things. And I just find that story that you just mentioned of the Golden Buddha is very much that. It's a lot of the human condition that we forget how magical we are, we forget how extraordinary we are, and we live these lives kind of locked in to all of these societal norms, to, whether it be capitalism, whether it be to following orders, whether it be to trying to live to the expectations of other people. When we know how extraordinary you are, we are empowered to just live our best lives and let our light shine so that others can also be inspired to let their light shine too. I think it's one of the reasons why I have this butterfly here because it reminds me of being reborn and just remembering that we can fly.

Hollee McGinnis:
Magic is real. Did anybody tell you otherwise? That's so true.

Jennifer Norman:
Magic is real.

Hollee McGinnis:
Wow.

Jennifer Norman:
Well, Hollee, to the end, I always ask these three constant questions of all of my guests, and these are a reminder of what connects us all. It's our beauty and our humanity and the truths that we live by. So my first question to you is, what makes you beautiful?

Hollee McGinnis:
I think. I think it's my discerning mind and my loving heart.

Jennifer Norman:
Discerning mind, loving heart. What does it mean to be human?

Hollee McGinnis:
To be human is to feel the highs and the lows of life. I think our emotional bodies is our humanity. And I just think about how much our current culture numbs and blocks us from our full emotional range. Thinking that we have to stay in this very narrow, like, happy range, right? But it's like we feel happy, we feel sad, and then we come back up and we feel happy. I often kind of, I use this metaphor of a bouncy ball that, like, the harder you throw a bouncy ball down, the higher it will go up. And so our fear of feeling deep feelings means that we're also hearing our ability and capacity, like, to feel incredible love and connection. If we're afraid to feel our losses, you know, those are our doorways to our compassion and deepest connection and highest states of, like, unconditional love and compassion. So at least that's been my experience the times that I've been willing often sometimes not willing to, but the choice when I have brought down to feel deeply something how I can carry the deep compassion now when I see other people suffering.

Jennifer Norman:
An amazing answer. And then my last question. What's one truth you live by?

Hollee McGinnis:
It's all gonna change.

Jennifer Norman:
It's the only constant - change.

Hollee McGinnis:
But I always, you know what? You can step back and be like, yep, change is the constant, it's the flow, you know? Yes, this shall pass. Even though I'm like, how is it gonna.

Jennifer Norman:
When is it gonna pass?

Hollee McGinnis:
Controlling, wanting to know my egoic self. Always wants to know what the answer is, what the next rock is going to be so we can avoid it. It's like, like, nah, nah. The adventure of life is not, though.

Jennifer Norman:
Oh, that is so beautiful. I would love for every adoptee, every parent to know how they can get in touch with you, how they can learn more about your work. Can you let everybody know where they can find you if they were to do a search?

Hollee McGinnis:
Sure. I'm on Instagram at Hollee, H O L L E E, McGinnis, M C G I N N I S, and you can find me by the same name on LinkedIn, Facebook and happy to connect.

Jennifer Norman:
Oh my goodness. Ladies and gents, beautiful humans, Dr. Hollee McGinnis, I am just so delighted that we had this conversation. I feel like I've learned so, so much from you today and I know that this is going to be so valuable for our listeners. Thank you so much for being such a beautiful human, Hollee.

Hollee McGinnis:
Thank you so much. Much love, Much love.

Jennifer Norman:
Thank you for listening to The Human Beauty Movement Podcast. Be sure to follow, rate and review us wherever you stream podcasts. The Human Beauty Movement is a community based platform that cultivates the beauty of humankind. Check out our workshops, find us on social media and share our inspiration with all the beautiful humans in your life. Learn more at TheHumanBeautyMovement.com. Thank you so much for being a beautiful human.