förbi Koachen Kamina, transracial adoptee in the USA.
I am a domestic, transracial, late discovery adoptee born in 1979 just outside of Dallas, Texas in the USA. At 42, I identify as just another African American woman but I actually didn’t know I was black until I was 14 and even then, I only thought my mother had an affair, or at least that’s what I was told. I believed this lie because I wanted to believe my parents, until I found out, by accident, that I was adopted.
When I found out at 32 that I was indeed adopted, I was going through SO MUCH that I just could not bear to face this truth. I acknowledged it and suffered the ignorant comments people made about me being adopted, to include questions about why I hadn’t searched for my family. It all made me even more defensive. I’ve always had, what I determined to be, rage issues. That certainly didn’t help the matter, constantly being confronted with questions I couldn’t even answer for myself. Instead of facing this horrible new truth, I locked it away and left the USA for almost 10 years.
My adopted home was full of racism, chaos and confusion. I was homeless at 15 because my female adopter put me out. She called the police and they came and waited for me to pack my things and leave. I asked them where I was supposed to go. They said that they didn’t care but I couldn’t stay there because my frail white female adopter was afraid of her big black burden. The best thing that ever happened to me was getting out of that home, though it did prove to make life quite a bit more complex than it originally should have been. Up to this point, we had been fighting over a man almost 15 years my senior that she had been allowing me to see. Until I started to unearth all my trauma, I didn’t even realize that this too was abuse. Nonetheless, in the time she spent with him helping us sneak around to see each other, she fell in love with him. I will leave that first home right there but not before also mentioning that my female adopter’s biological son sexually abused me and when I finally had the courage to bring it up, I found out she knew. So yes, let’s leave them right there.
I had so much trauma in the works before I found out I was adopted that I had spent almost 10 years attending to those wounds before I could even consider the journey out of the fog. I looked to religion, even attending seminary to become a chaplain in the Army. The book “The Secret” began my spiritual transformation. While I am not religious at all anymore, I am quite deeply spiritual as that book set me on the path to study Quantum Physics and other ideas and theories that not only supported my soul but also didn’t go against science. I needed to make sense of it all.
In China, I found the book A New Earth by Ekhart Tolle and started to learn more about energy and discovered I could control my menstrual cramps by focusing on the energy I hold in my body. That led me to discover energy medicine and energy healing, from which I took my atunement to become a Reiki master. Living outside the white noise of the USA gave me an opportunity to explore myself in a way I never had before, and so I did. Meditation became easier and I started growing and changing as I continued to feed my mind with knowledge about my soul and the powerful energy that we all share that is inside us.
I became quite a devout Muslim while living in Saudi Arabia and I studied Buddhism quite a bit while living in Thailand and Myanmar. I was constantly seeking a way to fill up the hole in my heart where a family should have been. Religion didn’t do it. Science didn’t do it. And let’s be painfully direct and say that spirituality didn’t do it either. I desperately wanted to have kids of my own but that was yet another attempt to fill that hole.
I returned to the USA after almost 10 years of living and working abroad in eight different countries during the worst time in my life to be an American, March of 2020, the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m an introvert and an empath, so being at home was great but the problem was I could literally FEEL all the pain of the country. At one point, I was curled under my office desk in tears shaking and crying. The loneliness finally broke me on my birthday, a bad day for many adoptees and I’m no exception. This was the second time I self-sabotaged on my birthday and almost succeeded in ending my life. I was supposed to go see a guy I liked and he went missing. Instead, I got up, got dressed and went out to get the attention I so desperately thought I needed. I was arrested for driving under the influence on my way to who knows where. I was so out of it that I didn’t even know I had driven all the way to another city before I was pulled over and arrested.
That was it for me. I began my reunion journey shortly thereafter. Wherever you go, there you are and I had been running from myself for far too long. In the 10 years I was abroad, groups have formed to assist domestic adoptees in searching for free, using only non identifying information and DNA results. I’m a research fanatic and that’s how I ended up making a turn down the adoptee rabbit hole. I had joined an adoptee group once before and left because I was overwhelmed. Same this time. I joined many groups and each time I would find myself out of place or wildly uncomfortable. Luckily though, not before I made two amazing adoptee friends who are also women of color and transracially adopted. I’m so very thankful for their presence in my life, but I still avoid groups for the most part. I hate discourse that ends up in bickering. The one group I continue to enjoy is one for adoptees who have cut ties with their adoptive families. I have not found another group where I felt this safe.
As I moved through my reunion journey, I continued to hear people say that I NEEDED a therapist. I couldn’t afford one at the time and didn’t have insurance to help. Instead, I joined a support group for adoptees of color. I didn’t fit in there either. It was decent the first session but after that, I began to feel like an outsider yet again. I began to ask for help more to see if anyone had any ideas and one of my new adoptee friends turned me to Joe, one of the very first adoptee psychotherapists to start to write about this. His website stated he offered help for free to those who are moving towards reunion. Nonetheless, after our first session, he started discussing money. He was also an older white male which made me uncomfortable and he attempted to overcompensate by telling me he had a a black girlfriend. It was very creepy and uncomfortable. Needless to say, that didn’t work out either.
After Joe, a former military friend pointed me to a military funded therapist. I was so thankful to find out she was also trained in EMDR. I knew about EMDR because a friend of mine died in another friend’s arms and an Army chaplain suggested I research it to help him process his trauma. However, she ended up being quite racist, calling me a reverse racist. After two sessions, she ended our relationship via a text that almost snapped my soul in two. I had started seeing a very sweet person I was in love with and I was certain that I wouldn’t be able to maintain the relationship or navigate reunion without help. It was like being broken up with, like death. Abandonment has always equalled death to me.
Those two failed attempts at therapy didn’t deter me from continuing my healing journey. Dr. Gabor Mate is one of my favourite trauma experts and he asserts that all of our mental hang ups are a product of trauma, including addictions. He also endorses psychedelics for healing, though that wasn’t the first time I had heard about this. The first time was probably when I was wondering to a friend about near-death-experience and they mentioned DMT, the manufactured version of the plant medicine ayahuasca. At this point I had read a book on how people are able to rewire their brains through following an intensive meditation modality, but that ayahuasca had been able to achieve the same results, often with only one dose. As I went further down the rabbit hole, I found the psychedelic groups on the social media platform ClubHouse, and that’s where I first turned my attention to psilocybin, the psychedelic chemical in magic mushrooms. I had never thought of them before but began to study them more closely. I found they have the same capabilities to rewire the brain and quieten the ego portion of the brain so I could look at my trauma for what it truly is.
When I moved to Arizona in July of 2021, I finally had access and began the search for the medicine (magic mushrooms) while still studying what people had to say about the process. Science has done plenty of studies but I wanted to hear what the natives had to say about it as well. Colonization has allowed white people to appropriate everything and make it seem as though it was their ideas, but these natural healing modalities have been around for 1000s of years. I wanted to hear what everyone had to say so that I could make the best decision for myself. ClubHouse offered that opportunity as well.
In the process of searching for magic mushrooms, I began to search for a therapist. My romantic relationship ended quite violently and I just couldn’t bear the idea of hurting anyone else with my hurts. I believe the concentrated positive energy of my adoptee friend, led me to my new therapist or at least aided in my search. Not only is she very aware of her whiteness and the privilege it yields her, she isn’t uncomfortable to talk about it. She’s also adoption informed, trained in brainspotting and psychedelics for healing. Brainspotting is even more effective than EMDR and requires less prep work. I found her using https://www.psychologytoday.com/us. I like this site because it allows me to search for therapists who accept my insurance, the modality I wanted, and the area of specialty. I always searched for adoption informed first, but would have accepted merely trauma informed. I’m happy I found the therapist I have now because she trusted my intuition about my own healing, even before I did.
At this point, I have done three sessions of psilocybin and 5 therapy sessions and I’m stunned at the breakthroughs and progress I’ve made. I love myself, probably for the first time in my life — truly love myself. I mourned what I lost when I lost my family and have developed deep compassion for myself. My biggest fears to date have been my rage and my issues developing boundaries. Guess what I’m now working on? That’s right, my rage and my boundaries. Why now? It’s amazing what you’re willing to do for someone you love, especially when that someone is yourself! It’s still scary but I know for sure that I’m worth the effort. Now, I’m actively using psilocybin on my own and using my therapist for integration after each ceremony.
I will wrap up by saying that we are all unique, even though we share adoption in common. Before you begin such a radical healing journey, please consider where you are spiritually and emotionally. Also, don’t take other people’s word for anything. Take everything with a grain of salt, even what I have written here. Though people may have a title like doctor or therapist, that doesn’t mean they know which healing path is best for YOU. Only YOU truly know that.
If you don’t have money for a therapist, which I understand wholeheartedly, there are so many resources online that will point you in the right direction and help to give you some insight into your struggles. Take plenty of time reflecting on yourself, your journey and where you want to go before you make any decisions. All the healing you need is already there inside of you. The trick is finding the key to unlock it.
One last thing, healing is a journey, not a destination. Though I am making huge leaps and bounds, I will always be walking down this road. You can’t rush it and you might even hurt yourself if you do. Have patience with yourself, though often easier said than done. Sending love and light to all who read this as you move along your healing path.
Recommended Resources for Healing with Psychedelics
I also recommend joining in on ClubHouse and the groups that discuss this topic. Specifically, there is a couple that I have joined who have been doing this for 14 years i.e., healing people with magic mushrooms. Their names are Tah and Kole. They are VERY knowledgeable.
Find Me
YouTube: Koachen Kamina
Email: KaminaTheKoach@gmail.com
ICAVs other posts with adoptee experience of Magic Mushrooms : My Game Changer & Deep Truths.
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