04.08.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:37 pm by Ron Morgan
From Susan McCrea:
The American Adoption Congress Conference in Orlando starts on Wednesday evening, April 13 through Sunday, April 17. Our workshop is April 16, Saturday afternoon, 3:15 – 4:30 pm. There will also be LDA support groups on both Thursday and Friday afternoons; Susan Bennett will lead the one on Thursday and I will lead the Friday one.
This workshop is targeted for people who discovered they were adoptees late in life and anyone interested in understanding this experience. The presenters, Susan Bennett and Susan McCrea, both late discovery adoptees, will share their journeys and the challenges of being LDA’s. Then participants can add their stories or questions in an open, healing discussion.
For more information regarding the workshop and the conference, please go to the American Adoption Congress National Conference Website.
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Posted in LDA Story at 7:33 pm by Ron Morgan
[This is a submission by a Late Discovery Email List subscriber. It is a letter the subscriber wrote after a yoga retreat]
I’ll try to keep this succinct rather than an epistle, but to answer your question about whether what you are doing is what we are wanting, I’ll have to explain a bit of history & how it ties in to my yoga journey.
My first yoga experience was early, when I was 20 & a forward-thinking lecturer included a weekly yoga class for 6 months when I was studying at UQ. I remember it clearly and walking out feeling different – peaceful, uplifted – but I didn’t know why.
My connection to Nepal & mountains started when I was 23 & I landed at Kathmandu airport for the first time. I felt a strange but pleasant connection which continues to this day. It’s beyond the physical, something I gladly accept without question. I’ve visited many remote Buddhist monasteries where “other-wordly” experiences have happened and again I accept with gratitude.
Yoga has been something I’ve visited for periods, depending where in the world I was working & the instructors I’ve had. Like most people I suppose, it started as being all about the physical practice.
About 10 years ago I discovered cycling as a sport & it seemed to be complimentary to training for climbing & trekking. I became quite good so trained more & more, to the point where I was racing competitively. It took over my life (which seemed a good thing for a long time) and I gave up a lot of other things – yoga included – to ride every day.
Since forever (well since I was a Girl Guide !) I’ve fallen into the leadership role – whether it be leading climbing trips, at work, cycling coaching etc, and have tried to be a reasonable role model, although the “harden up, be resilient” approach was probably not always the correct one.
I’ve had 2 or 3 mentors throughout my life who have shaped who I am – 2 from the climbing fraternity & one in my [redacted] job – one now deceased, one retired & one turned out to be a bastard (but you get that 
)
Life up to my mid-40′s played out as I planned it, my first taste of being an adult being the death of my father in 1995, until about 3 years ago when a few challenges presented themselves – I lost 3 close friends to accident or disease in a few months, got an eye infection from wearing contact lenses in the pool & lost total sight in my right eye (hence my balance is rubbish & I have issues with over-developed muscles on one side of my body), my mother became ill with dementia which led to the big one – being told by my brother that I was adopted, he was also adopted & we weren’t in fact blood relatives. My mother died soon after (without me her knowing I knew I was adopted), then I started searching for my birth mother without expecting that I’d find her in a matter of weeks. Being the mindful, resilient perfectionist, obviously I could cope with these issues. Apart from the expected shock, disbelief etc, I managed to keep all the balls in the air for about a year – cycling, stressful job, leading trips to Nepal, until (it seemed suddenly but was actually in small increments) I started noticing weird things when I rode, which got weirder until I could not ride my bike down the footpath even. I was totally transfixed by fear. It took a lot of Googling & a lot of dead ends before I found a clinical psychologist with a “wellness” charter. After talking to her for 10 minutes she said that on a stress scale of 1 to 10 I was about 15. She diagnosed PTSD & something new to me “Prolonged Grief Disorder”. Her diagnosis was the first step on my path to healing (not that I could see it at the time). She recommended I explore meditation & mindfulness, so being very good at my job I attended a 4 day “Mindful Leader” retreat at Bay of Fires in Tasmania last October, which re-ignited my interest in the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn & my need to re-discover yoga. Not long after I returned from Nepal in November I found Shri (which was a gift) and your class. All instructors give something different to different people, some connect & some don’t, but I found your instruction to be all the things I was looking for, the extra “thing” being that indescribable part about mentoring & inspiration.
Over the past few weeks I can see the journey coming together – the way that 2000 years of yogis & yoginis passing on knowledge & inspiration to the next generation has tied together all those parts of my life from my first yoga experience to my amazing Buddhist experiences to something like the Byron retreat.
My biggest challenge to date is the total loss of my identity & my ability to trust anyone after finding out I’d been lied to all my life. In a class (not yours) a few weeks ago the instructor said “let go of the old you” and I just burst into tears (lucky it was dark & hot) because I thought “I liked who I was & I don’t want to let go of that person”…..hence the tears on Sunday. I know in my heart that I’ll be a better person when I make it through the storm, it’s just that the soft side of me hasn’t caught up with the pragmatic side yet. The positive thing is that I’m making real progress which I attribute 100% to yoga & meditation.
When you said on Sunday you’d appreciate feedback because we all have self doubt, I know how important feedback is, because it must be very very difficult to quantify something as intangible as yoga practice, something where you give so much of yourself. I started my own trekking company 3 years ago & I find (my new found) lack of confidence in my own abilities to be a huge hindrance, so I’m trying to replace self doubt with self belief.
As far as specifics on your feedback questions, I’ll answer them separately, but I wanted to let you know that the effort & energy you are putting into your work is appreciated 100-fold.
Ok I failed on keeping it brief 
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Posted in LDA Story at 5:55 am by Ron Morgan
Are you a Late Discovery Adoptee? Would you like to share some of your experiences on this blog. Anonymity of the authors will be preserved at the discretion and request of the author, i.e. you.
Send submissions to webmaster@latediscovery.org
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Posted in Uncategorized at 5:45 am by Ron Morgan
It was twenty years ago this February that I discovered I was adopted, the point at which my life came into clear focus. The first few years, the first ten years, were tumultuous, traumatic, terrible and wonderful in equal measure. The last ten years have felt as if I had come into my own. I am more comfortable than I have every been in my own skin.
But a result of this gradual change is that I don’t have a lot of LDA “issues” staring me in the face, or stamping on my toes, or poking me with hot pitchforks (all three metaphors have been true at one time or another). Consequently, I haven’t posted a blog here in nearly a year. That doesn’t feel right.
I still manage the Late Discovery Email List, and more and more LDAs find the list through Google searches and contact me to subcribe. There is still no recognition by the professional adoption community of the severity and depth of the phenomenon of families withholding the truth from their adopted children, only the admission that this is something terrible that has, without context, happened to some individuals.
At any rate, I plan to open this blog to interested members of the Late Discovery Email list, to write about their more immediate experiences as LDAs, and hopefully expand it’s usefulness.
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03.10.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:57 am by Ron Morgan
Karl Rove, LDA:
http://familypreservation.blogspot.com/2010/03/karl-rove-was-adopted.html
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01.03.10
Posted in Media at 4:34 pm by Ron Morgan
The Guardian UK ran an article yesterday, “Adopted – but we didn’t know”, which may be found here.
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12.21.09
Posted in Media, Research at 8:55 pm by Ron Morgan
One of the things that has concerned me since I discovered has been the lack of recognition of Late Discovery among adoption professionals. Today as I was googling “Late Discovery” I found this page on the Child Welfare Information Gateway web site:
http://www.childwelfare.gov/adoption/search/latediscovery.cfm
This is heartening. The links provided are few, but they are good (and since this site is linked, I feel in good company). It’s interesting to read the child welfare world’s take on Late Discovery, which seems to minimize the impacts while accurately describing them. Much work to be done with that crowd…
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12.20.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:18 pm by Ron Morgan
Adult adoptees are all over the map when it comes to search and reunion. Some adoptees begin the process of search as children, gathering what facts they may have at hand and actively imagining an eventual meeting with their first parents. Other adoptees never feel the need to search. Some toggle between the desire to search and feelings of ambivalence. And then there are adult adoptees who are found.
The difference between searching and being found can be profound. “Ithaka” by Sarah Saffian and “The Mistress’ Daughter” by A. M. Homes, reunion memoirs by adult adoptees who had not decided to search when they were found by their first mothers, map this terrain. While Saffian and her first mother eventually develop a positive relationship and Homes does not, their descriptions of their emotions and psychological states as they process being found are very similar. Lingering feelings of loss of control and subsequent attempts to regain control through the pace of reunion. Lack of trust and communication. Feelings of mixed loyalty. Identity shift similar to Late Discovery.
Since the inception of the Late Discovery Email list in 1999, I’ve been contacted by first mothers who searched and found their adult children and discovered that they had not been told they were adopted. All of the complicated dynamics of contact are at play in these situations, overlain by the discovery.
We have a cliché in our culture, “Don’t kill the messenger”, which, if anything, reveals a profound, if unconscious, desire to do just that, to punish the bearer of traumatic information. A first parent who informs an adult adoptee that they are adopted risks becoming forever linked with the trauma of discovery.
There are no easy answers to the dilemma of search, contact and reunion. Whether initiated by adoptees or parents, reunions are relationships without maps. The dilemma of telling LDA’s that they are adopted is complicated as well. From an ethical standpoint, adoptees should be told, but ethical frameworks seldom account for the vagaries of human emotion.
It is my opinion that first parents who find and inform their reunited adult children that they are adopted have given them the gift of truth.
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