John R. Gregg

In past 2 months I’ve worked with SEVEN adopted men in their recovery from substance abuse. Three of them have also had their own children lost to adoption. It’s pretty eye-opening. The trauma of adoption is being passed down generationally from what I see. Why does the public not discuss this? 🥚

Elmo from Sesame Street in a letter to LinkedIn announcing his lay off due to federal budget cuts and giving his qualifications for future employment

A fucking travesty what they’re doing to public media.

Imagine telling a cancer patient that they are not trying hard enough to get better.

If you are having problems in recovery, try other things. It’s not you, you just haven’t found the right treatment yet. It isn’t one-size-fits-all, there are lots of way to recover.

“As they’ve had so much trauma and chaos in their lives.” I totally relate to this. I never was upstate, but my life was very chaotic and I was just trying to survive mostly. It wasn’t til I got sober that I started thinking about adoption. It’s cool that you work with incarcerated adoptees. 👊🏻

Awesome. Glad to connect. Reach out if you need support or just wanna “have coffee”. 👍🏻

Would the adoptee community find a thread on the various recovery programs available other than AA, with a brief overview, links to resources, pros & cons and personal experiences helpful? I know of about a dozen, some that are not widely known and some that can be done online. 🥚

It’s not just lack of medical records or knowledge of adoption trauma that hindered my recovery. It was adoption ITSELF. I was conditioned to always be a likable person or people would reject me, so in treatment I would minimize or lie to therapists out of fear of rejection. Anyone else the same? 🥚

It’s a funny meme, but actually is a lot more relatable to many folks who aren’t down with the God thing in 12-Step programs. Myself included….because THIS I get.

Oh it’s going to happen. But I’m still pretty new and have already been pretty aggressive about criticizing adoptee treatment. So for now, until I’m more settled & confident, I’ll pick my spots when colleagues will actually listen and then come REALLY hard. 🥚

Same. I needed to hold myself accountable, so I left “Adoptee Twitter”. All I was doing was saying same things over and over, but I wasn’t really DOING anything. That’s why my new job is so meaningful to me, because now I’m actually backing up my words with actions.

Haha! I should give it more than 24 hours, huh? 😜

Was just listening to podcast interview with one of my favorite musicians, Mike Patton (greatest vocalist of my generation imo), where he says “being yourself is the easiest thing in the world.”

Love you, Mike, but for adoptees being yourself is literally the HARDEST thing in the world. 🥚

A substance use disorder is only disease that I can think of that when the treatment doesn’t work, the patient is blamed. The abstinence model led me to years of shame & guilt for “not trying hard enough”.

Patient blaming in addiction treatment is a big problem.

“Most electronic health records don’t even have an option to indicate that a patient is adopted or has limited family medical history,” she said. “That’s an easy fix. Adding checkboxes for ‘Adopted’ or ‘Unknown family history’ could make a world of difference in normalizing the experience.”
🥚

bsky.app/profile/john...

The first thing I noticed when procuring a new job at a substance abuse facility. And my own lived experience has shown that adoption was not discussed in treatment settings unless I brought it up and even then it was more of a curiosity rather than a valuable piece of info

Yeah even if you are in reunion, getting medical history is difficult and you are often at the mercy of bio relatives to give it to you and if you do it can still be inaccurate…bad memory, speculation, inaccuracies, etc.

This is great.

“I don’t care if Mother Teresa said she’d be a great Mom, it’s still 20k for a white one.” 🤣

Being online discussing adoption with others, it’s easy to get discouraged. But offline, there are positive interactions happening. Even in job interviews! 2nd person I’ve heard from who also discussed adoption while interviewing for a job besides me. 🥚

What kind of work?

That’s incredible. Being online you’d think that everyone is clueless about adoption. But actually it seems like folks are actually listening and learning. So yeah, it’s wild, but also very reassuring.

Having family mental health history is a privilege of the kept. 🥚

You as well, Maggie.

Asking about adoption at intake alone isn't enough. The intake form needs to reflect "adopted, family history unknown" as a possible response. Practitioners need to understand what to do with the information. "Unknown" is NOT the same as "no history of." She's got some work to do to make it right.

💯 My own story is that I was unable to get a correct mental health diagnosis until after I’d been in recovery for 10 years, because of lack of family history. Only after reunion was diagnosis corrected and I’d been taking medication that made my illness worse. Trust me I hope to talk about that soon

🥚Communicating with Pinellas County Intergroup. Closed Adoptee AA meeting coming soon to Pinellas County. Already got a building.

Will post thread soon on how to start one in your community. Trust me…we’re all over the rooms. Let’s build a spot for us.

Many of us have suffered deeply from the trauma of adoption, resulting in addictions as a way to cope with the pain. We need a group specifically for adoptees to recover from addiction! Treatment centers and 12-step recovery rooms are filled with adoptees!

Oh man, don’t I know it. I got exactly what you’re looking for. It’s over Zoom but it is adoptee-only and for all addictions….drugs, sex, gambling…whatever. I’ll DM you.

I know. I was just hoping it was a little less toxic here. Overall it looks like it is.

Oh for real? People are doing that?

Never mind that non-biological children are at much higher risk for abuse. So pretty good odds you’d be trafficked from one abuse to a different one. So they might wanna rethink that one. 🤷🏻‍♂️