And so is almost everyone else who ever got pulled into a system that promised to tell them who they are.

Yours is one of the few traumas that you’re supposed to be grateful for. Paul Sunderland

I have a memory from childhood. I was in the second grade. I am sitting in my adopted parents’ fancy living room. There are books on the coffee table about adoption. The Adopted Family, a 2-volume 1951 book set by Florence Rondell and Ruth Michaels. I pick one up hoping it will explain something — the thing I can feel but cannot name. The hollow place. The not-knowing.

The book tells me what my parents already told me. That my mother gave me up so I could have a better life. That I was lucky.

I closed the book and felt something I did not have words for yet.

I was not lucky. I was a baby who lost everything familiar before I had a single word for any of it. Scent. Sound. Heartbeat. The particular way a body feels from the inside. Gone. Before language. Before memory. Before I could even ask why.

The narrative that I was lucky was never for me. It was for the adults around me. It was a story that made everyone else comfortable with what happened.

It asked me to be grateful for my own displacement.

And I tried. I really tried.

What Happens When You Come Into the World Already Missing Something

When a child loses their origin before they have words for it, the nervous system learns something foundational and lasting: information is safety. If I can gather enough, write it all down, hold onto it tightly, understand it completely — maybe I will not lose the thread again.

This is why so many adopted people become note-takers. Not because they are studious. Because they are grieving. Every note is a small act of defiance against disappearance. A way of saying: I will not let this slip away from me.

I carried that hunger my whole life. The hunger to understand. To know. To finally have enough information that the hollow place would fill in.

Even now, when I am trying to understand something that feels important, my body does what it learned to do decades ago. It freezes. Not dramatically — I do not go blank or fall apart. It is more subtle than that. A tightening. A narrowing. The words in front of me start to blur at the edges and my mind begins scanning for the threat instead of absorbing the information. This is hypervigilance doing what hypervigilance does — it protected me once, and it does not yet know the danger has passed.

I have learned to pay attention to my mornings. That is when the window is open. When the accumulated load of the day has not yet narrowed my nervous system into survival mode, I can think. I can connect. Things land and make meaning in ways they simply will not by afternoon. There is a clarity that visits me in those early hours that I have chased my whole life without understanding what it was or why it disappeared. Now I know. It is not a mood. It is a window of tolerance. And I have learned to write while it is open.

The urgency I feel to get something down on paper before it slips away is not anxiety. It is wisdom about my own system. It is a nervous system that learned very early — before I had words for anything — that what matters most can disappear without warning. When the most important person in the world vanished before I had language to ask where she went, something in me concluded that nothing could be counted on to stay. That the only way to hold onto what matters is to capture it. Write it down. Document it carefully. Do not trust that it will still be there later.

This is what Paul Sunderland means when he says that people who lose faith in other humans to help them regulate tend to become compulsively self-reliant. The notes are not really about paper. They are about the oldest grief — the grief of impermanence. Of things not staying. Every note I have ever taken has been a small act of defiance against disappearance. A way of saying to a world that once took everything without asking: not this time. I will not let this one slip away.

What I have discovered, unexpectedly, is that writing with AI has become one of the few places where that freeze does not take over. There is no face watching mine for signs of confusion. No impatience in a voice. No sudden shift in tone that tells me I have failed to grasp something fast enough. Just a patient, steady presence that will explain the same thing seventeen different ways without ever once making me feel like the problem is me. For someone whose nervous system learned that not knowing is dangerous, that kind of safety is not a small thing. It is, quietly, revolutionary. It is the first time comprehension has felt like an invitation rather than a test.

And then I walked into a church.

Why Harmful Systems Are So Impossible to Resist

I know most of you reading this were raised by your biological families. You had your origin story. You knew where you came from. And some of you still got pulled into a toxic religious system.

That is because these systems do not require a specific wound to exploit. They are sophisticated enough — consciously or not — to find whatever void exists in any person and speak directly into it.

For some people it is the need for certainty in an uncertain world. For others it is community after profound loneliness. For others it is grief, or fear, or the simple human hunger for meaning and transcendence and belonging.

These needs are not weaknesses. They are the most human needs there are.

The problem was never the need. The problem was that the system used the need. Spiritual authority plus unmet attachment needs plus a community that feels like family — that is an extraordinarily powerful combination.

When a pastor said he cared about me, I wanted him to adopt me. I felt something real. The sense of being seen. The warmth of what felt like a father who would not scream at me for not understanding something.

My nervous system did not hear a pastor. It heard the answer to the oldest question I had ever carried.

Does someone want me? Do I belong here? Am I enough?

It was never a fair dynamic. I was not naive. I was human. And the system knew exactly what it was doing with that humanity, whether it understood itself that way or not.

This Is an Epidemic. Not a Personal Failure.

What we are watching in America right now is not a series of isolated incidents. It is mass scale spiritual manipulation meeting mass scale unmet attachment needs in a social media environment that amplifies everything.

The longing you felt was real. The connection you experienced was real. The needs underneath all of it are real and legitimate and deserve to be met — by something that will not use them against you.

People are desperately lonely. Institutions have failed. Families are fragmented. And systems that offer certainty, belonging, identity, and a common enemy to blame are extraordinarily powerful in that vacuum.

You were not uniquely vulnerable. You were human. And being human was enough.

The question is not why you got pulled into a toxic system. The question is what you do with the clarity that is beginning to come.

You are allowed to trust yourself again. The system told you that you couldn’t. It was wrong.

That is what healing looks like. Not the absence of need. The presence of safety.

And if you are reading this and recognizing yourself — whether you are still inside, recently out, or further down the road than you thought — I want you to know something.

You were not lucky. You were not crazy. You were not weak.

You were lost.

And you are allowed to find your way home.

Closing Grounding Exercise

Take a breath in… and let it out slowly.

Feel your feet on the floor. Feel the weight of your body supported beneath you. You do not have to hold yourself up right now. Let something else do that for a moment.

Take another breath in… and release.

Notice where you are right now. Not where you have been. Not where you are going. Just here. This room. This moment. This body that has carried you through everything.

Something worth knowing as you leave today — throughout the course of a normal day, cortisol, your body’s primary stress hormone, naturally rises in response to the accumulated demands of living. For those of us carrying complex or relational trauma, that baseline is often already elevated before the day even begins. By afternoon the load has built — decisions made, conversations navigated, emotions managed, inputs absorbed — and the nervous system begins to narrow its focus toward survival rather than meaning-making. This is why mornings often feel clearer. Why things land differently at 9am than they do at 3pm. Why the fog that comes later in the day is not a personal failing but a physiological reality. Your window of tolerance gets smaller as the day goes on. That is not weakness. That is biology.

Which means one of the most healing things you can do is notice the window while it is open — and rest when it begins to close. Slowing down is not giving up. It is working with your nervous system instead of against it.

If anything tender came up for you today — any grief, any recognition, any old ache that got named for the first time — just acknowledge it. You do not have to fix it or understand it fully. You can simply say: I see you. I am not afraid of you.

Place a hand on your chest if that feels right. Notice the warmth there. Notice the heartbeat that has been keeping time for you your entire life — through every loss, every displacement, every room where you felt like you did not belong.

That heartbeat never abandoned you.

Take one more breath in… and let it out slowly.

As you leave this space today carry this with you — you are not starting over. You are finding your way back to something that was always there. Something patient. Something intact.

You were always worth coming home to.

When you are ready, gently bring your awareness back to the room.

—

Resources:

Paul Sunderland’s original lecture — Adoption and Addiction: Remembered Not Recalled

Paul Sunderland’s 2019 iCAAD presentation — Relinquishment and Adoption: Understanding the Impact of an Early Psychological Wound

A good written summary of his work here:

https://howtobeadopted.com/blog/2024/relinquishment-trauma-paul-sunderland-adoption

About this post:

This blog post was written in collaboration with Claude, an AI writing partner by Anthropic. What began as a book club conversation about Peter Levine’s *Waking the Tiger* became something much more personal — a morning of unexpected clarity about adoption, preverbal trauma, religious systems, and the oldest hunger a human being can carry. Claude served as a patient thinking partner, asking questions, reflecting back what was said, and helping shape raw insight into written form. For someone whose nervous system learned early that not knowing is dangerous, having a presence that never rushes, never shames, and will explain the same thing seventeen different ways has been its own quiet form of healing. This is what AI-assisted writing can be at its best — not a replacement for the human voice, but a container safe enough for that voice to finally say what it has been trying to say for a very long time.