This was the topic I spoke about at Thursday night’s adoptive families gathering for Open Adoption and Family Services in Seattle. 

On a scale of one to ten, how are we on our adoption journey:  one feeling discouraged, unhopeful and ten feeling exuberantly joyful about the future.  Most adoptive parents can find themselves all over this spectrum throughout their adoption journey.  At first, once the paperwork is in, there is a feeling of accomplishment and progress and adoptive parents can feel pretty high.  As time passes, and the wait extends sometimes beyond what we had thought we could handle, emotions shift to more pessimistic ones, less hopeful, some anxiousness surfaces. 

Human beings are always in an emotion.  When things are going great, it may seem like we’re not impacted by emotions at all.  Yet, we may be in the emotion of: joy, happiness, or excitement.  When our expectations of what should be happening are not meeting the reality of what is happening, then emotions like sadness, disappointment, irritation, or anger may surface. 

“We are never not in an emotion,” says my friend and colleague, Carol Courcy says, in her 20 year study of Emotional Fitness.  We do have the ability to become aware of our emotions and to shift into a new emotion that we desire and that may serve us better.

Shifting emotions requires first of all that we become aware of the emotions that we are expressing.  Awareness is the first step along the journey of emotional fitness.  Recognizing patterns of emotions that we are in is helpful in shifting to new emotions.  Sometimes we embody a predominant emotion or mood that we have a habit of living in.  We see this in people who may live in a perpetual mood of resentment, or a perpetual mood of ambition.  Over time our bodies take the shape of the moods we are most in the habit of living in.  So shifting our physical shape from contracted to open, for example, can shift our mood from one of hopelessness to one of curiosity and excitement.  Our awareness of the interplay between our moods and how we are showing up physically (our body disposition and shape) is part of developing our own somatic awareness.  This is another step along emotional fitness which I will be discussing in my next blog post.

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