279 How To Find Healing After Unplanned Pregnancy and Adoption
Episode Summary: As part of our Sacred Scar Story Series, my guest, Julie McLaughlin, opens up about her deeply personal journey through teenage pregnancy and the heart-wrenching decision to give her baby up for adoption. For over 40 years, Julie and her husband kept this secret hidden, carrying the heavy burden of shame that often follows birth moms in similar situations. Julie shares how God transformed her painful wounds into sacred scars, bringing healing and redemption when her son found them decades later. Tune in to hear Julie's powerful story of overcoming the stigma of unplanned pregnancy and discovering the freedom that comes from sharing her story. Quotables from the episode: Areas that God puts us in to minister to others often comes out of our areas of our painful wounds. I was shamed, embarrassed, and shocked when I became pregnant by my then-boyfriend (now-husband). I wasn’t ready to be a mom, and I wasn’t ready to get married, and with a lot of help by my parish-priest and others, I made the difficult decision to put my baby up for adoption. The stigma of that unplanned pregnancy has been with me my entire life. I kept that secret from everyone for over 40 years. I experienced so much shame attached to my actions. Shame makes you feel like you have fallen off the pedestal of life. I disappointed my parents (I was the oldest of five, and my younger brothers didn’t even know about it), and I disappointed myself. There was so much shame. I didn’t feel like I was the good Catholic girl I thought I was supposed to be. I married my baby’s father, and we kept the secret for forty years from most of the people in our lives, including our two daughters we had. We didn’t tell that I had had a son and had put him up for adoption. At the time that happened, only a few people knew. I fabricated a story and that’s what people believed. Although I lived a very full and fulfilling life, there were many things I shied away from (like running for public office) because I didn’t want my story to be found out. Even when other people talked about teenage pregnancy or adoption, I never talked about it. Our painful wounds often tempt us to keep our secrets hidden. Shame prompts fear (fear that we are going to be found out, fear of ridicule, fear that we are going to be rejected or abandoned, fear that people will share our story and it won’t be within our control…). Out of fear, we often then isolate because we don’t want anyone to find out. I probably experienced undiagnosed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I suffered with medical problems through the years, I tried counseling but found out that the counselor’s husband worked with my husband so I feared my story wouldn’t be kept confidential, so I quit going. When you keep your secrets quiet, I believe it will come out manifesting in different ways emotionally, physically, etc. About six years ago, after I placed my son in an entirely private adoption, through Facebook and an ancestry service, my son found us (we had not been looking for him). He found us and told us that he had had a great life, and that he appreciated the decision we had made, and ironically, he and his wife adopted a child (from the same agency I had used) when they were initially unable to have a baby, but then went on to have two more biological children. When my son validated the painful decision we made decades before, not only healed the wound, but filled a hole in my heart all those years. Because the story was out after my son found us, we started sharing our story, and we were received in such a loving way that was nothing like I had feared all those years ago. What we received instead was love and joy and peace. So I was able to write a book about our story, shared my story with countless people and I’ve had the incredible opportunity to meet other birth moms with the same story, adoptive parents, adoptive kids, which has helped to heal me and my husband, and now
