Discovering Self-Acceptance Through Memoir Writing with Dr. Jack Rocco

Dr. Jack Rocco confronts the complexities of adoption and its aftermath through his compelling memoir, Recycled, aiming to understand and accept the irregularities of his life while urging society to rethink how we approach each adoption case.

Do you long for a deeper understanding of yourself and your past? Are you an adoptee struggling to process traumatic experiences? Have you considered writing a memoir? As a tool for self-discovery and healing, memoir writing can help you gain insight into your identity and find acceptance. In this episode, Dr. Jack Rocco will share with you the solution of using memoir writing as a way to achieve improved self-understanding and self-acceptance. By exploring your past through the written word, you can achieve a sense of closure and peace, and move forward with a greater sense of purpose and clarity.

In this episode, you will be able to:

• Discover the power of writing memoir in processing personal trauma and fostering self-discovery.
• Examine the intricate dynamics and emotions associated with adoption.
• Unravel the misconceptions surrounding adoption its portrayal in society.
• Learn about the importance of openness and communication in the adoption process.
• Gain insight into the therapeutic potential of writing to embrace life's irregularities.

The key moments in this episode are:
00:00:02 - Becoming an Author and Making Sense of Life Through Memoir Writing
00:01:03 - Identifying Your "Why" Before Writing a Book
00:02:30 - Dr. Jack Rocco's Memoir "Recycled" and Self-Discovery
00:06:05 - Impact of Adoption on Society
00:17:37 - Adoption Narrative post Roe v. Wade
00:19:16 - The Complex Relationships in Adoption
00:20:44 - The Effects of Adoption on the Child
00:23:20 - Accepting Irregularities and Offering Grace
00:29:40 - Becoming a Mentor
00:34:26 - Recycled: A Reluctant Search for True Self

The resources mentioned in this episode are:

• Visit Ingenium Books website to learn more about becoming an author and publisher.
• Read Dr. Jack Rocco's memoir Recycled to gain insight into the self-discovery journey and the impact of adoption on personal identity.
• Hire an editor to help you through the writing process and ensure the quality of your book.
• Join online support groups for adoptees to connect with others and share experiences.
• Consider the physical and emotional effects of adoption before making a decision.
• Visit the Ingenium Books blog for more resources and tips on writing and publishing.
• Follow Ingenium Books on social media for updates on new releases and industry news.

Find us wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel (@ingeniumbooks) or visit our website at ingeniumbo

Transcript

Transcription

00:00:02
 So today we are going to talk about some of the things that happen when you become an author. And right at the beginning, starting from how writing a memoir can actually help us make sense of and process significant events in our lives. And then when you do that and you move forward the way our next guest has, and you write and you publish a book that is deep and penetrating and meaningful, you become a mentor for other people, whether you intended that or not. So that's what we're talking about on today's show.

00:01:18
 Joining me today is Dr. Jack Rocco, author of the memoir Recycled. And, you know, we've gone around the subtitle, Jack, so many times that I'm not going to rattle it off on the tip of my tongue because I'm sure I'll make some mistake, but welcome and thanks for joining us.

00:01:44
 You can give us the subtitle. Oh, make me the bad guy.

00:01:51
 Thank you, Boni. Yeah, I'm glad you invited me on here. I think it's very timely and it's clearly an honor. So the subtitle to make me the boring one because I think Recycled is very cool. Recycled is very cool.

00:02:08
 It's meaningful to me. So I'm clearly biased. But it's not about recycled and it's about the subtitle, which, unfortunately, as the book is a little complicated. The subtitle is a little complicated, but not really. So the subtitle is a reluctant search for true self through nurture nature and free will.

00:02:30
 Yeah, I need a drink of water to recover from that one. Yeah, you do. But that really is an accurate description of what is inside the book. You didn't want to go on this self discovery journey. You didn't necessarily enjoy this self discovery journey.

00:02:53
 This self discovery journey contained, I would say, bombshell surprises for you. But let's talk about what the journey has meant for you in terms of helping you process and make sense of the events in your life. And in order to start there, you need to give us the Cole's Notes version of what your story is about. Okay. My story is, I would say in so many ways, an absolute success story.

00:03:27
 It's a tribute to my parents. It's a tribute to my expanded family. It's mostly a tribute to them and how well they handled things, even though they may not have been so sophisticated. You know, in in 1966, when I was adopted, there were no books on adoption. There were no, you know, very limited resources.

00:03:49
 But my family relied on primarily their strengths, which were their love, their togetherness and their food. Because you're Italian, yes, it's all about the food, but the food is what brings you together and then whatever happens at the table, as long as you leave with that same love and togetherness. It's worked for us and the book is a tribute to them. But it's also, I felt a little bit of responsibility for once I went through it, that I talk about a lot of my hardships professionally in the book and my successes with those struggles getting into college, getting into medical school, getting into residency, dealing with patients, dealing with death, dealing with injury, dealing with all these things. And I did tremendously well.

00:04:50
 I thought given where I came from, I'm very blessed that I was able to get through that with strength. However, once I was slapped in the face with this realization of my adoption story may not be quite such the idyllic perfect little story that I had been told and I had been repeating when that story of my own identity suddenly hit me. I don't know that I collapsed, but I certainly stalled and I certainly was put back and a lot of these core beliefs and personal understanding of myself were suddenly challenged and I realized that I didn't understand anything about me or where I came from or my genetics or my culture. And those are all very fundamental things to who you are and how you define yourself. So suddenly to have the things that I stood so firmly and strongly upon, to have them knocked below me, then what do you do?

00:06:05
 And that was kind of what I was. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I describe it that way. No, I don't think we want to give away necessarily what was such a bombshell in there, but it involved your adoptive family in a way that was I'm going to use the word hurtful and you can tell me if that is true or not. And I just want you to talk a little bit about how you processed that. Yeah, it was hurtful.

00:06:55
 I don't think that's a stretch and I think it was hurtful for so many reasons. You know, primarily it's just, you know, I I held them in such high regard. I held my family in high regard, I held my grandfather in high regard, I held my culture, everything in high regard. And big surprise, lo and behold, there were some secrets and sins of omission, right? Especially when you take into account the timing of it and not just the timing of it, but the span of time that was covered in that period.

00:07:35
 My birth, 1966. And now if you're going to include my adoptive parents, you got to go back into the early sixty s to their high school, their upbringing just in the immediate. So you're dealing with 1960 through 2018, which is pretty much when the book ends, and how beliefs and transparencies and understandings what happened in 1960, what happened in 2018, and it's very understanding that the lies and the sins of omission would be different in that 50 year, 60 year time span. But the story that I had, my understanding of my adoption because it went so well, in so many ways, there was a success story. So now suddenly all these lies and omissions that I had been living with since I was 210 whatever I had to re digest and go back in time and understand why they were told how they were told what?

00:08:51
 Was the intention of their telling why they weren't told why they weren't spread and what they mean now. And how do I deal with them now?

00:09:03
 In so many ways, it was my life passing before me. And I describe in chapter ten the moment when my life passed before me. There was a particular incident and moment in time when I went through that movie moment where the world is spinning and you're falling and you don't know when you're going to stop. And then I had to regroup and then reinterpret, taking into account the same love and togetherness and intention and fact that no one had ever done this. My parents had not adopted children before in their lives.

00:09:50
 Many people had not adopted children in their lives. And it all sounds like such a wonderful blessing, tremendous thing. And it is. It isn't that it's not, but it doesn't always turn out that way. I think the intentions of adoptive parents, I'm going to say they're mostly for valid reasons.

00:10:12
 There are exceptions where people definitely use it over historic over historic time. They've used it for profiting, they've used it for self promotion, what have you. Like, so many things. Yeah, things can be abused, right? And then there's conscious reasons why you do things.

00:10:33
 There's subconscious reasons and there's unintended consequences of both of those things.

00:10:42
 I found myself dealing with this at the same time I was also dealing with a separation and impending divorce, a career change, location wise, and then that little pandemic we had, among other things. So it was definitely a really challenging time. And I found myself spending hours and hours just sitting in my little chair with the computer in front of me, typing away on various topics, on a variety of unrelated topics, and at some point trying to figure this out. I thought, I need a time frame. I need someone to help me with this.

00:11:28
 So I hired an editor to work with me and help build through it.

00:11:38
 So that's the story of how I became an author, if you will. Yeah, I want to just before we come into the next phase of what we're going to talk about next, I want to just tease apart you've talked about the impact of your discovery on you. You've talked about what was going on in your family and what you learned about your family. We know that you and your family have moved forward, so just to close that loop for our listeners and viewers. But there's a societal message in here, too, that you and I have talked about, and that you wrap up nicely at the end of the book.

00:12:26
 And that is related to not just adoption, not just what we do when we are putting children up for adoption, if that's the current term. I'm not sure that that's the correct phrase these days, but people will, I think, understand what I'm talking about, but it can be fostering as well, where we remove children thinking that the messaging is that this is the best thing to remove them early. But you've got an interesting perspective on that. And given the context of the recent Roe v. Wade strike down and what is going on in the United States now with respect to the fallout issues, I wonder if you can just talk about that for a minute, what it made you think about with respect to what's happening in the US now on that front?

00:13:23
 Yeah, and I think a lot of these feelings, like as I was going through it early on, I had no mentors, I had no one to go to. In the book, I tell of a story where I was introduced to a book by Betty Jean Lifton called Journey of the Adopted Self. And this book, if a book could be a frying pan, this book was my frying pan to my face. And reading that book was, like, really hit me hard that there could be negative issues with adoption.

00:14:06
 I love my family and I always spoke highly of it. I say I drank the adoption Koolaid, if you will. I was compliant with it, and it was very, I think, very beneficial to me. However, the book brought out a number of things that were issues of mine that were in the closet, under the cushions, something that was we don't talk about from the book, the movie Encino. We don't talk about I scrape the character.

00:14:38
 But anyway, we don't talk about these things. We don't talk about problems. And we didn't have mental health issues when I was growing up, quote unquote. We of course we had them, but no one talked about them. We always had those weird uncles, we had those weird people.

00:14:53
 We didn't talk about mental health. We didn't talk about stresses and Pts. It's just either suck it up, buttercup, move along. It was a different time. And what I was learning as I was making my discovery and I was coming across other adoptees online, in support groups, in other books, that it's a hugely variable experience.

00:15:19
 And if I'm to the far right when I met those people to the far left, or vice versa, the people on the other extreme, from me, it magnified my sense of entitlement, if you will, of guilt, of just awareness that I had no idea. And if I ever spoke to someone about, oh, adoption is so wonderful, it wasn't for them. And when you get into physical abuse, sexual abuse, substance abuse in the family, just that feeling of displacement that you really don't belong anywhere. It was something that I could share in that I did have those same feelings and shared in them. And I think that my family and our dynamics, the dynamics of our entire family were such that my misfit ways, if you will, were accepted and understood, and no one rubbed it in my face.

00:16:31
 No one made it. Well, you're the adopted kid. What do you know? You're not even a real part of this family. I was the oldest, I was the son, I was the first son of the first son.

00:16:45
 You know, there was a lot of blessings that came with my situation, but had I been the second son, had I been a female, had I been any number of things, people could have taken that you're adopted thing and turned it into a negative.

00:17:03
 And I've heard many stories where they have so when Roe v. Wade was overturned and first of all, abortion and adoption are completely different subjects. Yes, exactly. I am good at compartmentalizing and breaking things down, and they're not equivalents, and there are many different emotions that go with it. But just when the adoption I'm going to stick with the adoption narrative.

00:17:37
 The adoption side of that argument not going to talk about abortion, but the adoption side of that argument is always portrayed as stupid. You dummy. How can you not just go for the adoption origin? It's the perfect win win situation. You have a baby, you give it to a family.

00:17:59
 Who needs a baby, you don't want one, they want one. What's the problem? Just go with that. And it's not that easy one. There's the physical effects of carrying a child to term on the female, which is not insignificant, not insignificant.

00:18:17
 The body changes, the hormones change, the entire life changes, the psyche changes. You go through that bonding of a child, and then you give it away. It's a different psychology that many people don't want to deal with. I'm not morally going to judge whether it's right or wrong to go through it, but it is a stress. So then you take this child and you give it to another family who is equally traumatized.

00:18:46
 Often they are infertile. They have tried, they have been exhausted, they have spent money on these. This family is challenged. Their marriage is probably challenged from this lack of a fruitful union. You've been married, you've decided on this life, and naturally, like your neighbors, like your family, you want to have a bouncing little baby in this perfect little home.

00:19:16
 And you can't, and you can't, and you strike out and you miss and you struggle and you question yourselves. You question your validity as a male or as a female and then as a couple. So you have this unfruitful marriage, and it's a struggle for that family. So now they get their prayers answered. Now you have this child also, you know, so you've got the birth mother, who's struggling, you've got the adoptive family who's struggling, and then you've got this child.

00:19:47
 And people rarely think of the child. Back in the 60s, this child was a blank slate. This child was lucky. This child was blessed, was fortunate to have been taken into a good family, quote, unquote.

00:20:04
 And a lot of the books that a lot of the readings that I've done and the information I've gathered rarely talk about the effect of the child. This is a child who has been bonding with its mother. Whether you like to believe it or not, simpler animals can accomplish great things. Amoeba can do amazing things. If you watch a neuron, which isn't even an organism, but if you watch a neuron regenerate into an intended target, it's an amazing thing.

00:20:44
 How does it know to go there? How is this nerve attracted to this site? Yet you're going to assume that this infant, who is much more complex than a neuron or an amoeba, doesn't recognize its mother, the smell of its mother, the feel of its mother, the electrical vibrations of its mother, the sound of the voice, the smell, the taste. And then you're just going to take this child and put it somewhere else and expect that it's going to bond. Expect not to even mention that this child has just been separated from its soil.

00:21:19
 It's been pulled from the ground, if you will, hasn't had the opportunity to bond with the mother to figure out what's going on. I mean, it's just been pushed through a birth canal and out into this cold, dry world. And we assume that, yeah, we'll just throw it over here and it'll be fine. It doesn't work out. So you've got three flawed characters in a very complex story, and the narrative that comes out of this is, oh, everything will be fine.

00:21:55
 It's for the best, it's God's will. It's a highly complicated, highly at risk relationship. So not saying that everyone goes through it, but there are people not in the same way. Everybody can go through it in in a bit of a different way, depending on the variables in each of those three circumstances. So, like I said, it took me a long time to describe that, but it's a very complex relationship between all three parties, who each have a wide range of it's, an infinite number of possibilities.

00:22:34
 So to just say that, oh, adoption is the easy answer to this, you know, this unwanted pregnancy is a little simplistic. Yeah. So tell me and tell us how writing this story of yours and bringing it out into the world by the time we are publishing this episode, you're going to be just a couple of days away from the published date, which is Father's Day of 2023. But how did this exercise impact and influence your own processing of the things that have happened to you?

00:23:20
 It has made me more accepting of irregularities, if you will. I think that I would say that growing up and whether this is a personality trait of mine, whether this came from my birth father, birth mother, or whether it's just me, but I think I was much more rigid in my expectations of myself and others.

00:23:54
 I was raised Catholic, which is, there's a right way to do things, there's a wrong way to do things, and there's a heaven and there's a hell, and life is black and white. Like I said, it was it my upbringing or was it my trauma and my belief that, okay, I'm struggling here to assimilate with a new group. And not every child bonds. I mean, my God, you can't find three people to agree on anything on any given day because of personality traits, experience trauma.

00:24:34
 Like I said, I've kind of come to the supposition that, once again, there's lumpers and splitters. And if you lump adoptees together, I think in general, there's a compliant adoptee and there's a rebellious adoptee. And I was more clearly in the compliant department. But I said, with compliance comes with rules and expectations. You have to do it this way, you have to do it that way.

00:25:03
 This is right, that is wrong, black and white. Going through the complexities of my journey and my new found truths, I'm like, wow. There was a lot of very imperfect things that were happening all along that I was unaware of. I was in my own little world in a lot of ways, little dissociated from reality, which is also another characteristic of adoptees, is this dissociation from what is real, because what they feel as real, which I lump into nature, my nature, what I feel is real versus my nurture. What I'm told is real or what I'm told is true.

00:25:51
 And there's that. I lived nature nurture, and I threw free will in there at the end because free will came after I learned the truths. And like I said, the story I didn't plan on this story being what it is. It just as I started writing the story, wrote itself. And I was in a situation where I was just let I let it tell itself.

00:26:20
 I didn't go into the story. I didn't know where it was going to take me. I didn't know what my final thoughts on it were going to be. And it scared me a little bit. Where is this going to take me?

00:26:35
 Is this going to make me hate my parents? Right? Is this going to make me hate my birth parents? Is this going to make me hate my family? Is this going to change me?

00:26:44
 Is this going to make other people hate me? Is this going to change how they look at me? And I think I was a little bit in the for lack of a better term, and just to be clear, a little bit in effort mode, just effort. Just let it happen, see what happens.

00:27:07
 And I was pleased at how things turned out because how it affected me. I think I ended up being honest about how it affected me. And I was proud of it once I completed it. But I didn't complete it to be published. I completed it just to be able to explain to my kids why their father wasn't living with their mother anymore, but also to explain to them who they were instead of just perpetuating the same lie that not lie, but fib that I had been told instead of just perpetuating the same thing.

00:27:47
 I wanted them to have the truth about me and about them and about humans, humanity. So I said so in the end, it struck me that, you know what, I should be less judgmental. I should offer more grace. There are more than one ways to do things. There are cultural ways.

00:28:07
 There are age dependent ways. There are things that change based on circumstances. So the book was hugely transformative to me after it was written, and I put my name on it. As far as the guy who wrote it, but I'm really not sure who wrote the book, to be honest. Who was that guy?

00:28:29
 Who was that masked man? Yeah, right. Now, you talked about being afraid at one point that you didn't know if this was going to change how people saw you and what people thought about you. And in a way it did, because we started this episode talking about how it has made you into a mentor of sorts for other people. And I want you to talk a little bit more about that and to clarify whether you find that you're being considered a mentor in other areas in terms of your self exploration or is it more specifically around the fact that you have written your story and your book is about to be published.

00:29:20
 And other people are saying, hey, I've got a story that I want to find out how I could do this too. Yeah, it does come with a good deal of responsibility and expectations as well.

00:29:40
 I guess when I first announced maybe on Facebook, on some of the Facebook social media, it's like people are like, oh, a published author. You're a published author. Now that's another right. Exactly like another mystical, magical occurrence.

00:30:00
 Some of that may be jealousy, envy, or some of it may be like, you really the little snot nose kid that I beat up in the park? Come on, you grew up in the same neighborhood I did. So there's some of that doubt.

00:30:21
 Once again, the range of, wow, that's great, to the range of, come on, how could you have been that guy? But then slowly, over time, these contacts, friends of mine, would start coming out of the closet a little bit like, oh, hey, Jack, congrats on the book. I've been writing a book. I've been thinking of that. I've been going through that.

00:30:46
 I have a story. If you did it, if a schmuck like you can do it, I'm sure I could do it better than you know what I mean? And I thank you for that. I mean, you believed in the book and you believed in me, and I am hugely grateful for that. But there's that.

00:31:08
 How do I do that? It speaks to the awesomeness of it. It's an accomplishment. It's something to be proud of, for sure. And if I can be that role model, if I can be that person that makes someone stand up, and what a powerful thing that my actions through space, through nothingness, not with wirelessly, motivated someone else to do something similar.

00:31:51
 You could write bad books, but it's intended for good. It's intended for personal good. It's intended to share a message. It's intended to support your family, whatever it is, it's intended to influence a generation. Printed words are a powerful thing.

00:32:16
 The pen is mightier than the sword. I mean, that is not an untrue statement that someone gets in a fight and wins. Big deal. Someone writes a book that proves a point or gets a point across or influences someone else seamlessly. Like I said, wirelessly, through mind, through memes, the original means of transferring ideas to influence someone else by your thoughts and words, especially if they're original or personal.

00:32:51
 It's a powerful place to be in, and it's an inspiration people placed to draw inspiration from and to provide inspiration to. Exactly. And you've just described what we're talking about when we say that this podcast is for the author, publisher and change maker. That's exactly what fits into that category. I've had a couple of people say, well, what are you talking about, change maker?

00:33:22
 You've just described what that is. And you didn't even coach me on that one, Boni. I didn't even coach you on that one. You did very well. A plus for Dr.

00:33:32
 Jack Rocco. And I think that's a beautiful place to leave this here. There's lots more that we can talk about. I'm going to leave it open for you to let us know if and when you want to come back and we'll explore some more of this. But I was explaining that we'd like to let our viewers and listeners know that we talk for approximately 30 minutes and not too much longer.

00:33:57
 We've gone a little bit over that, but very fascinating story, and I just want to remind people again, so recycled. Help me out with the subtitle. A reluctant search for true self through nurture nature and free will. Perfect. Published by Ingenium Books and the published date is Father's Day of 2023.

00:34:26
 So as we're recording this, it's just a couple of weeks away. When this drops and becomes published, it'll just be a couple of days away. So the book will be available wherever you buy your books. And I am going to just put a little hint out here that we are aiming for big things with this book. I think this is not going to be the last you hear of it because I suspect there's a certain very well known bestseller list that we're going to see this on.

00:34:50
 And I won't say any more about that at this time. Let'S hope. Yes. So, Jack, thank you very much for joining us. And we'll be back with our next episode.

00:35:03
 Thank you, Boni and John. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode of Ingenium Books podcast, please like, share and subscribe subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, but also consider subscribing to our YouTube channel where you can see these episodes in addition to hearing them. You my room.