The Fog

I write a lot. Not all of it gets put out there for everyone to read, but occasionally I'll write a comment and someone will reply saying they would love to hear more about my take on it.

One such comment was regarding the Fog. When I first started to read about adoption and figure out what I was experiencing, I learned of the phrase “Coming out of the fog”.

It is a metaphor used to describe coming to terms with feelings and realizations in regards to adoption.

Another adoptee I follow on Instagram posted a graphic that read, “For many, “the fog” is a survival tool.”

And I commented on it, saying,

“Coming in from my LDA POV. I feel like there's more than just one "fog". Couldn't tell you how many, or what they'd be called, it just feels like in a way, each trauma has its own "fog" that I'm dealing with.”

For quite some time now I have been trying to write about the Fog. I just didn’t know how or where to start. Seeing that post, and commenting on it was kind of the push I needed to really think about it.

Some time ago I came across this post on Reddit. It reads:

“I’m jealous of people who grew up with a healthy relationship with their family.

I think about it all the time and wonder how different my life would be if I would’ve had that. Seeing my friends interact in a healthy way with their parents was so unbelievable to me growing up. How could they be so comfortable around them? Now I just find myself jealous when I see it, but not in way that would make me bitter towards them. Sometimes I question the authenticity of it like they must be faking it because it seems so unobtainable to me. I don’t know. I just wish I knew how that felt because I really can’t picture it. I hope they don’t take it for granted, but if they do, it’s probably because they just can’t picture it any other way. I hate that I feel amazed watching families interact in a healthy way.”

I found it within r/offmychest. Click here for the link.

I understood this person. I felt the exact same way about my family.

The relationship and love I had with my parents always seemed conditional on my compliance.

I grew up in a toxic, and abusive family. This was something I figured out and understood early on in my teenage years. I didn’t have the words for it, but I knew the behaviour of my parents just did not feel right.

We were never on the same wavelength, and I constantly felt misunderstood.

And no matter how many times I brought it up, the notion that we were family, and all I had to was work harder was all that was needed.

It left me with feelings that I was the crazy one. That the problem was with me.

One of the things I remember growing up was watching the relationship my friends had with their parents. It was beautiful. I could see my peers actually bond with their mothers and fathers.

Their parents treated their children in a way that I could never imagine mine doing. They were actually being treated age appropriately, and it was fascinating,

As I got older, I was jealous. I was envious.

I wanted to have a relationship with the man that was my father in a way my male peers did.

I wanted to be able to talk to my mother without having to constantly worry about how she could use what I shared against me in some way.

No matter what or how I tried, it just never happened.

I still internally defended their behaviour because it was my normal. Because this was my family and just the way they operated. Recently I learned that it was because I was living in a FOG.

And what I experienced in my family included emotional blackmail.

FOG stands for Fear, Obligation, and Guilt. An acronym coined by Susan Forward, PhD, in 1997, in her book “"Emotional Blackmail: When the People in Your Life Use Fear, Obligation, and Guilt to Manipulate You.”

Here is an excerpt from that book regarding emotional blackmail:

“Emotional blackmail is a powerful form of manipulation in which people close to us threaten, either directly or indirectly, to punish us if we don’t do what they want. At the heart of any kind of blackmail is one basic threat, which can be expressed in many different ways: If you don’t behave the way I want you to, you will suffer. 

Emotional blackmail hits closer to home. Emotional blackmailers know how much we value our relationship with them. They know our vulnerabilities. Often they know our deepest secrets.

And no matter how much they care about us, when they fear they won’t get their way, they use this intimate knowledge to shape the threats that give them the payoff they want: our compliance.

Knowing that we want love or approval, our blackmailers threaten to withhold it or take it away altogether, or make us feel we must earn it.”

She goes on to explain the fog as follows:

“How do so many smart, capable people find themselves groping to understand behavior that seems so obvious? One key reason is that our blackmailers make it nearly impossible to see how they’re manipulating us, because they lay down a thick fog that obscures their actions. We’d fight back if we could, but they ensure that we literally can’t see what is happening to us. I use fog as both a metaphor for the confusion blackmailers create in us and as a lens for burning it off. FOG is a shorthand way of referring to Fear, Obligation and Guilt, the tools of the blackmailer’s trade. Blackmailers pump an engulfing FOG into their relationships, ensuring that we will feel afraid to cross them, obligated to give them their way and terribly guilty if we don’t.”

To break it down and put it into context for myself, here’s something I have put together after much revising and editing:

I felt fear of hurting my parents, and how they would react if I told them what I really thought.
I felt obligated to put them first for all they've done in spite of the trauma they've caused.
I felt guilty for my feelings because I knew it would hurt them, and maybe I'm wrong in feeling them.

These feelings were at a time when I was being raised by my family.

These feelings were there even at a time when I moved away from my family.

12 years ago I moved out to live on my own. I was finally at a place where I could take care of myself financially, and it was greatly motivated by the need to separate from my family.

I can tell you now living on my own back then was the first time I felt like myself. It wasn’t just the notion of being independent, but just the fact that there was no one to compare myself with anymore.

I wasn’t trying, or struggling to be like my family.

But the FOG was still there. I still felt duty-bound to my family. They were after all the ones who raised me. They provided for me. Even if all it was was the basic needs.

After speaking with my therapist, he made the observation that I understood that my parents were only capable of providing me with basic needs. Anything beyond that, I have worked towards on my own. He spoke to me about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how it related to relationships.

Maslow first introduced his concept of a hierarchy of needs in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation". Maslow's hierarchy of needs is used to study how humans intrinsically partake in behavioural motivation.

There are 5 layers, and in order to move up, previous ones must be met. Here’s an image I grabbed from Wikipedia:

My parents were capable of providing food and shelter without an issue. In fact, I relied on them for it. Until I was able to financially sustain myself, I leaned on them. 

I leaned on them because they were my family and my support. These are the people that have been my caretakers since I was born.

And because they provided these things for me, I felt I owed something to them.

However, everything above that, I had to do on my own. My parents only saw me as a child. Like I couldn’t make any decisions for myself.

Once I moved away, I no longer needed them for anything. I only stayed in contact out of obligation.

And then I discovered that I was adopted. And just like that, the foundation crumbled.

We were not related by blood. Everything I had ever known was a lie.

The family I thought was mine by blood turned out to be strangers that deceived and conned me about my true lineage.

Here’s something I wrote during those hard moments:

The day I discovered I was adopted was the day both my families died.

The ones that raised me turned out to be a sham, and the ones that did not turned out to be an enigma.

(Slight detour here, in my opinion, and my experience, not telling someone they are adopted, and instead raising them to think they are biologically and genetically yours is psychological abuse.)

After uncovering this secret, for a brief moment, a new FOG arose. I wanted to know the truth, and I needed honest answers from my adopters. But once again, I was afraid. Afraid of rejection. Afraid of how they would react. Afraid that they would withhold information.

Afraid of hurting the people that raised me. I now had the added struggle of feeling like I owed them something for adopting me and giving me a life.

I felt a sense of duty and loyalty to let them know I was still their son. I was still their family. I entered the Adoptee Fog, and once again,

I felt fear of hurting my adopters, and how they would react if I told them what I really thought.
I felt obligated to put them first for all they've done in spite of the trauma they've caused.
I felt guilty for my feelings because I knew it would hurt them, and maybe I'm wrong in feeling them.

I am still reading Susan’s book on Emotional Blackmail to get a better understanding for myself.

It’s interesting to see that for me when I didn’t know, and when I knew, I was still affected by a FOG.

It took me a while to accept that what I experienced was abuse.

Within the first chapter of her book, Susan also writes:

"Let me reassure you: Just because there’s emotional blackmail in a close relationship doesn’t mean it’s doomed. It simply means that we need to honestly acknowledge and correct the behavior that’s causing us pain, putting these relationships back on a more solid foundation."

It’s unfortunate that my adopters can’t seem to admit their fault. I’ve always thought that if they could have just been honest the first time I confronted them about being adopted, maybe things would be different. Maybe a relationship could have been salvaged.

I often wonder if they are in a fog of their own. A fog of delusion.

My adoptive mother so strongly believes she did the right thing. To this day she wishes I did not know. She would have taken this to her grave.

My adoptive father knows it was wrong. And it’s unfortunate that he will still stand by his wife and support her decision in this. When the fact is, he has just as much of a right to speak his mind.

I have to move on. Learning more about the phrase “coming out of the fog” is what led me to feel like there was more than one kind of FOG. It feels like I experienced two of them, the emotionally abusive fog before I knew I was adopted, and the adoptee fog after I knew.
But the underlying feelings appear to be the same. Fear, Obligation, and Guilt.