We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jeanette Yoffe a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Jeanette, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
To give you a backstory of my most meaningful project I need to begin by sharing with you, that all of what I have accomplished in my life, would not have been possible without these three adverse childhood experiences. Number one, being separated from my family of origin at fifteen months old, number two living six years in the New York City foster care system, and number three being adopted into a third family at the age of seven and a half.
I will now pause, take a little breather, and press on like I always have…
When I was adopted, I learned that our next-door neighbor had a dance studio and I was invited. I was a ball of stress, so this gave me a sense of direction “distraction.” I got to pas de bourree in ballet, stomp my heart out in tap, and do ten thousand cartwheels acrobatically home. In time, I grew to love performing and in high school I auditioned for the high school play, “Pippin” and was cast as a dancer in the chorus.
Being on stage felt natural to me, especially being “other people.” I was the greatest “chameleon.” I could be anybody given my new clean slate. So, I decided to go to Pace University in Manhattan and study theatrical arts. I learned all about the craft and in 1998 I moved to Los Angeles.
I joined a theatre company and started writing about my experience growing up in foster care and adoption “just for fun”, and was encouraged to write a one woman show which was I titled “What’s Your Name, Who’s Your Daddy.” (Now available on Audible.) I wrote a scene about a little girl who “auditions for a family” and people were confused, intrigued, and felt the plight of a child “wanting to be wanted”. Writing helped me make sense of my life and begin to grieve. This newfound clarity compelled me, more than ever, to help the world understand the feelings, from a child’s point of view, of being raised in foster care on a whole different level, other than lectures, books, and therapy, and through the magic of theatre.
I performed the show for the Los Angeles Women’s Theatre Festival and Venice Theatre Works. The audience would consist of adoptive/foster parents, therapists, and social workers. I learned, at the time, there were 36,000 children in the foster care system, which left me breathless. And went I walked onto the stage each night I would imagine all those kids trailing behind me, and WE were marching the march of our lives. I couldn’t stop thinking of all the children and that is what inspired me to become a psychotherapist with a special focus on working with children, teens and adults connected by foster care and adoption. Thus, I opened my first business Yoffe Therapy in 2006, a group mental health center of Adoption and Foster Care Competent therapists in Los Angeles.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
Being adopted, I had a strong desire to know and understand what happened to my first mother and it just so happens that my full biological sibling, who grew up in the Bronx, was also curious. He searched for five years and found me in 1996. We had a reunion on top of the Empire State Building and decided together to search for our mother. After seven years we found her, Celia, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We were shocked and stunned to learn, she was a native and prominent dancer and an artist in the Buenos Aires community, who came to the United States to live the American dream of becoming a dancer, however her psychosis led her to return home and now live in a women’s psychiatric facility in Buenos Aires. We flew to meet her there and found out we had another sibling, a sister, named Silvina. We learned more about our Argentinean heritage, culture, and the reason we could not live with Celia, due to her struggles with mental illness.
After coming back to the states, I had another newfound understanding now of my first mothers’ experience, “it’s not that she wouldn’t, she couldn’t” parent. She told me she always loved me. Now I wanted to erase the negative stigma of a first mothers experience and shine a light on the lifelong process of pursuing wholeness for the adopted person that begins with understanding the “primal wound” of maternal separation.
It was then that I started my second business, a non-profit organization named Celia Center. Our mission was and still is… to bring the constellation of adoptees, first parents, foster and adoptive parents together into a conversation of understanding, learning, and leaning into one another by attending a monthly support group called the Adopt Salon Constellation.
Our goal is to bring the constellation together so we can validate the foster and adoptees’ experience, honor the first mother’s experience, and educate adoptive and foster families – as well as professionals – about the experience, to gain clarity, ultimately heal, and become a force together.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
After learning our mother was an artist and dancer, I wanted to create a connection between the arts and healing with an arts festival. I found other like-minded adoptee artists, performers utilizing the art of creativity to heal their loss and pain, and we created a festival titled, Celia Center Arts Festival, Adopting Resilience, Fostering the Art of Creativity. Which is a one-day festival that includes the visual arts, performing arts, healing arts workshops, and child and family creative arts programming.
Our next festival is slated for National Adoption Month in November 2024. Learn more by visiting our website https://celiacenterartsfestival.org
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
In my 20’s, I began to really listen to my “inner voice” and she wasn’t my friend. I would often hear her say terrible things to me. The script was “you are not good enough.” I had a faint little voice inside me that whispered, “it’s ok to feel your pain.” And thank goodness I listened to that little voice because I entered therapy. The minute I opened my mouth, I cried and cried to my new therapist. I was so ashamed. Yet, she let me be. I pushed through. The more I talked about it, the more I was able to see, there was a “part of myself” that just needed to be heard. To be “honored” for what it had been through.
That is why psychotherapy is a big part of my life. It helped me befriend the parts of myself that felt less then, sad, angry, and scared. I began to paint my parts on canvas, write letters to these parts, ask them what they needed, what they wanted, and how I could best support them. This is what is called “parts work.” This process helped me develop new healthy parts that were compassionate, loving, nurturing, allowing me the permission to grieve, without feeling ashamed and motiving me to start “doing something about these parts” like… working with children…. being an example of change in a foster care system with many broken parts….and finally create a narrative that tells me often, and when I most need to know…. that “you are good enough.” And “when you fall… fall reaching.”
Contact Info:
- Website: www.JeanetteYoffe.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeanetteyoffe/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jeanette.yoffe
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanetteyoffe/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/JeanetteYoffe
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@Jeanette-icallySpeaking
- Other: Author page: https://www.amazon.com/~/e/B07V9L93XF