Finding light in the darkness of a mother’s depression, lies about a father’s identity and a legacy of trauma

A conversation with Adam P. Frankel about his book, The Survivors: A Story of War, Inheritance, and Healing

Around 2010, I was working on my MSW and my good friend, Stephanie, started dating a young Obama speechwriter. A few years later, I would attend their wedding, and even more years later, I was excited to learn that Adam had written a book about his grandparents’ experience as Holocaust survivors, the results of this horrific trauma on multiple generations of his family, and the life-defining secret his mother kept from him.

When I read the book, I was struck by how beautifully and fully he captured his complicated relationship with his mother and how he navigated and came to understand her bouts of severe depression and symptoms commonly seen with people who suffer from borderline personality disorder. I could see many of my patients in his story and knew that the book would benefit a lot of people with similar experiences.

I asked to interview Adam as I wanted to talk to him as a therapist and learn more about the clinical aspects of his book and his own personal journey. I took a trip to New York to talk with him, a conversation that was observed and sometimes joined by our spouses.

Lisa: I loved your book. You’re the first person I’ve ever heard perfectly describe the emotional connection and complicated relationship so many of my patients have with parents who struggle with mental illness in some way.

At the same time, when I read the blurb about the book, I got to the sentence about you writing about your mother and I texted Stephanie and I said, “HOW IS HE DOING THIS? HE CAN’T DO THIS.” I was scared for you. You can’t hide this from her and given that she has moments of fragility, I knew that this was risky for you to do and risky for your relationship.

Adam: She’s read it. And yeah, I was terrified. I was terrified from the moment I decided to write all this. That was one of the things I was most terrified about: What would her reaction be?

But, look, I mean, number one: I needed to write it. Just needed to write it. Period. End of story.

And I knew that publishing it was also important to me. It’s not like I could write it and put it in a box. I needed to get it out there. Because being able to be open about my identity is a big part of this for me, I feel like I’ve had to hide who I am for a lot of my life and I’m tired of it. I want people to see me for who I am.

The biggest consequence I was most worried about was how my mother would handle all this. She was very gracious and said she was proud of me. But I still worry about her reaction some. Just because it’s one thing one day doesn’t mean it won’t be another thing another day. When the book comes out, that’ll be a different experience for her. We’ll see.

I honestly think since she disclosed the secret in 2006 about the real identity of my father, I’ve felt incredibly tense thinking about her and engaging with her or being around her. Part of that tenseness came from feeling like there was a huge amount I needed to say to her that I couldn’t. I wanted her to know about how horrible and painful this whole experience was for me. And what I realized after she read the book is that feeling went away. There’s nothing more I have to say her. Everything I could have possibly wanted to say is in the book, and she read it. So I’ve actually felt much lighter and more relaxed and calm with her since she read the book than in the more-than-a decade before. That surprised me.

Lisa: How do you think your relationship with your mom, or this whole experience, including the piece with your dad, impacts you as a father, and how your parent?

Adam: I was very conscious as I was dealing with all of this about how it was affecting me and my relationship with my family and our children. It was very important to me to protect myself and protect our family and protect my children from the impact of this saga. That was part of the reason I wrote the book: to process and deal with this, so some of the trauma, the mess, the drama, the mental health stuff, wouldn’t cloud and affect my parenting, my ability to be there and be present with our family.

And, the idea of secrets is a theme of the book and a theme of my life — all these huge secrets. It is very important to me that we don’t have secrets in our family. I wrote the book partly to transmit a culture of openness and honesty to our family, for our children, so that nobody feels like they have to keep secrets.

I try to create a sense of stability for our family. My mother was very unstable. I often didn’t know which version of her to expect at night, and sometimes it was great and fine, and totally normal. And other times, I didn’t know what was happening.

And then on my dad’s side, my dad has always been just a loving, supportive dad to me, so I try to replicate that.

Lisa: You said that writing the book was primarily for you to get this out, and to be heard by her. In a way, it’s clear from the book she doesn’t generally hear you. Do you have any broader hopes for the impact of the book?

Adam: Honestly, I wrote it because I needed to write it. There’s a lot of fascinating research on expressive writing, which I’ve only come to as a part of writing the book. It’s used by veterans’ organizations and many others to help people manage trauma. I definitely found that to be the case. All of these events were such a jumble of pain and traumatic incidents that being able to write it in a linear way, and just tell the story, and situate these moments in my life, was healing. I was living one life for 25 years and then thrown into something else that I couldn’t make sense of and I didn’t understand what was happening. I didn’t know how to reconcile these two things: the life I thought was my life, and the father I thought was my father, and these facts about my actual biological father.

Being able to write it helped me synthesize all these things in a coherent way to make sense of everything. As I was writing, I didn’t realize the impact it would have when I began, but very quickly, I did. I wrote it for us [gestures towards his wife], for me, and my family.

I’ll have some healing to do for the rest of my life. But this book has been the last biggest piece to managing all of this and understanding what happened.
Having said that, one of the things I realized as I was writing was the broader kind of application of some of this. And the way that inter-generational trauma plays itself out. It helped me understand how everybody bears the brunt of inter-generational trauma in one way or another.

So, I do hope parts of the book will help different kinds of people. Maybe this helps some see why certain family patterns are the way they are, certain lives are the way they are. I think of the people who have lived with a depressed parent. Sometimes, you don’t even realize what your experience was or that it wasn’t “normal.” Like I didn’t know that my mother shutting the door and crying at night when I was a kid was a thing some parents didn’t do. So I hope it helps people like that who have that kind of background and experience. [Tears up.]

Lisa: Why is that emotional for you?

Adam: It’s emotional because a lot of the painful stuff that I write about is relatively new for me to process. It’s only in the past five years that I really began thinking about this. I lived most of my life not reflecting on it. And I could skirt by a little bit, until this big event of learning about my father forced me to grapple with it. The reason I’m emotional is it’s just sad. It saddens me about my mom, about the experience I had as a kid, the experiences others have had. It just breaks my heart.

I also think and hope the book helps the increasing numbers of people having revelations like mine in different ways. With 23andMe and Ancestry.com, there’s an explosion of this happening. The experience can be incredibly disorienting and painful. I’ve been in touch with people and there’s a very similar emotional journey and process we go through. And there’s very little research or information available to those people. I know because I looked for it once I started writing this book. So I do hope this book might demonstrate an increasing need for late discovery adoptees or others facing unexpected biological revelations to tell their stories and for there to be research on this to help find ways to help people manage this in their lives. If someone had written a book like this that I could have read when I was going through it, I think it would have helped me a lot. I think just seeing it in somebody else’s words, just seeing that I wasn’t alone, would have helped me.

Lisa: I think you’ll help a lot of people who are kids of parents with borderline personality disorder or major depression or other significant mental illness. I think it would be tremendously helpful to some of my patients who are coming to understand how the way those parents raised them, even if they had the best intentions, was hard on them and affected them.

I also want to ask you about the scapegoating that goes on in families, that clearly happened to you. What are your thoughts about why that happens, about the need to protect the person even when their behavior is harmful or unfair?

Adam: I can just speak to the “why” of my family. In my family, given the Holocaust experience, you don’t let anyone know of any weakness in the family. Mental health issues, we don’t talk about those. I mean, for that generation, they’ve been through so much that they are like, what is this mental health stuff? We survived the Holocaust. Get it together.

Lisa: Why am I upset about having a difficult mother when these people really suffered?

Adam: I think that dynamic was at play. And, it’s just she was so weak and fragile that the family felt like they needed to protect her. This was all they understood. The only way they knew to protect her was by sheltering her and making sure she was even-keeled, even if that threw everybody else off. And certainly never show her the trail of disaster that often followed in her wake. Because it might upset her. And it’s an endless, exhausting effort to accommodate somebody’s emotional swings, to insulate them, no matter what the wreckage is, that’s left all around. So the scapegoating is just a part of that, I think.

Lisa: So, given that you come from a family of Holocaust survivors, I want to tell you about an experience I had at the Holocaust Museum. When I was an Adjunct, I took my MSW classes there and one of the Scholars kindly does a presentation and holds a discussion. In 2018, I asked her something like, ”Are you concerned about anything that you’re seeing out in the world today in parallel to Nazi Germany?” She said, “No,” which surprised me, because I find myself nervous and seeing parallels. And there’s all the anger I see on Twitter directed at people who make Holocaust comparisons about what’s happening today. How do you view what’s happening now politically and socially? Because I was remembering too in the book about the heightened reaction to 9/11 that your mom had.

Adam: I don’t think you can look at what’s happening today and not see parallels and not see warning signs. I think that’s blind and ahistorical. I had a tough time growing up understanding my grandparents’ experience. I don’t think anyone who didn’t experience it can fully understand it. I remember my Bubby, my grandmother, saying, “I remember when the kids stopped playing with me in the playground because they weren’t allowed.” Their parents told them they weren’t allowed to play with Jews. And I remember thinking, “That seems like in a different time.”

I think anyone who’s paying attention today could imagine a scenario where that happens — whether it’s a Jewish child, a migrant child, a Muslim child, or whatever.

The period we’re living in has actually helped me understand my grandparents’ experience and how quickly things can change. Seeing how many people in America quickly adjusted to the reality of a Trump presidency was an unsettling thing for me to observe and helped me understand how these things happen. People adjust for their own interests. So, yes. I absolutely see parallels.

The point also is that one shouldn’t have to compare it to Hitler for it to be outrageous and unacceptable. Whether or not those comparisons are apt, whether it’s what’s happening on the border or the spike in hate crimes against Jews, against African-Americans, against people of color — and not just in this country but globally — should deeply alarm everybody on its own.

The other point is that these patterns recur throughout history. It’s not to say the Holocaust happens every so often. It doesn’t. But there are cycles in history and there are periods of relative peace and prosperity. There are periods of war. There are periods of democratic governance and there are periods of hate and anti-democratic governments. This is the history of human civilization. And those periods can last very long. There’s no rule that we have to live in one of the good times. I think everybody should be very vigilant in ensuring that this period of anti-democratic governance and the sort of leadership that’s fueled by bigotry and hate is as short as possible.

Lisa: What was the most helpful thing from your therapy? What would you say to the therapist who gets “you” as a patient?

Adam: There are two things. One of the first therapists I saw in D.C. observed very early that I was emotionally stunted and didn’t know how to talk about emotions. That observation on her part, which was probably very obvious to her, but I was totally blind to, was helpful for this process.

Second, the therapist who was been the most helpful to me, a therapist in New York, when I came to see her several years ago, I told her I couldn’t imagine talking about any of this with my dad. And she knew immediately that I needed to talk to my dad about not being his biological son, and that a big part of the journey would be getting me comfortable with that. It was unthinkable to me when I first went to see her. But in hindsight, it was very clearly the overarching goal from her perspective. At the time, if she’d told me that, I would have said, “I’ll never tell him.” It made me physically uncomfortable. She saw that. And so everything we did was getting me comfortable with that in different ways, because that was the key for me to unlocking it. Apart from writing the book itself, telling my dad was the big thing for me.

Lisa: It’s so interesting that it was the unimaginable thing because reading the book — and I’m sure her as the therapist working with you, it’s like — it’s the easy thing. It’s so heartbreaking listening to you thinking he wasn’t going to accept you. And it’s like, “Oh my God. Just end the misery. Tell.” That’s the thing for all of us, probably. The hardest thing for you internally is the obvious thing to everyone else.

Adam: One of the things I’ve thought about in this process was that at each stage, some of the things that I was scared of proved to be things I didn’t need to be scared of. Telling my dad was the thing I was most terrified of, and there was nothing to be afraid of.

And telling other people. I didn’t know how people would handle the revelation stuff, the identity crisis that can ensue. It’s really profound. I’ve had people say to me, “Your dad is your dad.” They don’t really get the other layers, the deep profound kind of tectonic shift that happens when you realize that your dad isn’t your biological dad. And it varies from family to family. If I didn’t like my dad and didn’t identify with his family, I might’ve found it a relief to find out I wasn’t related to him.

Lisa: What would you say the other people coming out of this. Whether the revelation about your identity, or your relationship with your mom.

Adam: I think I would say it’s not callous and cruel to look out for yourself and your family. I think I’d say, you need to look out for yourself and your family and that your mother, in her healthiest moments, would want you to. Or at least a reasonable mother would want you to. And you shouldn’t feel ashamed or guilty about that. And that’s not easy. I am not pretending that’s easy.

And then to the folks who’ve experienced the revelation, I guess — number one, just knowing that you’re not alone, that there are a lot of people out there who’ve gone through this. And I think every story is probably different. Which means also that there are different paths to healing for people.

But the key point is that there is a path and the journey that you’re going through, however hard and painful it may feel at any one time, it’s one part of a journey and there is another part. And it gets easier and better to deal with. So, just being able to situate yourself on that journey and find a way through it. Even when it seems so disorienting. That’s what I’d say, because for me I didn’t know there was a path. I just felt like I was in it and I didn’t know how to get out of it.

Lisa: Last question. Do you think you could have written this book without being located in a new family? With Stephanie, with your kids. Without the security of a new relationship and a new family, do you think you could have done this work?

Adam: It’s a good question. I don’t know the answer to that. I think that there is definitely a level of conviction and determination in writing this and moving through this that comes from being their dad and wanting to get things right. I might not have gone that extra mile. I don’t know. But I said to Steph, and I think I put this in the book, that the trauma stops with me. Very melodramatic of me.

Lisa: That’s true though. That’s why therapists do what they do. That was one of the weirdest places in the book for me because I remembered being in my own therapy and wanting to quit or end a relationship and saying, “I can’t. I’m done. I don’t care anymore.” And my therapist would say, “You have to fix this because you have to stop the cycle. It stops with you.”

Adam: The other thing I guess I would say is there was just so much darkness in this stuff and in my family from the Holocaust experience and the horror of what they went through and the stories that I grew up with. I was always in it as a kid. It’s a part of me, these horrible, horrific stories from concentration camps. People murdered. People raped. Just horrible stuff. Then my mother’s suicide attempt. The volatility. It’s just so dark. Then my biological father and everything he told me and everything he did. The whole thing is just so dark.

That part is not me. That’s inherited. I got that. I came into this world and I was surrounded by it. But that’s not me. I want to bring a light to our family, on a fundamental level. I want to live my life in the light. I don’t want live in the darkness. I want to bring light to our family and to my future.