About BJ Lifton
I never know where to start in describing myself and my interests, or in what order.
In my book Twice Born, Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter, which came out in 1975, I said that you wouldn't know I am adopted to meet me. That I could pass. I went on to say I am a writer, a wife, a mother, a theater buff, and an animal fanatic. Now I must add to the list an adoption therapist, which I have been since the late 1980's.
My adoption journey began in Staten Island, NY, where I was born, and continued in Cincinnati, Ohio, where I went to live with my adoptive parents. I was told my birth parents were married, but had died. Although years later I would find my birth mother very much alive, there was some truth in my adoptive mother's version of reality, for in the closed adoption system birth parents are as if dead to the adopted child.
I found my way back to New York by going to Barnard College and majoring in English literature and drama. I had totally repressed all thoughts of adoption, but from the moment I arrived in New York I knew that I was home. Barnard validated the woman I wanted to be. I wrote poetry, plays and short stories, and acted in the Columbia Players. Like so many of my generation, I wanted to burn with a "hard, gem-like flame." I met and married my husband, Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist, shortly after graduation, and for the next fifteen years we lived alternately in Japan, Hong Kong, and America. During that time I was a journalist in Tokyo and Vietnam, eventually writing a book with another correspondent ― The Children of Vietnam.
My son was born in Tokyo in 1961 and had his first birthday in Hiroshima. It was in this city where the world's first atomic bomb was dropped, that my husband and I became witnesses. We have each written, in our own way, about the danger of nuclear weapons for the world. My books Return to Hiroshima and A Place Called Hiroshima were both created in collaboration with the Japanese photographer, Eikoh Hosoe, and dealt with the effects of the bomb on children. They introduced Sadako Sasaki, the Anne Frank of Hiroshima, who was to die of radiation effects ten years after the bomb fell.
My daughter was born in 1965 in New Haven, where my husband had a research chair at Yale. During this time I wrote children's books and plays, and formed a professional company, The Jugglers, which did my multimedia plays for children at City Center in Manhattan, and BAM in Brooklyn.
It was after we moved to New York, that I learned from a cousin that my birth parents had not died the way my mother had told me. In the process of trying to discover how they died, I learned there was no record of their deaths. Indeed, they might be very much alive. It was traumatic to learn that I had not been told the truth, but I could not bring myself to confront my widowed adoptive mother with my discovery. With much trepidation, I went on a search to find the truth - which was really a search for self. In the process I had to awaken much that had lain repressed in me. I could not understand how my mind had been able to snap closed on the primal subject of where I came from. It was this psychological mystery that led me to take a Ph.D in counseling psychology and become an adoption therapist.
After living in Manhattan for twenty five years, my husband and I have relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I have my adoption practice. I commute to New York a few times a month to see clients there, and also do telephone counseling with members of the adoption triad across the country. I do animal assisted therapy with Lady-Jingly Jones, a white standard poodle and Maui, a Devon Rex cat.
Every summer my husband and I move to our home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, which is on a dune overlooking the ocean. I have a study there, where I do my writing, see clients, and continue with my telephone counseling. Lady Jingly-Jones counsels the sea gulls on the beach, and Maui has become a professional indoor bird watcher.
Every August 6, the day the bomb fell on Hiroshima, I stand in silent vigil in Wellfleet center with my husband and others concerned with nuclear proliferation. We commemorate those who died that day and who continued to die long after from radiation effects. Each year we hope our message will be heard: that Hiroshima is not just the past, but could be the future if the world does not ban nuclear weapons.
My focus shifts back and forth, then, from my concern with healing in the adoption world to healing in the larger world that we all share.
