“A threshold is a sacred thing.”

—Esther De Waal

I sit tense with anticipatory dread on the sofa in a large office lit by the soft glare of the mid-morning sun. My therapist and a psychiatrist flank me to my right and to my left. I reach for the glass of clear liquid on the nightstand and hold it in my lap for a moment. I want to whisper a prayer or intention but my clenched, fluttering stomach and panicked thoughts cloud my mind. Without a word, I drain the glass and wait for the medicine to take effect.

What am I so terrified of, they ask? I don’t know. That I’ll be stripped of the defenses that keep my pain in and other people out. That I will be utterly vulnerable, overexposed, at their mercy. Then, as the medicine starts to take hold, muting my fear and enhancing empathy and emotional awareness, a deeper clarity dawns: I know this sounds strange, I say, but I am afraid that, under all my clenching, all my holding myself together, so to speak, I don’t exist. That if I let go, I will just fall into an abyss of nonexistence, completely disconnected from everything and everyone.

The effects of the medicine increase. I feel something like a curtain part in and around my body. And the very abyss I fear is laid bare. I am in the void, floating, nothing. I have no relationship to the world, no selfhood, no connection to other people at all. From this vantage point, life is mere performance and adaptation, but I am not in it. I drift unseen, unknown even to myself.

This crushing aloneness would be unbearable without the cushioning effect of the medicine. And yet I feel strangely lucid as I continue to describe what I am experiencing. The psychiatrist, clearly uncomfortable, responds by telling me that he needs me to express my willingness to come out of my isolation and join them. He encourages me to formulate the words. “I need your help not to die. I need your help to live.” But I know that these words aren’t real. They, too, are mere performance, an adaptation to his need, his story.

At that moment, my therapist, who is also an adoptee, suddenly realizes something about herself. She discovers for the first time that she, too, knows this void of nonexistence intimately, even though she never had words for it until now. From her newfound clarity, she interrupts the psychiatrist, turns intently toward me and says:

“I am here with you, and there is no other place I want to be.”

In my state of heightened receptivity, her words penetrate skin, flesh, and bone. I feel the weight of her words like gravity drawing us into a common orbit, tethering us together in this nameless nothingness. I am seen. I am known. I am held in her gaze. Previously, we knew this place only through a haunting echo of terror, emptiness, ache and doubt. Now we know it as a place of meeting, of encounter, of seeing ourselves through one another’s eyes. We call it the Nothing Place.

Developmentally, the Nothing Place is where we were meant to recognize ourselves mirrored in our mother’s gaze as we slowly learned to differentiate between self and other. But we were met with her absence instead, severed prematurely before we could know ourselves as separate from her gaze, voice, touch, smell, taste, breathing, heartbeat, emotional rhythms, and the energetic and ancestral fields we shared. This is also where we were held by the wrong gaze, by genetic strangers who could not meet us and mirror us in the deep places where we ached to be met. Here, I sense the vital embodied core of myself that I had to leave behind to survive, to be seen, to belong—to become a falsification of who I was when I was born. Here, with my therapist, in our mutual recognition of one another in this shared wound, I sense this vital core pulsing back to life.

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Of course, most encounters with the Nothing Place do not arrive in such dramatic or chemically-assisted fashion. Most often, it comes quietly—an inexplicable ache beneath the surface, a fleeting moment of emptiness, a sense of not-quite-belonging that never fully goes away. This ache does not need to be manufactured or forced, therefore; it is already present, woven into our bodies and stories, waiting to be acknowledged. It can also be present in the synergy we experience in community with other adoptees—a mirroring resonance calling us home to ourselves. What is most important, as I see it, is that we come to know ourselves as seen and known, no longer alone in our primal aloneness.

After more than four years, my initial uncovering and naming of the Nothing Place with my therapist continues to shape me. It is a story that I have told and reflected upon elsewhere, particularly on my previous blog, Peregrine Adoptee. My intention here, however, is new: to begin to tease out how bringing the Nothing Place to consciousness has transformed my spiritual life, and what more I and others can learn from it.

• I do not need to leave myself to belong.
• I do not need to perform to be seen.
• I do not need to adapt to other people’s needs and perceptions to survive.
• I can be known, met, and held in another’s compassionate gaze without any effort on my part.

These statements may sound like simple affirmations of a healthy sense of self-in-relationship. But to me as an adoptee, they come as revelation, like rolling thunder after the lightening flash. This is what I learned, and could only learn, in the Nothing Place, where my infant self floated unwitnessed until it was met at last: “I am here with you, and there is no other place I want to be.” Yes, I can still experience the Nothing Place as a terrifying void that threatens to unmake me. But even amidst the terror, I also retain the memory of my therapist’s gaze, her tenderness, her face a mirror that shows me I am real because I am seen. She does not resolve the wound but rather reflects back to me the relational shape and basic goodness of this ache that I’ve lived with all my life.

No wonder I felt such an overwhelming need for my therapist’s eyes in the Nothing Place!—a longing, long buried, remembered and reanimated. And this rekindled longing has slowly worked its way into how I pray. My therapist’s gaze has become an icon reminding me that I can be met in this longing—that I am worthy of being met in my deepest need, even if neither she nor any other person can fully meet that need. Instead, the desperate infant-drive to survive in the Nothing Place has softened into passionate desire that orients me like a compass toward the ultimate holding of the Divine Presence. I am no longer on the outside looking hopelessly in. I am on the inside seeking greater intimacy with God.

My inspiration to embark on this exploration comes from the conviction that we adoptees, pierced at the root, are set from our origins on unique developmental trajectories. The maps were not drawn for us, and this includes maps of spiritual development. Yet, consciousness of the Nothing Place has brought me back into conversation with the wisdom of mystics and contemplatives in a new way. Who else, after all, has the experience to guide us at this mysterious threshold where the self is made and unmade? Who else can teach us how to stay present to emptiness without fleeing, how to allow longing to remain open and receptive without hardening into grasping, how to trust that the unraveling of self can be held in the unflinching gaze of the Divine? This is an exploration of paradox—the wound as doorway, the void as meeting place. If this resonates with your own longing and curiosity, I welcome you to join the conversation.