Adoption-aligned BOOKS
Books That Actually Speak to Adoption Journeys 📚✨
Who among us hasn’t searched endlessly for a book that truly reflects the adoption experience? As an adoptee in reunion for over a decade, I’ve spent what feels like years combing shelves and catalogs—only to find that most titles miss the mark. That’s why I’ve created this  Adoption Book Nook—a thoughtfully curated collection of existing books written by adoptees, first parents and experts in the field.
All the best,
Patricia Knight Meyer
Adoptee, Author, and Advocate for Adoption Reform
A collection of adoption books.
Books
Finding Loretta: An Adopted Daughter’s Search to Define Family
A touching memoir of self-discovery, Finding Loretta is Diane’s tale of searching for history, roots, and family. Adopted as an infant, Diane Wheaton has always heard conflicting versions of the truth of her origins—but it’s not until she is forty-seven years old that she begins to search for her biological family. Amid search and reunion, however, Diane’s adoptive parents become ill—and while overseeing their care, she is told about a secret they have kept from her for more than fifteen years. This shocking disclosure requires Diane to face an important decision, which results in a level of healing she never could have anticipated.
The Adoption Paradox: Putting Adoption in Perspective
An ambitious book by Jean Kelly Widner, an adult adoptee, who explores the current and historical culture of American adoptions. Widner examines the unaddressed pain and systemic flaws in the system, and calls for a more transparent and compassionate approach to adoption.
Twice the Family: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Sisterhood
Author Sherry Bridgette Healey, a victim of forced adoption, exposes how government policies legally erased birth identities. Her raw memoir draws powerful parallels to historical human rights violations.
Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging
Julie’s search for her birth relatives spans years and involves a search agency, a PI, a confidential intermediary, a judge, an adoption agency, a social worker, and a genealogist. By journey’s end, what began as a simple desire for a family medical history has evolved into a complicated quest―one that unearths secrets, lies, and family members that are literally right next door.
A Real Nobody a Fake Somebody and Me: A Memoir of Forced and Closed Adoption
Author Sherry Bridgette Healey, a victim of forced adoption, exposes how government policies legally erased birth identities. Her raw memoir draws powerful parallels to historical human rights violations.
Adoption and Suicidality
Beth Syverson and Joseph Syverson, an adoptive mother and adoptee, collaborate to address adoption’s hidden mental health crisis. Drawing from groundbreaking research, they combine personal stories with practical resources to support families and professionals.Â
Woman of Interest a Memoir
Tracy transforms her pandemic-era search for her Korean birth mother into a genre-defying detective story, earning widespread critical acclaim pre-publication.
Adoption Memoirs: Inside Stories
Marianne analyzes 45 adoption memoirs, identifying patterns in how adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents process trauma, race, and reunion experiences.Â
Abandoned at Birth: Searching for the Arms that Once Held Me
BJanet challenges adoption’s “happy ending” narrative through her exploration of the primal wound theory and her personal journey of discovery through DNA testing.Â
In Better Hands
Brandi shares her Appalachian story of adoption intersecting with poverty, addiction, and trauma, offering practical healing strategies while highlighting rural America’s unique challenges.Â
The Girl With Three Birthdays
Patti’s DNA test launches an investigation into sealed records and family secrets, revealing how adoption secrecy shaped her understanding of identity.
The Girl I Am Was and Will Never Be
Shannon, a transracial adoptee, blends adoption memoir with speculative fiction in this Printz Honor Book, exploring parallel lives while incorporating official documents and family records.Â
Crossing the Cherry Blossom Sea
M. Rosales recounts her journey as a Korean adoptee, taken from her homeland at age five. Her search for birth family after 29 years illuminates the complex emotions and cultural identity challenges faced by international adoptees.Â
The Branches We Cherish
Lori weaves together fifteen adoption stories, sparked by a chance encounter that led to an epiphany about the need to share these narratives. Drawing from her own experience as an adoptee who kept her adoption secret for years, she explores the universal theme of belonging that runs through the adoption community.
Adoption Songs
Lori weaves together fifteen adoption stories, sparked by a chance encounter that led to an epiphany about the need to share these narratives. Drawing from her own experience as an adoptee who kept her adoption secret for years, she explores the universal theme of belonging that runs through the adoption community.
Five Siblings Lost and Found
EM delivers a graphic memoir about five siblings separated by foster care and closed adoption. Through illustrated storytelling, she traces her journey as an Ojibwe/Anishinaabe and European adoptee searching for belonging, culture, and her first family. Her unique visual narrative explores how five siblings, placed in foster care and adopted into three different families, found their way back to each other.
To Be Real
In To Be Real, Anne Heffron provides a many-voiced picture of adoption. With the help of fellow adoptees Hannah Andrews, Dawn Conwell Mulkay, Leah E. Cooper, Brad Ewell, Shelley Gaske, Sharon Stein McNamara, Andrew Glynn, Tonni Johnston, Kathleen Shea Kirstein, Elisa Nickerson, Kristen Steinhilber, Kimberly Van Den Hoek, and other special guests, To Be Real lifts up the voices of the community as they share personal stories of self-discovery.
Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, By Gretchen Sisson
Based on a decade-long study, Sisson examines the complex interplay between adoption, privilege, and the ideals of American motherhood, shedding light on the broader cultural and systemic factors that shape the adoption landscape.
I Would Meet You Anywhere: A Memoir
A poignant and beautifully crafted narrative that explores the author’s experiences as a trans-racial adoptee. Growing up with adoptive Nisei parents, Ito knew only that her birth mother was Japanese American and her father was white. Finding and meeting her birth mother in her early 20s was only the beginning of her search for answers, history, and identity. Ito does a masterful job of demonstrating the difficulty of managing expectations around reunion and the longing to be accepted by her newfound first mother.
Adoption Unfiltered
This book reveals the candid thoughts and feelings of those most directly involved in adoption. The authors interview dozens of adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, social workers, therapists, and other allies, all sharing candidly about the challenges in adoption.Â
Journey of the Adopted Self
Betty Jean Lifton, whose Lost and Found has become a bible to adoptees and to those who would understand the adoption experience, explores further the inner world of the adopted person. She breaks new ground as she traces the adopted child’s lifelong struggle to form an authentic sense of self. And she shows how both the symbolic and the literal search for roots becomes a crucial part of the journey toward wholeness.
Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss
A road map for the journey of writing honestly about grief and loss. Useful to the memoirist just starting out, as well as those already in the throes of coming to terms with complicated emotions and the challenges of shaping a compelling, coherent true story.
Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal: Migrating Toward Wholeness
Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal shares the framework and method of using writing as a practice for adult adoptees, therapists, teachers, and researchers interested in learning how to migrate and heal embodied trauma. It analyzes lived experience and the author’s own writing to develop a methodology for moving toward wholeness by writing and speaking the truth of internal adoptee experiences.
The Story You Need to Tell
A practical and inspiring guide to transformational personal storytelling, The Story You Need to Tell is the product of Sandra Marinella’s pioneering work with veterans and cancer patients, her years of teaching writing, and her research into its profound healing properties. Riveting true stories illustrate Marinella’s methods for understanding, telling, and editing personal stories in ways that foster resilience and renewal.
What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma
A searing memoir of reckoning and healing by acclaimed journalist Stephanie Foo, investigating the little-understood science behind complex PTSD and how it has shaped her life.
Hole In My Heart
In the days before Roe v. Wade, an ambitious young journalist, abandoned by her beau, leaves Michigan for a dream job on the city desk of a Rochester, New York newspaper. Burned once, she’s eager for love, but as the only Girl in the newsroom, she’s more concerned with finding allies and making friends.
When a new leading man appears, she recognizes a kindred spirit. Soon her bylined stories claim front-page space. However, when she becomes pregnant, she must switch her attention from deadlines to decisions.
With adoption on the horizon, she pushes her man to make a commitment. Sadly, he wants her, but not their daughter. Will Dusky ever find the little girl she longed to raise, and if she does, what will be the fallout from their years apart?
No Bad Parts
Discover an empowering new way of understanding your multifaceted mind – and healing the many parts that make you who you are.
The Primal Wound
The Primal Wound is a seminal work which revolutionizes the way we think about adoption. It describes and clarifies the effects of separating babies from their birth mothers as a primal loss which affects the relationships of the adopted person throughout life.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences Recovery Workbook
We’re all a product of our childhood, and if you’re like most people, you have experienced some form of childhood trauma. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are at the root of nearly all mental health disorders, including depression, anxiety, panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachement
n this groundbreaking book, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Amir Levine and psychologist Rachel S. F. Heller reveal how an understanding of attachment theory-the most advanced relationship science in existence today-can help us find and sustain love.
The Body Keeps The Score
A pioneering researcher and one of the world’s foremost experts on traumatic stress offers a bold new paradigm for healing.
Adoption Therapy
A much-needed anthology addressing a variety of potential psychological and physiological concerns, Adoption Therapy, Perspectives from Clients and Clinicians on Processing and Healing Post-Adoption Issues is a must-read for adoptees, adoptive parents, first families, and vitally, mental health professionals.
The Journey from Abandonment to Healing
The fear of abandonment is one of our most primal fears, and deservedly so. Its pain is often overwhelming, and can leave its mark on the rest of your life. In the midst of the hurt, it’s hard to see an end to your feelings of rejection, shame, and betrayal.
Seven Core Issues in Adoption and Permanancy
Based on a hugely successful US model, the Seven Core Issues in Adoption is the first conceptual framework of its kind to offer a unifying lens that was inclusive of all individuals touched by the adoption experience.
When the Past is Present: Healing the emotional wounds that Sabotage our Relationships
The popular author of How to Be an Adult in Relationships reveals how past trauma can negatively impact our present-day relationships—and offers guidance on what to do about it
Healing the Child Within
Here, frontline physician and therapist Charles Whitfield describes the process of wounding that the Child Within (True Self) experiences and shows how to differentiate the True Self from the false self.
Coming Home to Self: The Adoped Child Grow up
Coming Home to Self is a book about becoming aware. It is written for all members of the adoption triad: adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents as well as those who are in relationship with them, including professionals.
God and Jetfire
God and Jetfire is a mother’s account of her decision to surrender her son in an open adoption and of their relationship over the twelve years that follow. Facing an unplanned pregnancy at twenty-two, Amy Seek and her ex-boyfriend begin an exhaustive search for a family to raise their child.
Parallel Universes: The Story of Rebirth
In this poignant and powerful memoir, David B. Bohl reveals the inner turmoil and broad spectrum of warring emotions—shame, anger, triumph, shyness, pride—he experienced growing up as a “relinquished” boy.
Goodbye Again: A Memoir
The first time to adoption and the second not long after reuniting with him. In this heart-wrenching and heart-warming memoir, Candace Cahill offers an intimate view of child relinquishment and child loss, the definition of motherhood, and how two things can be true at one time.
The Gathering Place
When Emma learns her birth mother wrote and signed a letter about her to the adoption agency, she knew she had to have that letter if she were to ever discover her birth mother’s true identity.
American Baby
The shocking truth about postwar adoption in America, told through the bittersweet story of one teenager, the son she was forced to relinquish, and their search to find each other.
The Myth of Normal
By the acclaimed author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing.
Finding Loretta: An Adopted Daughter’s Search to Define Family
A touching memoir of self-discovery, Finding Loretta is Diane’s tale of searching for history, roots, and family. Adopted as an infant, Diane Wheaton has always heard conflicting versions of the truth of her origins—but it’s not until she is forty-seven years old that she begins to search for her biological family. Amid search and reunion, however, Diane’s adoptive parents become ill—and while overseeing their care, she is told about a secret they have kept from her for more than fifteen years. This shocking disclosure requires Diane to face an important decision, which results in a level of healing she never could have anticipated.
The Adoption Paradox: Putting Adoption in Perspective
An ambitious book by Jean Kelly Widner, an adult adoptee, who explores the current and historical culture of American adoptions. Widner examines the unaddressed pain and systemic flaws in the system, and calls for a more transparent and compassionate approach to adoption.
Twice the Family: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Sisterhood
Author Sherry Bridgette Healey, a victim of forced adoption, exposes how government policies legally erased birth identities. Her raw memoir draws powerful parallels to historical human rights violations.
Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging
Julie’s search for her birth relatives spans years and involves a search agency, a PI, a confidential intermediary, a judge, an adoption agency, a social worker, and a genealogist. By journey’s end, what began as a simple desire for a family medical history has evolved into a complicated quest―one that unearths secrets, lies, and family members that are literally right next door.
A Real Nobody a Fake Somebody and Me: A Memoir of Forced and Closed Adoption
Author Sherry Bridgette Healey, a victim of forced adoption, exposes how government policies legally erased birth identities. Her raw memoir draws powerful parallels to historical human rights violations.
Woman of Interest a Memoir
Tracy transforms her pandemic-era search for her Korean birth mother into a genre-defying detective story, earning widespread critical acclaim pre-publication.
Adoption Memoirs: Inside Stories
Marianne analyzes 45 adoption memoirs, identifying patterns in how adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents process trauma, race, and reunion experiences.Â
Abandoned at Birth: Searching for the Arms that Once Held Me
BJanet challenges adoption’s “happy ending” narrative through her exploration of the primal wound theory and her personal journey of discovery through DNA testing.Â
In Better Hands
Brandi shares her Appalachian story of adoption intersecting with poverty, addiction, and trauma, offering practical healing strategies while highlighting rural America’s unique challenges.Â
The Girl With Three Birthdays
Patti’s DNA test launches an investigation into sealed records and family secrets, revealing how adoption secrecy shaped her understanding of identity.
The Girl I Am Was and Will Never Be
Shannon, a transracial adoptee, blends adoption memoir with speculative fiction in this Printz Honor Book, exploring parallel lives while incorporating official documents and family records.Â
Crossing the Cherry Blossom Sea
M. Rosales recounts her journey as a Korean adoptee, taken from her homeland at age five. Her search for birth family after 29 years illuminates the complex emotions and cultural identity challenges faced by international adoptees.Â
The Branches We Cherish
Lori weaves together fifteen adoption stories, sparked by a chance encounter that led to an epiphany about the need to share these narratives. Drawing from her own experience as an adoptee who kept her adoption secret for years, she explores the universal theme of belonging that runs through the adoption community.
Adoption Songs
Lori weaves together fifteen adoption stories, sparked by a chance encounter that led to an epiphany about the need to share these narratives. Drawing from her own experience as an adoptee who kept her adoption secret for years, she explores the universal theme of belonging that runs through the adoption community.
Five Siblings Lost and Found
EM delivers a graphic memoir about five siblings separated by foster care and closed adoption. Through illustrated storytelling, she traces her journey as an Ojibwe/Anishinaabe and European adoptee searching for belonging, culture, and her first family. Her unique visual narrative explores how five siblings, placed in foster care and adopted into three different families, found their way back to each other.
To Be Real
In To Be Real, Anne Heffron provides a many-voiced picture of adoption. With the help of fellow adoptees Hannah Andrews, Dawn Conwell Mulkay, Leah E. Cooper, Brad Ewell, Shelley Gaske, Sharon Stein McNamara, Andrew Glynn, Tonni Johnston, Kathleen Shea Kirstein, Elisa Nickerson, Kristen Steinhilber, Kimberly Van Den Hoek, and other special guests, To Be Real lifts up the voices of the community as they share personal stories of self-discovery.
I Would Meet You Anywhere: A Memoir
A poignant and beautifully crafted narrative that explores the author’s experiences as a trans-racial adoptee. Growing up with adoptive Nisei parents, Ito knew only that her birth mother was Japanese American and her father was white. Finding and meeting her birth mother in her early 20s was only the beginning of her search for answers, history, and identity. Ito does a masterful job of demonstrating the difficulty of managing expectations around reunion and the longing to be accepted by her newfound first mother.
Adoption Unfiltered
This book reveals the candid thoughts and feelings of those most directly involved in adoption. The authors interview dozens of adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, social workers, therapists, and other allies, all sharing candidly about the challenges in adoption.Â
Journey of the Adopted Self
Betty Jean Lifton, whose Lost and Found has become a bible to adoptees and to those who would understand the adoption experience, explores further the inner world of the adopted person. She breaks new ground as she traces the adopted child’s lifelong struggle to form an authentic sense of self. And she shows how both the symbolic and the literal search for roots becomes a crucial part of the journey toward wholeness.
What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma
A searing memoir of reckoning and healing by acclaimed journalist Stephanie Foo, investigating the little-understood science behind complex PTSD and how it has shaped her life.
Parallel Universes: The Story of Rebirth
In this poignant and powerful memoir, David B. Bohl reveals the inner turmoil and broad spectrum of warring emotions—shame, anger, triumph, shyness, pride—he experienced growing up as a “relinquished” boy.
The Gathering Place
When Emma learns her birth mother wrote and signed a letter about her to the adoption agency, she knew she had to have that letter if she were to ever discover her birth mother’s true identity.
Adoption and Suicidality
Beth Syverson and Joseph Syverson, an adoptive mother and adoptee, collaborate to address adoption’s hidden mental health crisis. Drawing from groundbreaking research, they combine personal stories with practical resources to support families and professionals.Â
Adoption Unfiltered
This book reveals the candid thoughts and feelings of those most directly involved in adoption. The authors interview dozens of adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, social workers, therapists, and other allies, all sharing candidly about the challenges in adoption.Â
Hole In My Heart
In the days before Roe v. Wade, an ambitious young journalist, abandoned by her beau, leaves Michigan for a dream job on the city desk of a Rochester, New York newspaper. Burned once, she’s eager for love, but as the only Girl in the newsroom, she’s more concerned with finding allies and making friends.
When a new leading man appears, she recognizes a kindred spirit. Soon her bylined stories claim front-page space. However, when she becomes pregnant, she must switch her attention from deadlines to decisions.
With adoption on the horizon, she pushes her man to make a commitment. Sadly, he wants her, but not their daughter. Will Dusky ever find the little girl she longed to raise, and if she does, what will be the fallout from their years apart?
God and Jetfire
God and Jetfire is a mother’s account of her decision to surrender her son in an open adoption and of their relationship over the twelve years that follow. Facing an unplanned pregnancy at twenty-two, Amy Seek and her ex-boyfriend begin an exhaustive search for a family to raise their child.
Goodbye Again: A Memoir
The first time to adoption and the second not long after reuniting with him. In this heart-wrenching and heart-warming memoir, Candace Cahill offers an intimate view of child relinquishment and child loss, the definition of motherhood, and how two things can be true at one time.
Adoption and Suicidality
Beth Syverson and Joseph Syverson, an adoptive mother and adoptee, collaborate to address adoption’s hidden mental health crisis. Drawing from groundbreaking research, they combine personal stories with practical resources to support families and professionals.Â
Adoption Unfiltered
This book reveals the candid thoughts and feelings of those most directly involved in adoption. The authors interview dozens of adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, social workers, therapists, and other allies, all sharing candidly about the challenges in adoption.Â
Journey of the Adopted Self
Betty Jean Lifton, whose Lost and Found has become a bible to adoptees and to those who would understand the adoption experience, explores further the inner world of the adopted person. She breaks new ground as she traces the adopted child’s lifelong struggle to form an authentic sense of self. And she shows how both the symbolic and the literal search for roots becomes a crucial part of the journey toward wholeness.
Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss
A road map for the journey of writing honestly about grief and loss. Useful to the memoirist just starting out, as well as those already in the throes of coming to terms with complicated emotions and the challenges of shaping a compelling, coherent true story.
Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal: Migrating Toward Wholeness
Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal shares the framework and method of using writing as a practice for adult adoptees, therapists, teachers, and researchers interested in learning how to migrate and heal embodied trauma. It analyzes lived experience and the author’s own writing to develop a methodology for moving toward wholeness by writing and speaking the truth of internal adoptee experiences.
The Story You Need to Tell
A practical and inspiring guide to transformational personal storytelling, The Story You Need to Tell is the product of Sandra Marinella’s pioneering work with veterans and cancer patients, her years of teaching writing, and her research into its profound healing properties. Riveting true stories illustrate Marinella’s methods for understanding, telling, and editing personal stories in ways that foster resilience and renewal.
No Bad Parts
Discover an empowering new way of understanding your multifaceted mind – and healing the many parts that make you who you are.
The Primal Wound
The Primal Wound is a seminal work which revolutionizes the way we think about adoption. It describes and clarifies the effects of separating babies from their birth mothers as a primal loss which affects the relationships of the adopted person throughout life.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences Recovery Workbook
We’re all a product of our childhood, and if you’re like most people, you have experienced some form of childhood trauma. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are at the root of nearly all mental health disorders, including depression, anxiety, panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachement
n this groundbreaking book, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Amir Levine and psychologist Rachel S. F. Heller reveal how an understanding of attachment theory-the most advanced relationship science in existence today-can help us find and sustain love.
The Body Keeps The Score
A pioneering researcher and one of the world’s foremost experts on traumatic stress offers a bold new paradigm for healing.
Adoption Therapy
A much-needed anthology addressing a variety of potential psychological and physiological concerns, Adoption Therapy, Perspectives from Clients and Clinicians on Processing and Healing Post-Adoption Issues is a must-read for adoptees, adoptive parents, first families, and vitally, mental health professionals.
The Journey from Abandonment to Healing
The fear of abandonment is one of our most primal fears, and deservedly so. Its pain is often overwhelming, and can leave its mark on the rest of your life. In the midst of the hurt, it’s hard to see an end to your feelings of rejection, shame, and betrayal.
Seven Core Issues in Adoption and Permanancy
Based on a hugely successful US model, the Seven Core Issues in Adoption is the first conceptual framework of its kind to offer a unifying lens that was inclusive of all individuals touched by the adoption experience.
When the Past is Present: Healing the emotional wounds that Sabotage our Relationships
The popular author of How to Be an Adult in Relationships reveals how past trauma can negatively impact our present-day relationships—and offers guidance on what to do about it
Healing the Child Within
Here, frontline physician and therapist Charles Whitfield describes the process of wounding that the Child Within (True Self) experiences and shows how to differentiate the True Self from the false self.
Coming Home to Self: The Adoped Child Grow up
Coming Home to Self is a book about becoming aware. It is written for all members of the adoption triad: adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents as well as those who are in relationship with them, including professionals.
Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss
A road map for the journey of writing honestly about grief and loss. Useful to the memoirist just starting out, as well as those already in the throes of coming to terms with complicated emotions and the challenges of shaping a compelling, coherent true story.
Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal: Migrating Toward Wholeness
Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal shares the framework and method of using writing as a practice for adult adoptees, therapists, teachers, and researchers interested in learning how to migrate and heal embodied trauma. It analyzes lived experience and the author’s own writing to develop a methodology for moving toward wholeness by writing and speaking the truth of internal adoptee experiences.
The Story You Need to Tell
A practical and inspiring guide to transformational personal storytelling, The Story You Need to Tell is the product of Sandra Marinella’s pioneering work with veterans and cancer patients, her years of teaching writing, and her research into its profound healing properties. Riveting true stories illustrate Marinella’s methods for understanding, telling, and editing personal stories in ways that foster resilience and renewal.
The Adoption Paradox: Putting Adoption in Perspective
An ambitious book by Jean Kelly Widner, an adult adoptee, who explores the current and historical culture of American adoptions. Widner examines the unaddressed pain and systemic flaws in the system, and calls for a more transparent and compassionate approach to adoption.
Adoption and Suicidality
Beth Syverson and Joseph Syverson, an adoptive mother and adoptee, collaborate to address adoption’s hidden mental health crisis. Drawing from groundbreaking research, they combine personal stories with practical resources to support families and professionals.Â
Adoption Songs
Lori weaves together fifteen adoption stories, sparked by a chance encounter that led to an epiphany about the need to share these narratives. Drawing from her own experience as an adoptee who kept her adoption secret for years, she explores the universal theme of belonging that runs through the adoption community.
Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, By Gretchen Sisson
Based on a decade-long study, Sisson examines the complex interplay between adoption, privilege, and the ideals of American motherhood, shedding light on the broader cultural and systemic factors that shape the adoption landscape.
The Story You Need to Tell
A practical and inspiring guide to transformational personal storytelling, The Story You Need to Tell is the product of Sandra Marinella’s pioneering work with veterans and cancer patients, her years of teaching writing, and her research into its profound healing properties. Riveting true stories illustrate Marinella’s methods for understanding, telling, and editing personal stories in ways that foster resilience and renewal.
No Bad Parts
Discover an empowering new way of understanding your multifaceted mind – and healing the many parts that make you who you are.
The Primal Wound
The Primal Wound is a seminal work which revolutionizes the way we think about adoption. It describes and clarifies the effects of separating babies from their birth mothers as a primal loss which affects the relationships of the adopted person throughout life.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences Recovery Workbook
We’re all a product of our childhood, and if you’re like most people, you have experienced some form of childhood trauma. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are at the root of nearly all mental health disorders, including depression, anxiety, panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachement
n this groundbreaking book, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Amir Levine and psychologist Rachel S. F. Heller reveal how an understanding of attachment theory-the most advanced relationship science in existence today-can help us find and sustain love.
The Body Keeps The Score
A pioneering researcher and one of the world’s foremost experts on traumatic stress offers a bold new paradigm for healing.
Adoption Therapy
A much-needed anthology addressing a variety of potential psychological and physiological concerns, Adoption Therapy, Perspectives from Clients and Clinicians on Processing and Healing Post-Adoption Issues is a must-read for adoptees, adoptive parents, first families, and vitally, mental health professionals.
The Journey from Abandonment to Healing
The fear of abandonment is one of our most primal fears, and deservedly so. Its pain is often overwhelming, and can leave its mark on the rest of your life. In the midst of the hurt, it’s hard to see an end to your feelings of rejection, shame, and betrayal.
Seven Core Issues in Adoption and Permanancy
Based on a hugely successful US model, the Seven Core Issues in Adoption is the first conceptual framework of its kind to offer a unifying lens that was inclusive of all individuals touched by the adoption experience.
When the Past is Present: Healing the emotional wounds that Sabotage our Relationships
The popular author of How to Be an Adult in Relationships reveals how past trauma can negatively impact our present-day relationships—and offers guidance on what to do about it
Healing the Child Within
Here, frontline physician and therapist Charles Whitfield describes the process of wounding that the Child Within (True Self) experiences and shows how to differentiate the True Self from the false self.
Coming Home to Self: The Adoped Child Grow up
Coming Home to Self is a book about becoming aware. It is written for all members of the adoption triad: adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents as well as those who are in relationship with them, including professionals.
American Baby
The shocking truth about postwar adoption in America, told through the bittersweet story of one teenager, the son she was forced to relinquish, and their search to find each other.
The Myth of Normal
By the acclaimed author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing.
OTHER GREAT GIFTS TOO
Don’t Miss the My Adopted Life | Resources section for some other resources from our community!Â
