A comprehensive list of adoption resources including podcasts, search angels, organizations, and events.
EVENTS
Grief A Comedy
In “Grief A Comedy,” Alison recounts how, after decades spent with Mr. Wrongs and/or Mr. Right Nows, she happened upon THE love of her life — an Indian expat named Bhima. She shares how she found Bhima and sadly how she lost him — too soon, waaaay too soon — and she explains how she managed to carry on after her fiance’s tragic and unexpected passing, and how he returned to her in spirit to help her write their love story and urge her to find love again.
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins
A remarkable window into the volatile, constantly changing China of the last half century and the long-reaching legacy of the country’s most infamous law, Daughters of the Bamboo Grove is also the moving story of two sisters torn apart by the forces of history and brought together again by their families’ determination and one reporter’s dogged work.
Tell No One
A stunning memoir of one man’s search for his birth parents, which uncovered an astonishing global scandal at the heart of the Catholic Church.
Brendan Watkins was eight years old when his parents told him he was adopted. When he was in his late twenties, he started searching for his birth parents and eventually discovered the identity of his birth mother: he was told she was a Catholic nun. And she wanted nothing to do with him.
For the next thirty years Brendan had no clues as to the identity of his birth father. In 2018, a DNA test provided the answer: he was the son of a priest. His father had studied in a Trappist monastery in Ireland, returned to Australia and become a celebrated outback missionary. After decades of searching and obstruction from the Catholic church, the whole truth was finally exposed. Brendan Watkins’ birth parents were a Catholic priest and a nun.
Tell No One reveals the moving story of that incredible discovery, and explores the questions, anxieties and reflections arising from his hidden past.
Lucky Bastard
When he was ten years old, the author was told he’d been adopted. It was a seismic event that turned his world upside down. Nobody was who he thought they were. His mother wasn’t his mother; his father wasn’t his father; his sister wasn’t his sister; his grandparents weren’t his grandparents; he wasn’t related to any of his relatives; he didn’t know where he came from or who he was. This was at a time when adoption was shrouded in secrecy and shame. Birth mothers and adoptive parents signed non-disclosure agreements. Adoption records were sealed. In Lucky Bastard Anthony Akerman takes the reader on his quest to find out where he came from.
Anthony Akerman’s memoir is a significant achievement. It is moving, funny, light to the touch, insightful, wry, self-reflective and witty. It is also poignant. Richly illustrated with photographs, and vividly written, it is a profoundly informative reflection, not just on adoption, his own adoption, and the perilous paths all those who adopt and are adopted are obliged to trudge, but on the tender anguishes and idiocies of being human. Justice Edwin Cameron.
Follow this riveting odyssey of an adopted man in this compelling memoir. He defied the odds, crafting plays and words and conquering the world with resilience and passion. Herman Lategan, author of Hoerkind / Son of a Whore.
Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States (American Crossroads) (Volume 74)
The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents—a narrative that is especially pervasive with transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Kit W. Myers comparatively examines the adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. He shows how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures—in contrast to others that are not—and argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attempt to transgress biological, racial, cultural, and national borders established by traditional family ideals. Yet they are also linked to structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence. The Violence of Love confronts this discomforting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care.
Pulled by the Root: An Adoptee’s Healing Journey From Trauma, Shame, and Loss
Adoption involves complex trauma that, if unhealed and unheard, will pulse through subsequent generations. Pulled by the Root is a raw, vivid, and cinematic account of Heidi Marble’s lived experience as an adopted person. The story is led by Heidi as she pieces together her identity and comes home to her true self. Each chapter is followed by psychiatrist Alysa Zalma’s commentary, which extracts the essence of what is happening psychologically and spiritually. Pulled by the Root is an awakening not only to the experience of being adopted but also to the experience of being human.
The Adoption Reader: Birth Mothers, Adoptive Mothers, and Adopted Daughters Tell Their Stories
Adoption has always been a woman’s issue. With eloquence and conviction, more than 30 diverse birth mothers, adoptive mothers and adoptees tell their adoption stories and explore what is a deeply emotional, sometimes controversial, and always compelling experience that affects millions of families and individuals.
The Baby Scoop Era: Unwed Mothers, Infant Adoption and Forced Surrender
An expose of unethical and coercive adoption industry practices during a short period in American history known as the Baby Scoop Era (Post WWII – 1972). By sharing the actual printed words of social caseworkers, maternity home personnel, lawyers, judges, medical and mental health practitioners, the methods used to ensure that “unwed” mothers would surrender their babies to mostly infertile strangers will be revealed. These crimes against nature resulted in more than 1.5 million vulnerable new mothers being permanently separated from newborns that they might have parented had they been informed of their civil, legal, human and Constitutional rights.
Adopting Privilege: A Memoir of Reinventing My Adoptee Narrative
Adopting Privilege is Dr. Hasberry’s attempt at not only reckoning with her past, but offering unfiltered guidance to other transracial adoptees, and the larger adoption community, navigating what it means to exist in a familial limbo while also discovering what it means to simply exist.
Abigail Hasberry is no stranger to adoption. As both a Black adoptee to a white family, and a birth mother, her intimate understanding of this experience has shaped her career as both a therapist and transracial adoption scholar. However, the intricacies of transracial adoption narratives leave much to be discovered, and with stories often shared from the perspective of the adoptive family, the most affected group—the adoptees—are often left to fend for themselves in their own self discoveries.
A Life Let Go: A Memoir and Five Birth Mother Stories of Closed Adoption
Closed adoption, heralded as the answer to the problem of unplanned pregnancy, shows its other side in A Life Let Go, A Memoir and Five Birth Mother Stories of Closed Adoption. These women tell how they experienced unplanned pregnancy in the restrictiveness of the last decades of the twentieth century. All gave up a child in closed adoption–the only option–understanding they would never see them again, a dark contract made under great duress.
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.
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.
If you know of an event you would like added to this list, email me at [email protected].
PODCASTS
Mind over Masculinity Podcast: Patricia Knight Meyer on Identity & Adoption
Identity is the story we tell ourselves about who we are, but what happens when the earliest chapter of that story is a question mark instead of a memory? Host Sayan talks with author and adoptee-rights advocate Patricia Knight Meyer about growing up as a black-market adoption survivor, tracking down her biological parents decades later, and what that search revealed about authenticity, belonging, and the masculine expectation to have it all figured out.
Patricia also opens up about the absence of legal protections for birth fathers in the U.S. and how abandonment, whether through adoption or an absent father, can quietly shape the way men show up in relationships and work. This conversation reframes identity questions not as flaws to fix, but as part of being human.
Black-Market Adoption: A Perseverance Journey of Patricia Knight Meyer to Learn the Truth
Patricia joins Dr. James Purdue on the Professor of Perseverance podcast to trace her journey from black-market baby to the truth about her own identity. She talks about reuniting with both birth parents, the remarkable relationship she built with her birth father, and the emotional challenges of reunion that no one prepared her to face.
Family Twist Podcast: The Reunion No-one Prepared Her For (Part 2)
In this episode, Patricia Knight Meyer returns to talk about reunion with both of her birth parents, the remarkable relationship she built with her birth father, and the emotional challenges that no one prepared her to face.
Family Twist Podcast: The Lawyer Who Sold Babies (Part 1)
This week, Corey and Kendall welcome adoptee, author, advocate, and National Association of Adoptees and Parents (NAAP) board member Patricia Knight Meyer.
Patricia shares what it was like growing up with unanswered questions, why she always feared someone might come to take her away, and how years of searching eventually led her to the truth.
Lisa Cooper Ellison Podcast: Author Platform Strategy: Why Less Effort Gets Better Results with Human Design
“Author Platform Strategy: Why Less Effort Gets Better Results with Human Design.” A conversation with Lisa Cooper Ellison on building a sustainable author platform, working with your natural strengths instead of against them, and why doing less of the wrong things gets better results.
The Mindful Journey Podcast: Writing to Heal: Reclaiming Identity and Truth Through Memoir, with Patricia Knight Meyer
Patricia joins Sana on The Mindful Journey Podcast to discuss “Writing to Heal: Reclaiming Identity and Truth Through Memoir.” A conversation about turning a fractured origin story into a memoir, and how the act of writing became its own path through trauma toward reclaiming identity and truth.
Adoptees at Work Podcast: Guest Patricia Knight Meyer
A conversation with Peggie Ardvison on Adoptees at Work Podcast about how being adopted impacts my work life and has influenced career choices and direction.
Adoption Uncovered: Guest Patricia Knight Meyer
Patricia shared a conversation with Charlyn Speiring about her adoption story and (at 20 min in) the healing power of writing to heal adoption wounds.
The Secret Son Podcast: Guest Patricia Knight Meyer
Patricia shares her story with Mike Trupiano. Mike is the creator of Secret Son, an adoptee podcast about searching, identity, and secrets.
Claiming Your Voice: Patricia Knight Meyer Part 2
Part two of Patricia’s talk with Janeice Gerard about reuniting with her birth father.
Claiming Your Voice: Patricia Knight Meyer Part 1
Patricia joins host Janeice Gerrard to discuss her reunion with both her birth mother and father.
Adoptees On
This is not the usual adoption talk. You will find real, raw, and deep feelings addressed in these interviews. No sugar-coating here! Come and laugh, cry, learn and heal with us. I promise you’ll have a “me too” moment. Adult adoptees share stories of search, reunion, and secondary rejection. Adoptees On also curates recommended resources to encourage and educate the adoption community about adoptee issues.
Adoptees Dish
Adoptee centered podcast elevating experiences and the lived experience of those impacted by the complexities of adoption. Amy & Marcela are both international & transracial adoptees as well as licensed clinical social workers. Their insights are both personal and share a clinical lens.
Adoptees Crossing Lines
In this podcast we deconstruct the romanticism holding up the adoption industry and expose the lies, abuse, and pain that gets silenced. We’re here to unwrap the shiny bow around adoption and speak our truths as adoptees.
If you know of a podcast you would like added to this list, email me at [email protected].
BOOKS
Grief A Comedy
In “Grief A Comedy,” Alison recounts how, after decades spent with Mr. Wrongs and/or Mr. Right Nows, she happened upon THE love of her life — an Indian expat named Bhima. She shares how she found Bhima and sadly how she lost him — too soon, waaaay too soon — and she explains how she managed to carry on after her fiance’s tragic and unexpected passing, and how he returned to her in spirit to help her write their love story and urge her to find love again.
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins
A remarkable window into the volatile, constantly changing China of the last half century and the long-reaching legacy of the country’s most infamous law, Daughters of the Bamboo Grove is also the moving story of two sisters torn apart by the forces of history and brought together again by their families’ determination and one reporter’s dogged work.
Tell No One
A stunning memoir of one man’s search for his birth parents, which uncovered an astonishing global scandal at the heart of the Catholic Church.
Brendan Watkins was eight years old when his parents told him he was adopted. When he was in his late twenties, he started searching for his birth parents and eventually discovered the identity of his birth mother: he was told she was a Catholic nun. And she wanted nothing to do with him.
For the next thirty years Brendan had no clues as to the identity of his birth father. In 2018, a DNA test provided the answer: he was the son of a priest. His father had studied in a Trappist monastery in Ireland, returned to Australia and become a celebrated outback missionary. After decades of searching and obstruction from the Catholic church, the whole truth was finally exposed. Brendan Watkins’ birth parents were a Catholic priest and a nun.
Tell No One reveals the moving story of that incredible discovery, and explores the questions, anxieties and reflections arising from his hidden past.
Lucky Bastard
When he was ten years old, the author was told he’d been adopted. It was a seismic event that turned his world upside down. Nobody was who he thought they were. His mother wasn’t his mother; his father wasn’t his father; his sister wasn’t his sister; his grandparents weren’t his grandparents; he wasn’t related to any of his relatives; he didn’t know where he came from or who he was. This was at a time when adoption was shrouded in secrecy and shame. Birth mothers and adoptive parents signed non-disclosure agreements. Adoption records were sealed. In Lucky Bastard Anthony Akerman takes the reader on his quest to find out where he came from.
Anthony Akerman’s memoir is a significant achievement. It is moving, funny, light to the touch, insightful, wry, self-reflective and witty. It is also poignant. Richly illustrated with photographs, and vividly written, it is a profoundly informative reflection, not just on adoption, his own adoption, and the perilous paths all those who adopt and are adopted are obliged to trudge, but on the tender anguishes and idiocies of being human. Justice Edwin Cameron.
Follow this riveting odyssey of an adopted man in this compelling memoir. He defied the odds, crafting plays and words and conquering the world with resilience and passion. Herman Lategan, author of Hoerkind / Son of a Whore.
Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States (American Crossroads) (Volume 74)
The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents—a narrative that is especially pervasive with transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Kit W. Myers comparatively examines the adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. He shows how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures—in contrast to others that are not—and argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attempt to transgress biological, racial, cultural, and national borders established by traditional family ideals. Yet they are also linked to structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence. The Violence of Love confronts this discomforting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care.
Pulled by the Root: An Adoptee’s Healing Journey From Trauma, Shame, and Loss
Adoption involves complex trauma that, if unhealed and unheard, will pulse through subsequent generations. Pulled by the Root is a raw, vivid, and cinematic account of Heidi Marble’s lived experience as an adopted person. The story is led by Heidi as she pieces together her identity and comes home to her true self. Each chapter is followed by psychiatrist Alysa Zalma’s commentary, which extracts the essence of what is happening psychologically and spiritually. Pulled by the Root is an awakening not only to the experience of being adopted but also to the experience of being human.
Grief A Comedy
In “Grief A Comedy,” Alison recounts how, after decades spent with Mr. Wrongs and/or Mr. Right Nows, she happened upon THE love of her life — an Indian expat named Bhima. She shares how she found Bhima and sadly how she lost him — too soon, waaaay too soon — and she explains how she managed to carry on after her fiance’s tragic and unexpected passing, and how he returned to her in spirit to help her write their love story and urge her to find love again.
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins
A remarkable window into the volatile, constantly changing China of the last half century and the long-reaching legacy of the country’s most infamous law, Daughters of the Bamboo Grove is also the moving story of two sisters torn apart by the forces of history and brought together again by their families’ determination and one reporter’s dogged work.
Tell No One
A stunning memoir of one man’s search for his birth parents, which uncovered an astonishing global scandal at the heart of the Catholic Church.
Brendan Watkins was eight years old when his parents told him he was adopted. When he was in his late twenties, he started searching for his birth parents and eventually discovered the identity of his birth mother: he was told she was a Catholic nun. And she wanted nothing to do with him.
For the next thirty years Brendan had no clues as to the identity of his birth father. In 2018, a DNA test provided the answer: he was the son of a priest. His father had studied in a Trappist monastery in Ireland, returned to Australia and become a celebrated outback missionary. After decades of searching and obstruction from the Catholic church, the whole truth was finally exposed. Brendan Watkins’ birth parents were a Catholic priest and a nun.
Tell No One reveals the moving story of that incredible discovery, and explores the questions, anxieties and reflections arising from his hidden past.
Lucky Bastard
When he was ten years old, the author was told he’d been adopted. It was a seismic event that turned his world upside down. Nobody was who he thought they were. His mother wasn’t his mother; his father wasn’t his father; his sister wasn’t his sister; his grandparents weren’t his grandparents; he wasn’t related to any of his relatives; he didn’t know where he came from or who he was. This was at a time when adoption was shrouded in secrecy and shame. Birth mothers and adoptive parents signed non-disclosure agreements. Adoption records were sealed. In Lucky Bastard Anthony Akerman takes the reader on his quest to find out where he came from.
Anthony Akerman’s memoir is a significant achievement. It is moving, funny, light to the touch, insightful, wry, self-reflective and witty. It is also poignant. Richly illustrated with photographs, and vividly written, it is a profoundly informative reflection, not just on adoption, his own adoption, and the perilous paths all those who adopt and are adopted are obliged to trudge, but on the tender anguishes and idiocies of being human. Justice Edwin Cameron.
Follow this riveting odyssey of an adopted man in this compelling memoir. He defied the odds, crafting plays and words and conquering the world with resilience and passion. Herman Lategan, author of Hoerkind / Son of a Whore.
Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States (American Crossroads) (Volume 74)
The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents—a narrative that is especially pervasive with transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Kit W. Myers comparatively examines the adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. He shows how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures—in contrast to others that are not—and argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attempt to transgress biological, racial, cultural, and national borders established by traditional family ideals. Yet they are also linked to structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence. The Violence of Love confronts this discomforting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care.
Pulled by the Root: An Adoptee’s Healing Journey From Trauma, Shame, and Loss
Adoption involves complex trauma that, if unhealed and unheard, will pulse through subsequent generations. Pulled by the Root is a raw, vivid, and cinematic account of Heidi Marble’s lived experience as an adopted person. The story is led by Heidi as she pieces together her identity and comes home to her true self. Each chapter is followed by psychiatrist Alysa Zalma’s commentary, which extracts the essence of what is happening psychologically and spiritually. Pulled by the Root is an awakening not only to the experience of being adopted but also to the experience of being human.
The Adoption Reader: Birth Mothers, Adoptive Mothers, and Adopted Daughters Tell Their Stories
Adoption has always been a woman’s issue. With eloquence and conviction, more than 30 diverse birth mothers, adoptive mothers and adoptees tell their adoption stories and explore what is a deeply emotional, sometimes controversial, and always compelling experience that affects millions of families and individuals.
The Baby Scoop Era: Unwed Mothers, Infant Adoption and Forced Surrender
An expose of unethical and coercive adoption industry practices during a short period in American history known as the Baby Scoop Era (Post WWII – 1972). By sharing the actual printed words of social caseworkers, maternity home personnel, lawyers, judges, medical and mental health practitioners, the methods used to ensure that “unwed” mothers would surrender their babies to mostly infertile strangers will be revealed. These crimes against nature resulted in more than 1.5 million vulnerable new mothers being permanently separated from newborns that they might have parented had they been informed of their civil, legal, human and Constitutional rights.
Adopting Privilege: A Memoir of Reinventing My Adoptee Narrative
Adopting Privilege is Dr. Hasberry’s attempt at not only reckoning with her past, but offering unfiltered guidance to other transracial adoptees, and the larger adoption community, navigating what it means to exist in a familial limbo while also discovering what it means to simply exist.
Abigail Hasberry is no stranger to adoption. As both a Black adoptee to a white family, and a birth mother, her intimate understanding of this experience has shaped her career as both a therapist and transracial adoption scholar. However, the intricacies of transracial adoption narratives leave much to be discovered, and with stories often shared from the perspective of the adoptive family, the most affected group—the adoptees—are often left to fend for themselves in their own self discoveries.
A Life Let Go: A Memoir and Five Birth Mother Stories of Closed Adoption
Closed adoption, heralded as the answer to the problem of unplanned pregnancy, shows its other side in A Life Let Go, A Memoir and Five Birth Mother Stories of Closed Adoption. These women tell how they experienced unplanned pregnancy in the restrictiveness of the last decades of the twentieth century. All gave up a child in closed adoption–the only option–understanding they would never see them again, a dark contract made under great duress.
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.
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.
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.
Unraveling Your Adoption Journey: Journal Prompts for the Adoptee’s Journey
Ready to dive deep into your adoption journey? My journal, Unraveling Your Adoption Journey, was created with adoptees in mind—those of us navigating identity, trust, and belonging. It’s more than just a journal; it’s a space to process your emotions, dig into your story, and explore who you really are, all while feeling seen and understood.
With each prompt, you’ll have the chance to reflect, get creative, and truly explore the layers of your own narrative. Whether you’re wrestling with issues of identity, trust, abandonment, or just trying to make sense of the complex emotions around adoption, this journal helps you make space for those feelings and encourages you to dive deeper into what makes you, you.
Inside, you’ll find a blend of thoughtful exercises and prompts that not only encourage self-reflection but also help you express yourself in ways that feel right for you. It’s a way to unravel your story piece by piece and make peace with it, reconnecting with your true self along the way.
Whether you’re just starting to explore your adoption journey or looking for a new perspective, this journal offers guidance, comfort, and a reminder that you’re not alone in your experience. Unraveling Your Adoption Journey empowers you to reclaim your narrative, embrace your story, and find a sense of belonging that feels authentic to you.
Open it up, and let this be the start of your healing, your self-discovery, and your journey toward acceptance and understanding.
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.
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.
If you know of a book you would like added to this list, email me at [email protected].
SEARCH & SUPPORT
Search Angels & Organizations
- Angel Search Network: A dedicated team of search angels offering adoption search support and assistance. They have a wide network of resources and volunteers ready to help individuals in their search for birth parents, adoptees, and other relatives.
- Search Angels Worldwide: A global community of search angels providing support and guidance to those involved in adoption searches. They offer various services, including document research, DNA analysis, and emotional support throughout the search process.
- Adoption Reunion Registry Search Angels: This organization specializes in reuniting birth families and adoptees through their search angel network. They provide personalized assistance, access to databases, and expert guidance to navigate the complexities of adoption searches.
- DNA Detectives: A group of experienced genetic genealogists who offer their expertise in using DNA testing and analysis to uncover family connections. They specialize in adoption-related searches and can help individuals interpret DNA results and navigate genetic genealogy databases.
- Search Squad: Composed of volunteer search angels, Search Squad assists individuals in finding their birth families through research, public records, and social media platforms. They have a dedicated online community where individuals can seek guidance and support throughout their search journey.
- Find My Family Adoption Search Angels: A team of passionate search angels dedicated to helping adoptees, birth parents, and siblings find each other. They provide personalized search plans, access to databases, and emotional support during the search process.
- Adoption Search Consultants: A group of professional search consultants who specialize in adoption searches. They offer comprehensive search services, including record retrieval, genetic genealogy research, and expert advice on navigating adoption laws and regulations.
- Birth Parent Finder: A network of search angels with expertise in locating birth parents and facilitating reunions. They offer personalized search strategies, document retrieval, and emotional support for both adoptees and birth parents throughout the search process.
- Search Angels of Adoption: A nonprofit organization comprised of dedicated search angels who volunteer their time and expertise to assist individuals in finding their biological families. They provide guidance, research assistance, and emotional support to individuals searching for their roots.
- The Seeker’s Heart: A group of search angels committed to helping adoptees and birth families find each other. They offer a range of services, including record searches, DNA analysis, and personalized support throughout the search and reunion process.
“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”
-Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
ORGANIZATIONS
Road to Belonging: Establishing a Legacy of Love after Closed Adoption
by Lynne Leppard
Each person has their own unique story, and as Lynne Leppard’s early life included foster care and adoption, she often found herself wondering about her origins and heritage. Her loyalty to her adoptive family was real, but so too was her longing to find out more about her first family and the story of her biological parents. In these pages, woven together with faith and family, Lynne vulnerably shares the untangling of the threads of adoption as she searches for answers to questions of identity, security and belonging.
Famous Adopted People
Lisa Pearl is an American teaching English in Japan and the situation there―thanks mostly to her spontaneous, hard-partying ways―has become problematic. Now she’s in Seoul, South Korea, with her childhood best-friend Mindy. The young women share a special bond: they are both Korean-born adoptees into white American families. Mindy is in Seoul to track down her birth mom, and wants Lisa to do the same. Trouble is, Lisa isn’t convinced she needs to know about her past, much less meet her biological mother.
No Stone Left Unturned: A relentless pursuit of the truth to uncover biological parentage
“I doubt that another human being will tread this same unconventional path.” This is an intimate and emotive account of an adult adoptee’s journey as he spent nearly three decades searching for his biological parents. Capturing his thoughts, emotions and physical encounters along the way, this rollercoaster ride demonstrates the determination and resilience of an adopted person to achieve his personal quest. There’s no doubt that this account will provide support, comfort, and inspiration to those thinking of searching for their biological parents, and those who have already started out on this journey, as well as those interested in wider adoption matters. Discover the relentless challenges and amazing encounters faced in pursuit of the truth when no stone is left unturned.
Adoption Trauma: Pain, Rejection, Fear! But There Is Hope
The day that I believed adoption trauma was a thing was the start of my journey to a whole new me. Growing up I had been under the impression that I was just bad, naughty, and at one point in my childhood the adjective “”evil”” was applied. Of course I completely bought into the adjectives used to describe me. Even when the odd teacher spoke to me about my good attributes: caring, kind, and compassionate. Still I veered towards the negative. Adoption trauma is very real. Had it been recognized as a “”thing”” when I was a child, and if someone had picked up on it, things may have been different for me. I can’t change anything, but I can walk towards inner healing. So can you.
Do you want to take a step towards confidence, acceptance, and well-being? This audiobook is my inward look at adoption trauma with some helpful tips that I have used over the past six years to help me overcome the feelings of unworthiness, anger, fear, and rejection that plagued me for 50 years.
The Family of Adoption: Completely Revised and Updated
Full of wonderful stories that give insight into a wide variety of adoption issues, now revised in light of recent developments, The Family of Adoption is a powerful argument for the right kind of openness in adoption. Joyce Maguire Pavao uses her thirty years of experience as a family and adoption therapist to explain to adoptive parents, birthparents, adult adopted people, and extended family, as well as to those who work with children professionally the developmental stages and challenges one can expect in the life of the adopted person. The Family of Adoption is truly the most insightful and healing book on the adoption shelf.
Belonging Matters: Conversations on Adoption, Family, and Kinship
Belonging Matters supports the adoption community while creating a conversation with those not directly touched by adoption. The collection explores the pursuit of identity and the boundaries of family and kinship. It challenges the reader to embrace all of who we come to be, and to discern with whom and where we belong. Because belonging defines the human experience, and it is what nourishes our spirit, fuels us with purpose, and compels us to soar beyond the limitations of our lived experience.
The Adoption Reader: Birth Mothers, Adoptive Mothers, and Adopted Daughters Tell Their Stories
Adoption has always been a woman’s issue. With eloquence and conviction, more than 30 diverse birth mothers, adoptive mothers and adoptees tell their adoption stories and explore what is a deeply emotional, sometimes controversial, and always compelling experience that affects millions of families and individuals.
The Baby Scoop Era: Unwed Mothers, Infant Adoption and Forced Surrender
An expose of unethical and coercive adoption industry practices during a short period in American history known as the Baby Scoop Era (Post WWII – 1972). By sharing the actual printed words of social caseworkers, maternity home personnel, lawyers, judges, medical and mental health practitioners, the methods used to ensure that “unwed” mothers would surrender their babies to mostly infertile strangers will be revealed. These crimes against nature resulted in more than 1.5 million vulnerable new mothers being permanently separated from newborns that they might have parented had they been informed of their civil, legal, human and Constitutional rights.
Adopting Privilege: A Memoir of Reinventing My Adoptee Narrative
Adopting Privilege is Dr. Hasberry’s attempt at not only reckoning with her past, but offering unfiltered guidance to other transracial adoptees, and the larger adoption community, navigating what it means to exist in a familial limbo while also discovering what it means to simply exist.
Abigail Hasberry is no stranger to adoption. As both a Black adoptee to a white family, and a birth mother, her intimate understanding of this experience has shaped her career as both a therapist and transracial adoption scholar. However, the intricacies of transracial adoption narratives leave much to be discovered, and with stories often shared from the perspective of the adoptive family, the most affected group—the adoptees—are often left to fend for themselves in their own self discoveries.
A Life Let Go: A Memoir and Five Birth Mother Stories of Closed Adoption
Closed adoption, heralded as the answer to the problem of unplanned pregnancy, shows its other side in A Life Let Go, A Memoir and Five Birth Mother Stories of Closed Adoption. These women tell how they experienced unplanned pregnancy in the restrictiveness of the last decades of the twentieth century. All gave up a child in closed adoption–the only option–understanding they would never see them again, a dark contract made under great duress.
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.
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.
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.
If you know of an organization you would like added to this list, email me at [email protected].
