Thriving Adoptees - Let's Thrive

Are you conflicted? Caught between your biological and adoptive mothers, fathers or broader families? Seeking peace, love or something else that you can't get?  Eva's story is very different to most adoptees' stories and yet many of the feelings are the same. That different story gives us a fresh perspective to reflect on our own emotional and the shared emotions give us permission to learn.

‘Eva Asprakis was raised in South London by her American mother and Cypriot stepfather, who subsequently adopted her. She now lives in Nicosia with her partner, and is the author of two contemporary fiction novels. Her work explores themes of immigration and cultural identity, as well as sexual politics and complex familial relationships.’

Connect with Eva at:

https://www.instagram.com/eva.asprakis/

https://eva-asprakis.mailchimpsites.com/

Link to order her book  https://books2read.com/38dor. 

Guests and the host are not (unless mentioned) licensed pscyho-therapists and speak from their own opinion only. Seek qualified advice if you need help.

How's your healing? If you're looking for more healing then a broader, holistic, view may help you jump the barriers on your journey. Listen in as adoptee and holistic healer for adoptees Sarah goes wide (and deep) to speed you along.

Here's a bit about Sarah

"I am 53 yrs old adoptee, English/Indian and a mom to two teenage boys. As a fully qualified Bowen Therapist and Reiki Master my goal is to unify the mind, body and soul for healing and recovery. I work from my own space in Silves, Portugal and globally remotely. Life gave me the opportunity to take a new path which began when I received a course of Bowen treatments after the birth of my first son in 2007. This led me to retrain into the holistic health field, since then I have been dedicated to the wellness of others on all levels. Over the last few years I felt a pull to expand into learning about the synergy of the mind and body. After a profound personal transformation, I knew that I could guide others on their own healing journey, specifically adoptees. My heart-led goal is to guide, encourage, lead and support you in creating a solid foundation for yourself, your family, your life. A foundation that is real, meaningful and unshakable from where you can expand and transform."

Here's a link to Sarah's group

https://www.facebook.com/groups/574139124622133

Connect with Sarah here:

https://www.globalhearthealing.com/

https://www.facebook.com/bowentherapyalgarvemstr

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahpatstone/

https://sarahpatstone.com/

Guests and the host are not (unless mentioned) licensed pscyho-therapists and speak from their own opinion only. Seek qualified advice if you need help.

Are your feelings sometimes unbearable? No wonder we try to stuff them down! But that doesn't work does it? So what are we to do? Listen in as Ferera shares her take on healing and feeling less hurt by the hurt. Trigger warning: mention of suicide ideation.

Bridging music and activism for adoptee rights, social change, and collective healing, Ferera has channeled her trauma into a creative and personal rebirth. “Some of our greatest gifts can be found in our deepest pain. Explore what hurts, and find yourself."

Listen to Second Time here:

https://open.spotify.com/track/0PwocyGJiMjThJexY5e3en

Read her blog here:

https://www.fereraswan.com/theswanproject

Find out more here:

https://www.fereraswan.com

https://www.instagram.com/fereraswan

https://www.facebook.com/fereraswan

Listen to Hayley Radke interviewing Ferera here:

https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/178

Guests and the host are not (unless mentioned) licensed pscyho-therapists and speak from their own opinion only. Seek qualified advice if you need help.

So many of us spent so long pushing tough emotions like loss away. So much of that has been unconscious. What if we can welcome loss in like a friend? So it loses its power over us? Jen shares her learnings from the loss of two mothers. 

From Laguna Beach (Orange County), California, Jennifer Bao Yu "Precious Jade" Jue-Steuck is an author, screenwriter, children's novelist, adoption researcher, and adoption columnist. Adopted from Taipei (by an American family from Los Angeles), Jennifer is a graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and Harvard University, where she was a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Scholar.

She is the founder of Chinese Adoptee Links (CAL) International — Global Generations, the first global group created by and for the more than 150,000 Chinese adoptees growing up in 26+ countries around the world. She currently serves as the co-founder of Harvardwood Vancouver-Seattle (for Harvard alumni in the Arts & Entertainment), and is the West Coast Brand Ambassador for Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs (HAE) Canada.

Jennifer has given more than 100+ adoption talks in 8 countries, including several Keynote Speeches, on behalf of the international adoption community. A contributor to St. Martin’s Press, Oxford University Press, MIT Press, Conde Nast and more, Jennifer was recently awarded a runner-up prize by International Thriller Writers (ITW). She won her first writing competition at age 9, and has been writing ever since. The Stepmother's Project is Jennifer's first Canadian global media project ("EVERY MOTHER MATTERS").

https://www.gofundme.com/f/Stepmother-Project

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-jue-steuck/

Guests and the host are not (unless mentioned) licensed pscyho-therapists and speak from their own opinion only. Seek qualified advice if you need help.

Would you like a better relationship with yourself? Less anxiety? Less anger? Listen in as we talk about forgiving ourselves, grace and much more. I don't usually swear on the podcast but I do so for emphasis. Sorry for any offence caused.

Would you like a better relationship with yourself? Less anxiety? Less anger? Listen in as we talk about forgiving ourselves, grace and much more. I don't usually swear on the podcast but I do so for emphasis. Sorry for any offence caused.

Louise Browne is a baby scoop era adoptee from the United States living in California. She Co-Hosts a podcast, Adoption: The Making of Me, that helps to get adoptees stories out in the world to help change the narrative around adoption. 

Louise enjoys spending time with her grown son, her husband, family and friends, hikes, enjoys nature and is working on writing her first novel and getting a Young Adult published. 

Find out more at:

https://twitter.com/LouiseBrowne_LA

https://www.facebook.com/louise.b.gonzalez

https://www.linkedin.com/in/louise-browne-3b5a0519/

https://www.adoptionthemakingofme.com

https://www.facebook.com/themakingofmepodcast

https://www.instagram.com/themakingofmepodcast

https://twitter.com/makingofmepdcst

Guests and the host are not (unless mentioned) licensed pscyho-therapists and speak from their own opinion only. Seek qualified advice if you need help.

One of the strongest themes in our conversations on healing is that it's an ongoing process. So what do learn over that process that helps us along that process? Listen in as Paige shares what she's done and continues to do to help her along the process.

Paige Adams Strickland (1961- ) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and adopted at 13 months. In 1987 she began a search for her biological family members. She has a BA from Florida State University in Spanish Education. She has 30 years experience in teaching. Her writing has been featured and won attention from scinti.com, a wordwithyoupress.com, soniamarsh.com and adoptionvoicesmagazine.com.

Listen to her previous interview:

Paige felt ashamed about being adopted when she was younger. Listen to what she's learned over the years to leave this behind. We discuss overcoming stigma, questioning the primal wound and our true identity to feel better, do better and thrive. 

https://thriving-adoptees.simplecast.com/episodes/from-shame-to-thriving-with-paige-strickland

Find out more about her at:

https://stricklandp.wordpress.com/author/stricklandp/

https://www.facebook.com/23plas

https://twitter.com/plastrickland23

https://www.instagram.com/paigeladamsstrickland/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/paige-adams-strickland-4819722b/

https://www.instagram.com/akin_to_and_after_the_truth/

Check out her books at:

https://www.amazon.com/s?i=digital-text&rh=p_27%3APaige+Strickland&s=relevancerank&text=Paige+Strickland&ref=dp_byline_sr_ebooks_1

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Paige-Adams-Strickland/e/B00FQ6GU5C?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1644231531&sr=8-1

Guests and the host are not (unless mentioned) licensed pscyho-therapists and speak from their own opinion only. Seek qualified advice if you need help.

How do you feel when say that you should be grateful for having been adopted? Angry? Frustrated? Invalidated? Feeling grateful is totally different to being told to feel grateful. Listen in as Josee shares a lifetime's of insights on gratitude and much more. 

https://www.facebook.com/JoseeBraultofficial

Guests and the host are not (unless mentioned) licensed pscyho-therapists and speak from their own opinion only. Seek qualified advice if you need help.

Does trauma sometimes keep you locked up?Listen in as transracial adoptee shares Suni powerful insights about breaking free from our trauma to find the freedom that sets us free.

Here's a link to Suni's previous interview https://thriving-adoptees.simplecast.com/episodes/lightbulb-moments-with-adoptee-suni-zmich

Here's a bit about Suni and her book:

After ignoring her own adoption story for 50 years, SUNI MILLER ZMICH journeyed alongside the interviewees as they described their stories, connecting on an elemental level, her unanticipated reward was she could clearly see herself in the mirror for the first time in her life. She is the mother of two daughters, a retired accounting and finance manager, and a transient ex-army brat poised for the next adventure. Practically empty nesters, she and her husband, Kurt, live in Minneapolis. For Now. When I first started Through the Lens of Ourselves,I only had a vague idea of what I wanted to accomplish.​

I am an adoptee. After conducting many interviews, my personal journey melded with the interviewees. I learned that ALL members of the adoption triad yearn for familial connection. In listening to the birth mothers, I was surprised at my own reaction. For years, I had harbored resentment about my own birth parents and would not fully invest myself emotionally with my adoptive parents. But after allowing myself to see through the lens of the birth parents in my book, I felt safe enough to become closer to my adoptive parents.

My hope is that my book will bring peace to to those who are still traumatized by their adoption experience. I will forever be grateful to the individuals who were brave enough to share their stories with me. They nourished my soul and I hope their stories will feed the world.

Listening to the stories of others touched by adoption healed me.

My hope is that my book will also heal you.

You know that quiet voice that whispers to you when you first wake up in that fuzzy space between sleep and full consciousness - where your dreams and reality collide? I would sometimes hear those little nudges to examine my adoption.

Here's the link I to the Dragon story mentioned https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7stT4OQoFGU

Here's links to her website with links to Amazon etc:

https://www.sunimillerzmich.com/

Here are links to her social media:

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100068780925549

https://www.instagram.com/sunimillerzmich/

Guests and the host are not (unless mentioned) licensed pscyho-therapists and speak from their own opinion only. Seek qualified advice if you need help.

Peace. Isn't that what all want? Or maybe just a bit more peace would be nice. A bit more well, peaceful. Triggered less of the time. Trigger for shorter periods of time. How do we find peace when our nervous systems have been shot to pieces? When we are constantly hyped up and hyper-vigilant. Adoptee and therapist Gill shares 25 years of learnings and what's really worked for her.

https://www.facebook.com/gilli.bruce

https://www.lara-leon.com/first-retreat-for-adopted-adults-june-2023/

https://howtobeadopted.com/blog/2021/study-into-lifelong-impacts-of-adoption-by-gillian-bruce

Guests and the host are not (unless mentioned) licensed pscyho-therapists and speak from their own opinion only. Seek qualified advice if you need help.

Most of us aren't choosing how we feel most of the time. Most of us aren't choosing what we think most of the time. Our trauma is choosing our thoughts and feelings for us. So how DO we choose? Listen in as neuroanatomist Dr Jill Bolte Taylor dives deep into learning to choose. Fascinating and empowering.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist whose research specialized in understanding how our brain creates our perception of reality. She was interested in this subject because she has a brother who is diagnosed with the brain disorder schizophrenia.

As irony would have it, in 1996 at the age of 37, Dr. Jill experienced a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain. On the afternoon of this rare form of stroke (AVM), she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. It took eight years for Dr. Jill to completely rebuild her brain to recover all physical, emotional, and thinking abilities.

Dr. Jill is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey (published in 2008 by Viking Penguin), which is still often the #1 book about STROKE sold in the Amazon marketplace. In addition, her second book WHOLE BRAIN LIVING: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters That Drive Our Life was published in May of 2021 by Hay House and is now readily available.

In 2008, Dr. Jill gave a presentation about her experience with stroke at the TED Conference in Monterey, CA, which was the first TED talk to ever go viral through the internet. TED and Dr. Jill became world-famous instantaneously and that TED talk has now been viewed well over 27.5 million times. This 18-minute presentation catapulted Dr. Jill into the public eye, and within six weeks of presenting that TED talk, she was chosen as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, she was the premiere guest on Oprah’s Soul Series webcast, and her book My Stroke of Insight became a New York Times bestseller and remained on the list for 63 weeks.

Dr. Jill is passionate about educating the public about the beauty of our human brain, and she is committed to not only helping others find their way back from neurological trauma but is eager to help everyone better understand their brain so they can live their best life.  Her Foundation Jill Bolte Taylor BRAINS is dedicated to providing educational services and promoting programs that are related to the advancement of brain awareness, appreciation, exploration, education, injury prevention, neurological recovery, and the value of movement on mental and physical health, as well as other activities that support this purpose.

Dr. Jill remains the National Spokesperson for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center (Harvard Brain Bank), whereby she educates the public about the shortage of brain tissue donated for research into the severe mental illnesses. Since 1993, she has been an active member of NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness), by serving for three years on the National NAMI Board of Directions and later spent over ten years as the president of the local level NAMI Greater Bloomington Area affiliate in Bloomington, Indiana.

https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_insight

https://www.instagram.com/drjillboltetaylor

https://www.facebook.com/DrJillBolteTaylor

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHfUhV_xjrJLPiLZSlTRNvg

https://www.drjilltaylor.com/

Guests and the host are not (unless mentioned) licensed pscyho-therapists and speak from their own opinion only. Seek qualified advice if you need help.