Thriving Adoptees - Let's Thrive

Adoptees born in Ireland can now access their birth information and apply for a tracing service. Listen in as Patricia Carey, CEO Adoption Authority of Ireland explains the background and services now available.

The Adoption Authority Of Ireland's mission is to " To ensure the provision of the highest possible standards of adoption related services, throughout the lifelong adoption process, with the best interests of children as the first and paramount objective."

The Birth Information and Tracing Act 2022 was signed into law on 30 June 2022. This landmark legislation provides a full and clear right of access to birth certificates, birth and early life information for all persons who were adopted, boarded out, the subject of an illegal birth registration or who otherwise have questions in relation to their origins. It also allows for access to information by next of kin in certain circumstances.

The new law establishes a Contact Preference Register and a robust tracing service and, as well as a range of new bespoke measures to address issues arising for people affected by illegal birth registration.

More at:

https://aai.gov.ie/en/

https://www.birthinfo.ie/

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.

Here's a bit about Joy from her website :

Adopted as a baby and raised by a devout Jehovah’s Witness family, Joy Castro is constantly reminded to tell the truth no matter what the consequences. Nevertheless, Castro finds this tenet to be the most violated. Here, in her very own Truth Book, Castro bears witness to a childhood lost but a life regained.

Castro’s parents divorce after her father is excommunicated for smoking. She is twelve when her mother marries a “brother” in the church who, though exhibiting an impeccable public persona, is violent and controlling at home. For two years, Joy does not grow at all; in fact, she loses sixteen pounds in response to the physical, emotional, psychological, and sexual abuse she suffers at his hands. Her battered mother does nothing to protect her, nor does her church. She is sustained by humor, books, and her protective love for her younger brother until their daring escape. This courageous personal account looks freshly at the disturbing effects of religious hypocrisy and the resilience of the human spirit.

More at:

https://www.joycastro.com/

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorJoyCastro/

https://twitter.com/_joycastro

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.

Shame seems to exist on a scale from mildly debilitating to totally wrecking adoptees' lives. Listen in as explore shame, where it comes from and coming to terms with it. This episode is all about how understanding the truth of who we are sets us free.

Susan Beale was raised on Cape Cod, lived in Belgium and France, and now lives in the Wells, Somerset. Susan has worked as a journalist and editor in the US and Europe. She is a former competitive figure skater. She is a recent graduate of the Bath Spa MA in Creative Writing. 

The Good Guy - her first novel is inspired by Susan’s life. Susan was adopted as a baby and only reconnected with her birth mother several years ago. The inspiration for the book came from her adoption files. The papers include interviews with her mother, grandmother and one with her birth father. As well as helping Susan understand why she was adopted, the papers paint a portrait of America on the cusp of the sexual revolution. It’s a time of unprecedented prosperity and conformity. Young people enjoy new freedoms, but gender roles remain clearly defined and expectations of morality and purity are strictly, and sometimes cruelly, enforced. It’s a world about to be shaken to its core.

Ted, a car-tyre salesman in 1960s suburban New England, is a dreamer who craves admiration. His wife Abigail longs for a life of the mind. Single-girl Penny just wants to be loved. After a chance encounter, Ted becomes enamoured with Penny and begins inventing a whole new life with her at its centre. But when this fantasy collides with reality, the fallout threatens everything, and everyone, he holds dear. The Good Guy is a deeply compelling debut about love, marriage, the pressure to conform, and what happens when good intentions and self-deception are taken to extremes.

https://www.amazon.com/Susan-Beale/e/B07761GLTT

https://twitter.com/terminal_expat

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.

Adoptee Diane's search & reunion process was epic and, ultimately, rewarding. Listen in as we take a deep dive into faith, hope & perseverance that powered her through that process for insights galore for all adoptees.

It is our human right to know who we are. After her adoptive parents passed away, Diane decided to take the DNA plunge to find her biological family. Learn how she found her biological family after years of wondering who she was and why she was born. With the help of a search angel, science and technology a lifetime of questions were about to be answered. Christmas, 2018 is just the beginning of her emotional journey to connect with her family.

https://www.facebook.com/dianegrayauthor

https://dianegrayauthor.com/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Faith-Hope-Perseverance-Adoptees-Biological/dp/1977226647

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.

Feeling unwanted is a central theme to many of adoptees' lives. We ache for connection. And it's a deep throbbing heartache that hurts like hell.  Listen in as adoptee Laurie and I explore what she's learned to help you heal that heartache.

What does it mean to belong? Laurie James spent most of her life wondering that same question. A lack of belonging and loneliness dictated how she spent most of her life. She rarely shared her secret with others—it was always hidden behind a carefree and can-do attitude.  

In her mid-forties, Laurie is sent down an unwanted path after her mother has a heart attack and her husband’s lawyer delivers some shocking news. She suddenly finds herself Sandwiched between caring for her parents, managing unruly caregivers, raising four teenage daughters, and trying to understand the choices of her husband she thought she knew.  

Sandwiched is a story about one woman’s struggle to do “it all” while facing the reality that the ideal life and family she believed she had created was slowly crumbling beneath her. As she tries everything to keep her family together, Laurie seeks therapy, turns to yoga, rediscovers nature, develops a strong female tribe and begins writing. As she explores the layers of her life and heals her past, she realizes that she’s the only one who can create the life she wants and deserves. 

Sandwiched, is a memoir debut about what it means to let go of the life you planned in order to find the life you belong to.  

https://www.instagram.com/laurie.james/

https://www.facebook.com/laurie.james.79219754

https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurie-james-8336a0168/

https://www.laurieejames.com/

Here's a another episode on the primal wound

https://thriving-adoptees.simplecast.com/episodes/primally-wounded-or-fundamentally-unwoundable-with-nick-mabey

Here's a link to the event on 3 January 2023 about healing the primal wound 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/whole-healing-my-primal-wound-tickets-473258638327

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.

Transracial adoptee Thomas felt anger was stitched into him. Listen in as we explore how he saw through that to find peace and end his identity crisis. This is a particularly profound conversation which listeners are going to love.

Here's a bit about Thomas and his book:

An inspirational book detailing the profound changes in the life of a black child being left at a hospital after birth. Thirteen months into his life being adopted by a white couple that migrated from Europe before World War 2, who would later adopt over twenty children with different nationalities.

The author writes of his emotional struggles from being abandoned and not knowing how to accept love to searching for answers to the pain and confusion that comes with growing up in white churches and schools while being black in the 1980s. Through anger, drugs, alcohol, jail, death, racism, and having the feeling there's no one to connect with to finding out who he is.

The author takes you for a riveting ride through his life as he never gives up to find the answers he is looking for that haunted him throughout his life.

Through life, love, hate, hurt, tears, and confusion, the author finds what he is looking for. But did he? An unbelievable ending to a lost soul that endured emotional trauma as in the end, he learns to love what he pushed away, learns to accept his life and who he is.

https://www.facebook.com/people/AuthorThomasKirst/100063906433231/

https://authorthomaskirst.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.

Resolving identity is often particularly tricky for transracial adoptees given the extra layer of complexity that race brings to adoption. Lucy felt different, saw lots of people who looked very different to her and was treated very differently too. Finding peace and ease with her identity took decades. Listen in as we explore the insights on the journey.

Here's a bit about her from her website

Lucy Sheen Made in Hong Kong exported to the UK in the early 60s as a transracial adoptee. Brought up by a white family in the heartland of conservative England, next to the cucumber sandwiches, church spires and cricket on the village green. Lucy has over thirty years of professional experience as an actor. Lucy has always written, but it is only in the last five years that Lucy has become an active writer. Her work takes its inspiration from her own background. Much of what interests Lucy concerns identity. "Duality, the schism in thought and emotion when you are conflicted, when your heritage and culture is split. The loss of your roots the displacement from one culture to another." Lucy seeks to write and make sense of things that most British audiences will be unfamiliar with. What it feels like to be "the other", what it means to be a minority within a minority. To tell the tales of lives that have been overlooked, to make the invisible and forgotten visible and known.

https://www.lucysheen.com/

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

https://www.instagram.com/lucysheen

https://www.facebook.com/ActorLucySheen/

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.

Taking our kids' behaviour personally stops us being the parents we need to be. So how do we become agents of healing? Listen in as therapist Catherine explores essential insights and steps to helping our kids heal.

Here's some more about her from her website:

Catherine Young, LMFT, is an author, trainer, consultant, clinical supervisor and child and family therapist. She has devoted over 25 years to helping children and families. She has worked in varied settings including public and private mental health agencies, children’s day treatment, children’s shelters, adoption agencies, early childhood mental health, and private practice.

Over the years Catherine developed a therapy model for working with some of the most challenging children and their families: Multi-Modal Attachment Therapy (M-MAT). She is excited to be sharing this model in her book, M-MAT Multi-Modal Attachment Therapy: An Integrated Whole-Brain Approach to Attachment Injuries in Children and Families.

She further applied the principals in M-MAT to attachment-based parenting. In her desire to bring healing to more children and families, she has recently authored a second book for parents: Understanding Attachment Injuries in Children and How to Help: A Guide for Parents and Caregivers.

Catherine Young currently provides training and consultation in attachment theory and therapy, attachment-based parenting and care, and related topics.

One of my first clinical jobs after graduate school was in a public mental health day treatment program for children 7 to 12 years of age. Many of these children were one step away from being removed from their homes due to their behavioral/emotional difficulties. Up to that point, the training I had received and the reading I had done in child therapy had been in non-directive play therapy and behavior therapy. I soon found that these children needed something much more. They needed more structure, more relationship focus, and more direction to help them move out of destructive patterns and cycles.

I went in search of more effective therapies...
 

...I have taken elements of attachment-based play, other attachment-based therapies, cognitive behavioral therapy, narrative therapy, play therapy, solution focused therapy and, I am sure, other therapy modalities that I have absorbed over the years, and brought them together in a new, organized and systematic approach that I have found very effective in reaching these very challenging children.

Because it needs a name, I call this approach Multi-Modal Attachment Therapy (M-MAT). I call it Multi-Modal Attachment Therapy simply because it integrates a variety of therapeutic modalities in a systematic way to treat children with significant attachment injuries.

I have watched children transform from detached, angry, aggressive, emotionally disorganized, sometimes bizarre, sometimes withdrawn beings into loving, happy, emotionally connected children. These children have historically been so challenging to treat that I have had parents tell me that other professionals have told them not to expect too much of their child; not to expect too much love, too much growth, too much connection from these injured children.

More at:

https://www.m-mat.org

 https://www.facebook.com/MultiModalAttachmentTherapy

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.

Many of us adoptees struggle with identity. Christiana became Christina at 8. All of a sudden she was in a new country, in a new continent, with a new culture and her new name. Listen in as we unpack what she's learned about absorbing the most extreme identity shock we've ever discussed on this podcast.

Christina Rickardsson was born in 1983 as Christiana Mara Coelho in Brazil in a town called Diamantina (Minas Gerais), where she lived with her mother in a cave. When Christina was around five years old they were kicked out of their home (their cave) and ended up having to move to the streets of a São Paulo, where Christina begged for food and money, and where she was subjected to several physical and psychological abuses. At the age of seven she was taken to an orphanage together with her youngest brother, and when Christina was eight years old they were adopted (against Christina’s and Christina’s mother’s will) and moved to Vindeln, a village located in the north of Sweden in a region called Västerbotten.

Christina’s life changed when she moved to Sweden, but even though she was finally in a safe place, adapting to new country was not easy. There were several culture-clashes and in the beginning it was hard for her to feel at home because everything around her was new: the food, the nature, the people, and also the language spoken around her. Little by little Christiana became Christina, and this change helped her to adapt to the Swedish lifestyle.

Christina wants her book to help increase people’s understanding about differences, prejudice and cultural conflicts, helping to promote dialogue, tolerance towards more open societies. She wants her own experience to become an example of how important it is to secure children’s rights, with Sweden and Brazil and a starting point.

Christina wants her story to inspire governments, companies, organizations and people to work together effectively in multicultural settings.

There are currently about seven million street children in Brazil, and Christina believes it is important to draw attention not only to the situation they are in, but also to the fact that these children have no voice of their own. The writer wants to help change this reality so that all children can live in a society where they can have a safe and happy childhood, and where they contribute to their own society when they become adults.

https://christinarickardsson.se/en/

https://www.facebook.com/rickardssonchristina

https://www.instagram.com/christina_rickardsson/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/christina-rickardsson-02738884/

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.

Check out my free event in January https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/whole-healing-my-primal-wound-tickets-473258638327

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.