Overview

Adoption Unfiltered authors Sara Easterly (adoptee), Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard (birth parent), and Lori Holden (adoptive parent) interview dozens of adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, social workers, therapists, and other allies--all sharing candidly about the challenges in adoption. While finding common ground in the sometimes-contentious space of adoption may seem like a lofty goal, it reveals the authors' optimistic aim: working together with truth and transparency to move toward healing. Healing isn't possible, though, without first uncovering the hurts--starting with adoption's central players: adoptees, who are so often in pain, suffering from what the latest brain science validates as the long-term emotional effects of separation trauma. By encouraging others to vulnerably share their stories, the authors discover that adoptees aren't the only ones in the adoption constellation who are hurting. Birth parents regularly shut down after being shut out by adoptive parents. Adoptive parents often struggle with unique parenting challenges and hidden insecurity, feeling the need to hide the fact that they are not the Super Parents they led the agency to believe they would be. Across the industry as a whole, misinformed and unethical practices abound. This book models the importance of adults in adoption working together in the spirit of empathy.

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Sara Easterly is an award-winning author of books and essays. Her spiritual memoir, Searching for Mom, won a 2020 Illumination Book Award gold medal, among many others. Sara's adoption-focused articles and essays have been published by Psychology Today, Dear Adoption, Feminine Collective, Godspace, Her View from Home, and Severance magazine, to name a few. Sara is the founder of Adoptee Voices and resides outside of Seattle with her husband, two daughters, and a menagerie of rescued fur-babies. Sara Easterly is an award-winning author of books and essays. Her spiritual memoir, Searching for Mom, won a 2020 Illumination Book Award gold medal, among many others. Sara's adoption-focused articles and essays have been published by Psychology Today, Dear Adoption, Feminine Collective, Godspace, Her View from Home, and Severance magazine, to name a few. Sara is the founder of Adoptee Voices and resides outside of Seattle with her husband, two daughters, and a menagerie of rescued fur-babies. Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard is the director of advocacy and policy at AdoptMatch, where she works on public policy issues impacting all adoption-triad members. She's a birth mother who is passionate about raising the standards in adoption to better serve the children, mothers, and families affected by family separation. Adoption has been a monumental part of her entire life: Kelsey is the daughter and granddaughter of adoptees. She has worked at various agencies and law firms in the adoption field and is also a cohost of the first-ever birth-mom podcast headed into its third season, Twisted Sisterhood. Kelsey resides in Northern California with her husband and daughter. Lori Holden, a veteran parent of two young adults, writes at lavenderluz.com and hosts the podcast Adoption: The Long View. She's the author of the acclaimed book The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption: Helping Your Child Grow Up Whole (recommended by People magazine in 2021), written with her daughter's birth mom, and featured on adoption-agency required-reading lists across the country. She has keynoted and presented at adoption conferences around the US and Canada, and her work has appeared in magazines, such as Parenting and Adoptive Families. In 2018, she was honored as an Angel in Adoption(R) by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute (CCAI). She lives in Denver, Colorado.

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