Episode 13: Navigating Adoption’s Emotional Turbulence with Sara Easterly
By The Gifts of Trauma /
Listen this episode here:
or here
Imagine a life where every day is a journey through complex emotions, punctuated by waves of separation, loss, and longing. For adoptees, this is often their reality—an unruly mosaic of misaligned feelings that demands understanding, support, and resilience.
A lack of social awareness around the true experience of adoption leaves many adoptees to face their issues with inadequate support. With heartfelt passion, author/adoptee Sara Easterly stands up for those who feel isolated, misunderstood, and/or burdened by invisible stresses and blocks.
Through the lens of Dr Gordon Neufeld’s theories on attachment and primal emotions of unbearable separation, Sara delves deep into the experiences faced by adoptees: the pursuit of love, defensive detachment, profound frustration, alarm, isolation and misunderstanding, lack of safety, constant vigilance, people-pleasing, perfectionism, addiction struggles, and more. She also exposes how systemic issues, such as racism, classism, and religious messaging, shape adoption narratives.
In her mission to normalize adoptees’ experiences, Sara sensitively articulates the dynamics that adoptees face, by illuminating:
• The emotional complexities of being adopted • The importance of sharing adoptee stories
• The healing potential of creative expression • The flaws in the positive societal view of adoption
Passionate about supporting adoptees’ voices and stories, Sara is an advocate for creating space within families and cultures to acknowledge the full spectrum of adoption experiences. Her work aims to prevent others from growing up feeling unwanted, flawed, or alone facing common adoptee challenges. The research findings and perspectives she shares reframe adoptees’ chaotic feelings and responses as natural human reactions to traumatic separation.
Join us to hear Sara’s personal adoption experiences, and support her in both spreading adoption awareness and fostering a more compassionate world where every adoptee feels seen, heard, and understood.
Resources
Websites:
- Sara’s Professional Website
- Adoptee Voices
- Adoption Unfiltered
- Comprehensive Resources page at Adoption Unfiltered
- Adoption Trauma Article
- Adoption Statistic
Videos:
- Adoptions & Addiction with Paul Sunderland
- Adoption Unfiltered Podcast Interview with Gordon Neufeld
- The Trauma of Relinquishment with Gabor Maté
Books:
Quotes:
- “For nine months, they heard the voice of the mother, registered the heartbeat, attuning with the biorhythms with the mother. The expectation is that it will continue. This is utterly broken for the adopted child. We don’t have sufficient appreciation for what happens to that infant and how to compensate for it.” – Gabor Maté
- “Adoptees and children who are fostered are over-represented in the prison system, addiction clinics and are 4 times more likely than their peers to attempt suicide.” – Gabor Maté
- “Adoption is one of the earliest and primary disruptions in the continuity of connection which can last throughout life. It doesn’t end right after adoption. That facing of separation is developmental and it will be there until the day you die.” – Gordon Neufeld “…there is no adoption [or] relinquishment without drama, there is an enormous grief of a child or a baby who has been waiting nine months to meet somebody who is set up to bond [with them] and then doesn’t. [There’s] the enormous grief of the mother …who cannot live with having a child … very often influenced by parents & patriarchal society …saying … you can’t do this, which goes against her biology. And it’s about the enormous grief of a group who can’t live without having a child, …adoptive parents who come …with an enormous grief that they’ve been unable to have a child and actually this is the problem. …this word adoption …covers up their grief … often we think… of people who are adopted .. as … having been chosen … but … very often it’s about somebody who enters into a family that doesn’t genetically fit for them, it’s about someone entering a family with an impossible job description…of having to be somebody that they can never … be, to fix a wound of infertility with its’ ….enormous grief when that can’t happen.” – Paul Sunderland
Sara’s Social Media:
