Praise for Adoption Unfiltered, a much-overdue review:

Adoption Unfiltered: Revelations from Adoptees, Birth Parents, Adoptive Parents, and Allies is now my *number one reading recommendation* to anyone impacted by adoption.
(Please, if you are in the church and you could read only one book on adoption, this is the one)

Its most obvious value is in its collaboration between the three roles, something we rarely find and yet desperately need. Adoptive parents are often easily heard and well-known in their spaces, adoptees have worked to create rich adoptee-centric spaces which uplift their unheard stories, and birth parents have contributed in the same way, telling their own stories, and often supporting the work of adoptees. But to combine adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents together to discuss openly and honestly about our shared lived experiences, our fears, our struggles, our injustices, our hopes, this is something I believe is so incredibly difficult and so incredibly valuable. We make up these systems together and if there is any hope, it will be in our willingness and capacity to sit together across generations, roles, and perspectives, to share and to listen.

Part One is written by adoptee Sara Easterly and covers common adoptee experiences: heartache, pain, the push and pull of relationships, emotional responses, classism, racism, and religion.

"When adult adoptees finally connect, their feelings and experiences are normalized, after years and years of keeping private worries at bay... having an adult adoptee in my life when I was younger would have gone a long way - especially if the adult adoptee was someone who had a healthy relationship with their grief and a solid understanding of adoption and attachment to help me make sense of the confusing tornado of swirling emotions inside."

My interest in learning more about the complexities of adoption truly began with listening to adoptees, and Sara does a great job of combining personal experience with the experiences of a variety of other adoptees to shine a light on the interior reality of adoptees and the many ways those challenges may manifest, without entertaining stigmatizing labels, and while also providing evidence-based hope for healing.

Part Two is written by birth mother Kelsey Ranyard and delves into the predatory practices of adoption marketing and scarce post-placement support, the role of religion in relinquishment, birth parent grief, shame, and how these serve as obstacles to showing up, power dynamics and openness challenges in adoption relationships, and the unexpected ways in which a birth parent's decision to relinquish goes on to affect generations.

Though I am a birth mother, I've spent so much time in adoptee spaces that Kelsey's section and her ability to word realities I didn't previously have words for, was newly convicting for me. I came away with such a motivation to work towards real change in how we practice adoption in our current "free-market framework...little regulation and virtually nonexistent enforcement."

"Being an outsider is a persistent gut feeling for birth mothers. Nevertheless, we carry a responsibility to stick around through the awkward times. However, sometimes birth mothers don't have a rebuttal for the voices in their heads urging them to run. The remedy for this is not always simple, but a commitment is required by all: transparent and informative pre-adoption education, effective and continuing post-placement support, and an adoptive family that doesn't give up on them. Birth mothers must be told they are not a fleeting particle but, instead, an essential piece of the composition that is this child's opportunity to feel whole."

Part Three is written by adoptive parent Lori Holden, and I was admittedly surprised to realize how beneficial this section was for me. As often as we hear the adoptive parent story, we often hear only certain parts of their stories, told in a way which centers only their perspective, and rarely do we get an intimate and vulnerable look into the full experiences of adoptive parents who are wrestling with honoring the full experiences of adoptees and birth parents as well.

Lori dissects the meaning of true openness, she covers unacknowledged grief, insecurity, parenting through the complexities of adoption, re-examining religious adoption narratives, she explores what it looks like to choose not to adopt, and finally attachment.

"Adoptees report that adoptive parents' ability to make space for birth parents, whether present in an adoptee's life or not, actually strengthens their bond with their adoptive parents rather than weakening it and research bears this out. Much like "splitting the child" in a contentious divorce, we know that "splitting the child" in adoption, or expecting the adoptee to have loyalty to one side over the other, harms the adoptee and weakens a genuine and enduring connection between the adoptive parent and the adoptee...To be able to metabolize insecurity about birth family and culture, and transform it into openness and curiosity, is one of the greatest gifts a parent can give their child."

Each of these three writers, and the many other voices they have included, don't just represent individuals sharing their own story, they represent the voices of individuals who have dedicated incredible time, energy, and work into facing their grief, their losses, taking the perspective of those unlike themselves, of doing the work required to improve the quality of these inherently challenging relationships.

And that brings us to the fourth part of this book: a section on healing and hope. Supporting adoptee maturation, advice for parents and caregivers, words of encouragement, and how adoption must evolve both personally and more broadly going forward.
This is a crucial component that is easy to overlook when digging into the realities of adoption. It is not either/or, but both/and. Adoption is complex, it involves trauma and grief and incredible challenges and ongoing frustrations, it is in need of reform and is susceptible to corruption and exploitation AND there is always hope for healing, for change, for collaboration, for growth.

"Without some measure of intimacy with grief, our capacity to be with any other emotion or experience in our life is greatly compromised." Sad does not mean there's no hope. Grief doesn't mean we're guilty. It's not darkness, even when it seems so. It's simply what's needed to step into the brightest light."

Brand	N/A
Rating	4.8 (48 ratings)
Price	$0.99
Category	Adoption