Voices Unheard: A Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees

“Adoptees were given a narrative about their life story from their family, society, and the media from the time they joined their adoptive family. They must find their own voice. The strongest voice that speaks to them is what they have stored in their thoughts and emotions over time. This journal offers an adoptee the opportunity to carefully examine their perspectives and feelings about their life and to clarify what is truth and what serves them in their life journey. With clarity can spring emotional well-being. This journal is long overdue, and I love that the insightful questions are posed over a year’s time so that a person can think, digest, and integrate any new revelations.”

—Sharon Kaplan Roszia, co-author of Seven Core Issues in Adoption and Permanency: A Comprehensive Guide to Promoting Understanding and Healing in Adoption, Foster Care, Kinship Families and Third-Party Reproduction

Voices Unheard: A Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees is an important guide for adopted persons. The workbook is just right for digging deeper into the emotional landscape we need to explore in this lifetime journey of healing and discovery.

—Deborah Jiang-Stein, adoptee, author of Prison Baby: A Memoir, Founder, unPrison Project

“Voices Unheard: A Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees is everything adoptees may not have realized they needed—a map for understanding their earliest traumatic experiences and navigating their adoption journeys. With a prompt for every week of the year based on core themes that arise in therapy, it facilitates reflective journaling—a strategy that can help adoptees gain insight, explore, and validate their feelings, comfort themselves, and, ultimately, reclaim their narratives. It’s a vital tool as well for therapists who want to better understand the emotional lives of adoptees and an indispensable guide to help peer group leaders facilitate healing conversation. I highly recommend it.”

—B.K. Jackson, editor of Severance Magazine

“Sharing my story about life as an orphan has revealed one thing more than any other: Stories of the orphan and the adopted stay with us for our entire lives. What Voices Unheard: A Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees does is allow us to take control of that narrative, to put our own experiences into our own words, and in doing so find measures of grace, understanding and healing.”

—Steve Pemberton, author of A Chance in the World: An Orphan Boy, a Mysterious Past, and How He Found a Place Called Home

“Voices Unheard: A Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees bravely breaks through the mystery of the unspoken. This guide offers a map for adoptees, one that urges us to listen to the truth of our bodies—the only kind of map we can trust. With nuts-and-bolts information such as terminology and scripts for running peer meetings, Lisa Coppola lays a path for those seeking the authentic voice and elusive truth—not just another story. With writing exercises that leave space for imagining and dreaming, the journal opens the gate to the layered, complicated trauma of the closed room, the bolted door of the adoptee’s psyche.”

—Jan Beatty, adoptee, author of American Bastard

“This is more than a workbook, it’s a mirror and an amplifier for adoptees to reassert our autonomy and rewrite the narratives that are all too often made without us.”

—Nate Bae Kupel, adoptee, President Emeritus, Boston Korean Adoptees, Inc.

“Adoptees coming out of the fog have much in common with people in recovery, and writing is a valuable tool not only because it aids in emotional healing, but because adoptees have important stories that need to be told. That Lisa Coppola, an adoption therapist and adoptee herself, wrote Voices Unheard: A Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees in the format of a twelve-step meeting script adds helpful measures to protect the emotions of potentially vulnerable participants as they respond to the prompts and prepare to share what they’ve written.

“There are as many paths as there are adoptees; this journal allows for all adoptees to come together in a room and heal. Whether they are international or domestic adoptees, transracial or not, in reunion, just obtaining their official birth certificate, or they grew up in an open adoption—wherever the adoptee is in their process, the format gives guidelines preventing advice giving and crosstalk, and offers timed shares in round robin format so everyone who wants to share has the opportunity to do so in a relatively safe space.

“This journal, replete with adoption-related glossary and bibliography, is everything the therapist leading an adoptee or group of adoptees, peer adoptee-group moderator, and adult adoptees working individually needs. With 52 writing prompts that center around the seven core issues that those in the adoption triad face—loss, rejection, guilt and shame, grief, identity, intimacy, and mastery/control—and space to write directly in the journal, at one meeting a week, the journal could take a year. Alternatively, a self-paced individual or group could work through it faster or use it any other way.

“I love this journal already. I teach creative writing classes, and the one I love teaching the most is Writing Personhood: For Adoptees. I plan to use these prompts in my classes! Thank you, BPAR and Lisa, for writing it for us all.”

—Aimee Christian, adoptee, Voices Unheard: Real Adoptee Stories forum speaker, freelance writer published in The New York Times, The Washington Post

"I find the Voices Unheard journal is great to reinforce topics, and I use it in therapy with some of my clients. Much appreciated!"

—Deb Olshever, LCSW, therapist