Lived Places Publishing author Brighid O’Shaughnessy was interviewed on the “Aging with Purpose and Passion” Podcast, talking about adopting a toddler from Haiti as a single woman and the unforeseen journey that followed. This episode first aired on July 16, 2025.
Show Notes
What if love isn’t enough? One adoptive mom’s truth about trauma, healing, and parenting a child no one prepared her for.
Adoption, trauma-informed parenting, and midlife motherhood collide in this powerful episode with Brighid O’Shaughnessy—licensed social worker, adoptive mom, and longtime mental health advocate. If you’re parenting through trauma, over 40 and navigating adoption, or working with vulnerable families, this conversation is a must.
Brighid shares her story of adopting a toddler from Haiti as a single woman and the unforeseen journey that followed: Parenting a child with fetal alcohol exposure, complex trauma, and deep attachment wounds. Her hard-earned insights dismantle the fairy tale of adoption as a simple fix and reveal what true healing takes – for children, families, and systems. “I have a boat that doesn’t have a bottom,” she says, quoting adoptees. “You can pour all the love in… but it still feels like it’s sinking.”
That truth drives her mission: to educate, to advocate, and to break the silence around what adoptive families really face.
🎧 In this episode:
- The reality of older adoptive parenting
- What schools and therapists get wrong about adopted children
- The myth of “love heals everything”
- How Brighid’s new book and theater project are reshaping professional training on adoption
This isn’t just about parenting. It’s about telling hard truths, creating better systems and supporting with compassion and clarity.
Links:
Guest: Brighid O’Shaughnessy
- Website: www.returntotheroots.org
- FB: https://facebook.com/brighid.oshaughnessy
- LinkedIn https://linkedin.com/in/brighid-o-shaughnessy-lsw-2617b7/
Host: Beverley Glazer
- Website: https://reinventimpossible.com
- LI: https://linkedin.com/in/beverleyglazer/
- FB: https://facebook.com/beverley.glazer
- IG: https://instagram.com/beverleyglazer_reinvention/
- GROUP: https://facebook.com/groups/womenover50rock
Read Brighid’s Book
In It’s A Long Way Home: Adoptive Mothers Break Their Silence, Brighid O’Shaughnessy gives voice to adoptive mothers whose journeys reveal the hidden, and often unsettling, realities of adoption. Through raw, ethnographic storytelling, O’Shaughnessy – an adoptive mother, social worker, and seasoned documentary theatre creator – shares true accounts that confront the public’s happily-ever-after perception of adoption. These stories explore challenging themes such as physical violence, self-harm, lifetime disabilities, and systemic failures in education and healthcare that continue to let families down. Yet, amidst the darkness, the book offers hope, providing practical strategies, resources, and hard-won paths toward healing.
This book is ideal for courses in social work, trauma studies, family counseling, disability studies, public health, education, and criminal justice, this book engages both students and professionals, providing valuable insights for educators, healthcare providers, and community leaders.
We want our books to be available to as many people as possible. If you’d like to purchase an individual copy, please email us and we’ll give you a discount code:
