The Resilience Project

Julie Brumley

Illuminating the unseen impacts of adoption — for all who’ve been touched by it. The Resilience Project Podcast brings voice, visibility, and validation to the parts of adoption society rarely names - but all of us feel. Through a trauma-informed somatic lens, host Julie Brumley explores the lived experiences of the entire adoption constellation, with a tender emphasis on the adoptee experience.This podcast goes beyond storytelling into soul-telling. It offers embodied insight, compassionate education, and a path toward awareness, strength, and hope. Each episode invites listeners to understand adoption more deeply - not just with the mind, but with the nervous system - and to reconnect with the truth, identity, and belonging that were always yours to come home to.

  1. 17h ago

    Twice Delivered: An Ethiopian Adoptee on Faith, Grief & the Body He's Never Explored with Isaac Melber

    Resources mentioned: Twice Delivered by Isaac MelberConnect with Isaac: WebsiteInstagramFacebookConnect with Julie: DM me on any of the socials, or schedule a conversation - I'd love to hear where you areJoin The Refuge Membership Community hereRegister for Un-M-Othered: A Revolution in Adoptee Healing hereIsaac Melber was four years old when his grandfather, uncle, and sister looked him in the eyes and told him he had to go - because staying in his Ethiopian village meant he would not survive. At five, he was adopted into a white American family. At seven, he became a Christian. And at twenty, he wrote a book about it: Twice Delivered - Two Families, Two Worlds, One Redeeming Love. Isaac and I do not come at adoption from the same angle. My work lives in the body. His lives in his faith. And that's exactly why I wanted him here. In this conversation, we talk about what it's like to be a Black man raised in a white family - the "whitewashed" comments, the grocery store stares, and how he turned "best of both worlds" from a burden into something he's proud of. We talk about the grief his adoptive parents made room for, including a mother who said the words every adoptee needs to hear: "I don't know how you feel - but I can help you if we talk about it." We talk about what churches get wrong when "chosen" and "God's plan" language covers adoptee grief instead of holding it. And then, near the end, I ask Isaac a question no one has ever asked him: Where do you feel your adoption story in your body? His honest answer - that he's never thought about it - became one of the most real moments this podcast has ever captured. Because that is the adoptee experience: we can know our story, tell our story, even build a ministry on our story… while it still lives, unexplored, in our bodies. This is two adopted people sitting in genuine difference with respect and curiosity. Wherever you are with faith - refuge, wound, or both - you belong in this conversation. In this episode:  - Village, orphanage, America: the story Isaac tells when he speaks  - Growing up Black in a white family: what people ask, what they get wrong  - Why "Twice Delivered": delivered from physical death at five, spiritual death at seven  - Being told "you have to go" at age four, and what a four-year-old remembers  - Julie asks: where does grief live in your framework - and was there room for yours?  - The parenting moment: "You can be in my arms. Come to my arms."  - "Chosen" and "God's plan": how churches can hold grief instead of covering it  - What Isaac tells adoptive parents about nurturing kids emotionally, not just spiritually  - What shifted after reading adoptee-centered work  - The question Isaac had never been asked: where do you feel it in your body?  - Isaac's hope for the next generation of adoptees If this episode meant something to you, a five-star review or a few written words helps this work reach more adoptees and the people who love themStop outsourcing belonging - insource it! Website Instagram: @juliebrumley_ Facebook: julierasbrum TikTok: @juliebrumley_ Click to Join My Free Adoptee Facebook Group You Tube: @julie_brumley

  2. Aug 27

    The Enneagram for Adoptees: Untangling Who You Are From Who You Became to Survive with Jennifer Hiltebeitel

    Connect with Jennifer: Instagram Free 30-minute consultation here Connect with Julie: Register for the Bring Your Burden Gathering tonight!!! - here DM me on any of the socials, or schedule a conversation - I'd love to hear where you are and how I can support you. Many of us as adoptees confuse who we are with who we became to survive. In this episode, I sit down with Certified Enneagram Coach and fellow adoptee Jennifer G. Hiltebeitel to explore how the Enneagram - held gently, not as a label or a party trick - becomes a map for seeing our survival strategies with compassion instead of shame. Jennifer was adopted through the Pennsylvania county foster care system in the early 1970s. She was told she'd been taken in "on a trial basis" - language she carried for decades. She met her biological mother at seventeen, her biological father at twenty-one, and only claimed her original birth certificate in 2023, when another adoptee told her Pennsylvania had opened records. Her response: "It's mine. It belongs to me." In this conversation, we explore: Jennifer's adoption story - abandonment at age two and a half, the foster system, and growing up in a home where adoption was tabooWhy meeting biological family at seventeen didn't fill the hole she thought it would - and what that taught her about where belonging actually livesWhat it meant to finally hold her original birth certificate, and why she claimed it "for all adoptees"How the Enneagram found her in 2018 through her relationship with her daughters - and how it merged with her adoptee journey when she found adoptee community during the pandemicThe difference between type and trauma - and why Jennifer always refers fresh trauma to therapy before typingWhy adoptees so often mistype, especially under stressThe pause: how the Enneagram stretches the space between stimulus and responseReparenting our inner child with the language the Enneagram providesThe secondary rejection Jennifer was prepared for - and the love from extended biological family she wasn'tThe question that changes everything: not "what's wrong with me?" but "what happened to me?"Key moments: "Self-awareness without self-compassion is just self-judgment."  "Many of us as adoptees confuse who we are with who we became to survive what happened to us."  "I was prepared for the secondary rejection. I wasn't prepared for the love."  Resources mentioned: Around the Circles podcast - "Start Here" series The Aligned Soul Company Enneagram type deep-dive toolkit If this podcast has meant something to you, a five-star review or a few written words helps this work reach more adoptees and the people who love them. Stop outsourcing belonging - insource it! Website Instagram: @juliebrumley_ Facebook: julierasbrum TikTok: @juliebrumley_ Click to Join My Free Adoptee Facebook Group You Tube: @julie_brumley

  3. Aug 20

    The Long Game: Navigating the Reunion Rollercoaster with Grace - with Elizabeth Barbour & Leslie Pate Mackinnon (Retreat Series #3)

    Register for The Long Game here CONNECT WITH ELIZABETH & LESLIE Elizabeth Barbour: Instagram, website Leslie Pate Mackinnon: website Register for Bring Your Burden Gathering here Reunion is not an event. It's not the airport hug or the tearful montage. It's a whole web of relationships your nervous system has to learn how to live inside of - and nobody hands you a map for that. Until now. The accidental retreat series continues with Elizabeth Barbour and Leslie Pate Mackinnon, co-facilitators of The Long Game: Navigating the Reunion Rollercoaster with Grace - a weekend retreat happening November 6–8, 2026 at Quietude in Black Mountain, North Carolina, just outside Asheville. Elizabeth is a reunited adoptee - 27 years in reunion with her birthmom, birthdad, and eleven (!) siblings - a reunion coach, speaker, and author currently writing her third book on building healthy relationships in adoption reunion. Leslie is a psychotherapist and birthmother with four decades in private practice, specializing in adoption and third-party reproduction, and a nationally known trainer of therapists and agencies. Between them: 50+ years of living in reunion. In this conversation: Elizabeth's reunion story - searching for one mother and finding out she's the oldest of twelveWhy "wounded healers" with lived experience are changing what adoption-competent therapy looks likeGrowing up without a "ghost kingdom" - and hiding inside other people's stories insteadThe both/and of reunion: loving your people AND grieving that you didn't get to grow up with them"We were all duped by adoption. There are no bad guys in the constellation."  Leslie on releasing the search for an enemyThe rollercoaster map: the honeymoon phase, why it feels exactly like falling in love, and the depression and grief that so often followPacing: why Elizabeth, Leslie, and Julie all say slow down - and what going too fast can cost a reunionReunion in the body: hypervigilance, dissociation, and Leslie's stunning account of reclaiming her body at 78The GRACE Methodology - Genesis, Reconnection (self, others, spirit), Authenticity, Communication, Evolution & ExpansionWhat actually predicts whether a reunion lasts (hint: it's each person's commitment to their own work)Repair after rupture and secondary rejection: Leslie's letter to her son after ten years of silence - sending it with love, then detachingWho The Long Game is for: adoptees, birth/first parents, adoptive parents, partners, siblings, grandparents - and NPE/MPE and donor-conceived people reconnecting with genetic relativesWhat they hope you carry home in your body: felt community, the capacity to hold grief and gratitude side by side, and the knowledge that you are not aloneCONTENT NOTE: This episode includes discussion of relinquishment, secondary rejection and closed reunions, dissociation and trauma responses, genetic sexual attraction, and plant medicine as one adjunct healing path. Please listen with care and tend to your nervous system. THE LONG GAME RETREAT November 6–8, 2026 | Quietude, Black Mountain, NC (20 minutes east of Asheville) Capped at 20 people. Includes the full program, three shared meals, and two bonus group coaching calls - one before and one after the weekend. Lodging and travel on your own. If something came up for you in this episode, DM me on any of the socials or schedule a conversation with me. I'd love to hear where you are in your own long game. Stop outsourcing belonging - insource it! Website Instagram: @juliebrumley_ Facebook: julierasbrum TikTok: @juliebrumley_ Click to Join My Free Adoptee Facebook Group You Tube: @julie_brumley

  4. Aug 13

    "I've Done the Work - Why Do I Still Feel Shame?" | Somatic Healing, Nervous System Regulation & Sacred Sisterhood with Becky Aste + Bridget Covill

    🌿 Learn more + reserve your spot here Connect with Our Guests: Becky Aste Bridget Covill Schedule a call with me here Join The Refuge Membership Community here You've regulated. You've journaled. You've done more inner work than most people you know. And yet there's still a quiet place inside that can't fully exhale. This week, I'm joined by two women who have become true co-laborers in this work with me - Becky Aste, trauma-informed somatic marriage coach, and Bridget Covill, RESET Breathwork facilitator. Together, the three of us are co-hosting our second Wild + Rooted retreat this November, and this conversation is a living example of why we built it: because healing happens relationally, and some layers of this journey simply can't be softened in isolation. We go deep into where shame hides in high-functioning, self-aware women - the perfectionism, the hyper-achieving, the "I'm fine" exterior - and where it actually lives in the body. Becky shares vulnerably about looking successful on the outside while her marriage was quietly falling apart, and about the grief she's carrying right now. Bridget talks about religious conditioning, learning to trust her body again, and why breathwork is one of the only things that truly quiets the mind. And I share my own adoptee story - the survival patterns that formed before I ever had language, and what it's taken to come home to myself. Then we tell stories from our first retreat that still give us chills: the northern lights appearing over the beach, a game of tag that brought a 60-year-old woman's childlike self back online, and the night a birth mother, an adoptive mother, and an adoptee ended up side by side at the same dinner table. If your body leans in at any point during this episode - don't ignore it. Just be curious about it. What arises belongs. In This Episode, We Explore: Why high-functioning, self-aware women still carry a subtle undercurrent of shame - and where it hidesShame as a "severed sense of love and belonging" (and how it shows up in perfectionism, control, and people-pleasing)Where shame lives in the body - and why noticing it is the beginning of the workWhat breathwork reveals that the mind keeps hidden, and why you don't need a story or explanation for what comes upGrief, brain fog, and giving the prefrontal cortex a breakWhat happens in a room of women that can't happen on Zoom or in a journal - co-regulation, eye contact, and being truly witnessedSacred sisterhood vs. surface-level friendship - and why so many of us have never experienced the formerRupture and repair, in real time, at our own retreatInside Wild + Rooted: what we've created for the woman who's already done the work and senses a deeper layer calling herAbout Wild + Rooted: A 3-day immersive retreat, November 6–8, 2026, at a private home on the Eastern Shore of Delaware. Trauma release breathwork, inner child and parts work, shame-dissolving sessions, art therapy, yoga on the water, at-home massages, and a sacred sisterhood that holds - with pre-retreat preparation and 90 days of integration support afterward. For the woman who's already done the work and wants the deeper layers. Spots are limited, and we're already over halfway full. Website Instagram: @juliebrumley_ Facebook: julierasbrum TikTok: @juliebrumley_ Click to Join My Free Adoptee Facebook Group You Tube: @julie_brumley

  5. Aug 6

    Announcing Un-M-Othered Revolution 2.0: A Healing Retreat for Adoptees in December (with Dr. Liz)

    Important Links: Hear directly from the pilot participants here Register for Un-M-Othered: A Revolution in Adoptee Healing retreat here Red Poppy Website Catch Julie and Liz in person at the Making of Me event in September Join The Refuge Membership Community here The retreat is back. In this special announcement episode, Julie is joined by her co-facilitator, colleague, and friend Dr. Liz DeBetta to share that Un-M-Othered: A Revolution in Adoptee Healing returns December 4–6, 2026 - this time at the Red Poppy Center for Renewal in Highland, Michigan, with everything under one roof. Dr. Liz DeBetta is a narrative healing practitioner, creator of the Migrating Toward Wholeness process, and the writer and performer behind Un-M-Othered - the work this entire retreat is built around. Together, Julie and Liz look back at what happened in that first sacred room in Idaho, what they learned, and how the second iteration is genuinely a different animal. In this episode: Content note: This conversation includes discussion of adoption trauma, grief, and relinquishment. Please listen with care and tend to your nervous system as needed. What actually happened at the pilot retreat in May - five adoptees, many of them in a room with other adopted people for the very first timeThe biggest lessons carried forward: keeping everything in one place, protecting integration time, and the power of smallInside the Red Poppy Center for Renewal - a woman-owned sacred healing space with gardens, a lake, a fire pit, and a heated indoor pool and hot tub (December in Michigan, y'all)Why the film screens Friday night, so nervous systems can sleep on it before the deep work beginsTwo intimate circles of seven, with both groups experiencing Liz's narrative writing track and Julie's Belonging Blueprint somatic trackBrand new: private one-on-one sessions - every participant chooses narrative session, somatic work, or bodywork and reiki - and why choice matters at a retreat built on bodily autonomyHow Liz's four N's (Notice, Name, Nurture, Next Step) and Julie's five C's move together: feeling it in the body, then finding language for itWho this retreat is for - whether you're just beginning or you've been stuck in the same therapy chair for a decadeWhy December: solstice stillness, and a pause between the holidays that can be so hard for adopted peopleA hint about what's coming in June…The details:  Un-M-Othered: A Revolution in Adoptee Healing  Friday, December 4 – Sunday, December 6, 2026  Red Poppy Center for Renewal - Highland, Michigan  14 spots total. One all-in price covers your room, every meal, all programming, and your private one-on-one session. No hotel bill, no dinners out, no surprises. Connect with Dr. Liz DeBetta here Questions about whether this retreat is right for where you are? DM Julie or Liz on the socials, or schedule a conversation with Julie here. Stop outsourcing belonging - insource it! Website Instagram: @juliebrumley_ Facebook: julierasbrum TikTok: @juliebrumley_ Click to Join My Free Adoptee Facebook Group You Tube: @julie_brumley

  6. Jul 30

    "You Don't Owe Them Your Loyalty": Brielle Wilson on Foster Care, Religious Trauma, and Reclaiming Her Story

    A note on content: this episode includes direct discussion of childhood sexual exploitation/grooming, teen pregnancy, foster care system failures, and religious trauma. Please take care while listening, and feel free to pause or come back to this one when it feels right for you. Links - Brielle's resources Brielle's Books Brielle's Social Handles - TikTok & Insta - @briinthemaking; YouTube - @Bri_MFTintern; Facebook - Bri W, MFT Intern Connect with Julie Join The Refuge Membership Community In this episode, I sit down with Brielle Wilson - an adoptee, teen mother, wife, and mother of eight who is currently pursuing her MFT licensure after completing her degree. Brielle's story touches nearly every part of the adoption constellation: kinship care, foster care, gaslighting, religious trauma, and what it looks like to be a teenager navigating systems that were supposed to protect her and didn't. She's already published two books, with more resources on the way, and she's building a future where she gets to be the therapist she wishes she'd had. This conversation covers a lot of ground, and Brielle shares it with a level of honesty that I think will land in your body before it lands anywhere else. In this episode, we talk about: - Being raised by her maternal grandparents from infancy after both biological parents struggled with addiction, and what "home" did and didn't feel like growing up - Becoming pregnant at 13 after being groomed online by a predator, and the pressure she faced from Bethany Christian Services and her guardians to relinquish her daughter - Her determination to parent despite having no model for what healthy parenting looked like - Being placed in an emergency shelter while pregnant, and commuting to high school with her belongings in a garbage bag - A foster placement that started out supportive and became restrictive - including a foster family later found to be exaggerating her behavior for additional stipend money - Her eventual adoption alongside a sibling set, and how adoption legally severed relationships with siblings she still saw walking past her house every day - Carrying her adoptive mother's unresolved adoption trauma, being treated as a caretaker in the home, and having her worth tied to productivity - Therapists appointed by her adoptive family who reported information back to them - and what that did to her ability to trust anyone meant to help her - The role religion played in both pressuring her toward adoption and, later, in the surveillance and performance she felt inside her adoptive family's church community - Marrying her husband and leaving her adoptive home at 18 - and the slow, honest work of realizing how entangled she still was in that family system even after she left - Why she chose to pursue an MFT, and what it means to become the clinician she needed as a teenager - How she's parenting her own eight kids with transparency instead of silence - Her belief - and the research behind it - that adoption trauma exists in every adoption scenario, even the "good" ones, and why two things (grief and gratitude) can be true at the same time - Her two books: Writing Over the Lines and Consumed, and what led her to write each one Stop outsourcing belonging, insource it! Website Instagram: @juliebrumley_ Facebook: julierasbrum TikTok: @juliebrumley_ Click to Join My Free Adoptee Facebook Group You Tube: @julie_brumley

  7. Jul 23

    Why Transracial Adoptees Feel Like Strangers in Their Own Mirror (And What Reunion Taught Adam Esparza)

    LINKS & RESOURCES About the Adoptee Mentoring Society: founded by Angela Tucker (author of "You Should Be Grateful"), AMS offers mentoring, lounges, and community that is by adoptees, for adoptees - a place where you never have to over-explain yourself. Connect with Adam here Connect with Julie: DM on any of the socials (links below), or schedule a conversation. Some adoption stories get told over and over. Others stay in the dark. In this episode, Julie sits down with Adam Esparza - transracial, transnational adoptee from Guadalajara, Mexico, advocate and ambassador with the Adoptee Mentoring Society - for a conversation about the layers of adoption that society doesn't seem to want to name. Adam shares what it was like growing up visibly different from his adoptive family, making up stories in kindergarten show-and-tell to survive, and legally changing his name back to his birth surnames so the person in the mirror finally made sense. He opens up about the reunion that found him when he had all but given up - a message from a cousin, a birth mother who once hid him from the authorities who came to take him, and a full brother, Israel, who looked exactly like him and painted roses, just like Adam always had. Together, Julie and Adam explore: Why some adoptee stories get visibility while others - like Mexican adoptees - remain largely unseen The dark underbelly of adoptions in Guadalajara, black market realities, and why we can't be afraid to name what really happened What reunion felt like in the body - Adam describes stepping out of survival mode for the first time in his life The grief of cultural disconnection: language, mirrors, food, art, and the homeland that stays in you no matter what Returning to Mexico for Dia de los Muertos to say goodbye to the brother he never got to meet Being a male adoptee in spaces where men are underrepresented, and why analyzing your emotions to help others is its own kind of strength How siblings adopted into the same family can cope in completely different ways - and how compassion keeps the door open What every parent of a transnational adoptee needs to accept: one day, that child will want to go back Adam's message to any adoptee feeling culturally untethered is simple: stay curious. You are not contractually bound to one side of yourself or the other. Don't neglect either one. A note of care: this conversation includes honest discussion of suicide statistics among adoptees, alcohol dependency, and an abusive relationship. Please listen with support around you if these topics are tender for you. You are not alone in this.  If this episode meant something to you, a five-star review helps this work reach more adoptees who need to hear they are not alone. Stop outsourcing belonging, insource it! Website Instagram: @juliebrumley_ Facebook: julierasbrum TikTok: @juliebrumley_ Click to Join My Free Adoptee Facebook Group You Tube: @julie_brumley

  8. Jul 16

    Born Brokenhearted and Expected to Be Whole: Adoptee Grief, Faith, and Healing with Anita Garber

    LINKS + RESOURCES: - Get Anita's book, Wading in the Waves - available on Amazon - Seven Core Issues in Adoption and Permanency - The Roar: God's Sound in a Raging World by Bob Hazlett - The Danger of a Single Story (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) - Adoptee Voices writing community - Schedule a conversation with Julie - The Refuge Membership Community SUMMARY: What if the wound you carry has no memory attached to it... and your body remembers anyway? In this episode, Julie sits down with Anita Garber - social worker, worship leader, and author of Wading in the Waves: A 40-Day Journey of Healing, Grief, Identity, and Belonging in the Presence of God - for a conversation about what it actually takes to step toward healing without bypassing grief. Anita shares the story behind the book, born from her observation that adoptee spaces were having every conversation except the one about God - and from a writing assignment that surprised her: a letter addressed directly to adoption itself, containing the line that stopped Julie in her tracks: "I was born brokenhearted and expected to be whole." Together they explore the difference between feeling unsafe and feeling uncomfortable, why the meanings adoptees absorb early - banished, unwanted, too much, not enough - root so deeply, and what it means when the body relives a separation the mind never consciously recorded. Anita opens up about her own moment of being called out of an orphan identity ("You are living as an orphan and called to be a daughter. Change your clothes."), the armor she didn't know she was wearing, and what "getting dressed" has looked like in real life: slowly, with safe people, with accountability that calls you higher instead of shaming you.= This one goes to the very center of the work: nothing is wrong with you. Something happened to you. And your body has been telling the truth about it all along. IN THIS EPISODE: - The story behind Wading in the Waves and why Anita wrote a faith-centered book on the seven core issues of adoption - Why healing is a choice - and what happens in the body when we avoid pain too long - Feeling unsafe vs. feeling uncomfortable: the nervous system question that changes everything ("Am I in danger right now... or am I remembering danger?") - Why beliefs like "I was too much" or "not enough" root so deeply in adoptees - the primal wound, ambiguous loss, and preverbal imprinting - Day 14 - Orphan: the prayer-time moment that confronted Anita's survival identity, and the armor she had to take off - Living as an orphan vs. living as a daughter - and how this maps onto survival identity vs. true identity - What "getting dressed" practically looks like: safe people, accountability, and choosing belonging consistently - Day 15 - Truth: Anita's letter to adoption, what surfaced in her body as she wrote it, and why telling the honest (not grateful, not polished) truth creates freedom - Day 16 - Rejected: "I have no memory of being given away, yet my body and spirit have internalized the trauma" — implicit memory, body memory, and why "you were just a baby" misses the point entirely - The "blank slate" myth adoptive parents were told - and what it cost - How preverbal rejection shows up decades later: reject-first strategies, trust, and attachment - Jesus and adoption: why Anita believes He understands the adoptee experience on a lived level - Forgiveness vs. bypassing pain - releasing yourself from prison vs. pretending you're not in one - Can forgiveness exist without honesty? (And what to do when the other person won't give you theirs) - What healing actually looks like in real life: felt safety, safe people, and starting with God - Two-way journaling (listening prayer) as a starting place - What "coming home to yourself" means: integration, living unfragmented, and being deeply known, held, and loved MOMENTS THAT STAY WITH YOU: "I was born brokenhearted and expected to be whole." "You are living as an orphan and called to be a daughter. Change your clothes." "My mind had forgotten, but my body remembered well." "Forgiveness is releasing yourself from prison. Bypassing pain is staying in prison and telling yourself you're not in one." "Nothing is wrong with you. Something happened to you." If this episode meant something to you, a five-star rating or a few words in a written review helps this work reach more adoptees and the people who love them. You are never alone in this. Website Instagram: @juliebrumley_ Facebook: julierasbrum TikTok: @juliebrumley_ Click to Join My Free Adoptee Facebook Group You Tube: @julie_brumley

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
6 Ratings

About

Illuminating the unseen impacts of adoption — for all who’ve been touched by it. The Resilience Project Podcast brings voice, visibility, and validation to the parts of adoption society rarely names - but all of us feel. Through a trauma-informed somatic lens, host Julie Brumley explores the lived experiences of the entire adoption constellation, with a tender emphasis on the adoptee experience.This podcast goes beyond storytelling into soul-telling. It offers embodied insight, compassionate education, and a path toward awareness, strength, and hope. Each episode invites listeners to understand adoption more deeply - not just with the mind, but with the nervous system - and to reconnect with the truth, identity, and belonging that were always yours to come home to.

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