Aging with Purpose and Passion

When Love Isn’t Enough: Adoption, Trauma & Midlife Motherhood Truths

• Beverley Glazer • Episode 138

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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 sinks."
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. 

For similar episodes on reinventing your life over 50 check out stories on healing and trauma check out episodes 127 and 131 of Aging with Purpose and Passion and you may enjoy "Older Women & Friends" with award-winning host Jane Leder. She takes a deep dive into the joys and challenges of being an older woman. "Older Women & Friends" sets the record straight, dispels the myths, and explores the contributions and the wisdom women are anxious to share. janeleder.net.

Please help us spread the word by dropping a review and sharing this story with a friend. 

Resources:

Brighid O’Shaughnessy

brighidosh@yahoo.com

Website: www.returntotheroots.org Check for upcoming events

FB: https://www.facebook.com/brighid.oshaughnessy

Linked In https://www.linkedin.com/in/brighid-o-shaughnessy-lsw-2617b7/

 Beverley Glazer

Website: https://reinventimpossible.com

LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beverleyglazer/

FB: https://www.facebook.com/beverley.glazer

GROUP: https://www.facebook.com/groups/womenover50rock

https://www.instagram.com/beverleyglazer_reinvention/



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Have feedback or a powerful story that's worth telling? Contact us at info@Reinventimpossible.com

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion, the podcast designed to inspire your greatness and thrive through life. Get ready to conquer your fears. Here's your host psychotherapist, coach and empowerment expert, Beverly Glazer.

Beverley Glazer:

If you've ever felt overwhelmed or that you've been carrying more than your share. Well, welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion. This is the podcast for women over 50 who are ready to stop settling and live life on their own terms, and each week you will hear raw conversations, inspiring stories and get practical tips to help you reignite your own fire. I'm Beverly Glazer, an expert in reinvention for women who are ready to stop settling, and you can find me on reinventedpossiblecom. Bridget O'Shaughnessy is a licensed social worker, an adoptive mom and a documentary theater artist who gives voice to the real and raw experiences behind adoption, trauma and Healing. Through her work in schools and her project Adoption Uncovered, she helps educators, professionals and communities to better support adoptive families with empathy, truth and transformation. In this powerful episode, bridget will share the realities of transracial adoption, single motherhood and parenting a child, with trauma From career sacrifices to systems failure. Bridget has lived it all, so keep listening and welcome Bridget. Thanks, beverly, it's great to be here.

Beverley Glazer:

You grew up in Santa Barbara. No, you weren't. Well, I had that information. Where did you grow up?

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

No, I actually grew up in the Chicagoland suburbs.

Beverley Glazer:

Ah, are you still there?

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

Now I live in Oak Park.

Beverley Glazer:

Okay, and so I was next going to ask you and I hope I'm right were you always interested in theater?

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

Yes, that is a for sure. So from the time I was a little kid, I loved the arts. In fact, I think the very first play I was in was in first grade and I was Cinderella and I remember I wore like the equivalent of a glass slipper and at one point I had to let it off my foot and it went shooting across like the school elementary school gym, went right into the piano and it created this big hilarious moment. But yes, it was in my heart from the beginning.

Beverley Glazer:

And you ended up teaching, teaching drama, but usually you teach drama for drama on the stage. You were teaching theater in a rehab.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

Yeah, so I've taught theater in a wide range of settings. I was actually a professional acting teacher at one point, but I quickly discovered that, while I loved theater for theater's sake, I actually wanted to do theater that created social change, and so, about 25 years ago, I actually got connected with a place called Thresholds, which is Illinois' oldest and largest psychosocial rehab program for adults with severe mental illness, and it was there. It was less that I was teaching theater and more that I was giving clients an opportunity to tell and perform their own stories.

Beverley Glazer:

And you became a social worker.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

I did. Yeah, that took a little bit of time. The rehab center was an incredible multi-year experience, but after that I realized that, while the 20 people we worked with were incredible, there were so many other people who would never have walked into the rehab center's doors, who also had stories. Members, friends, people that you might, you know, meet for a cup of coffee at Starbucks were also dealing with depression or addiction, and so I wanted to expand it out. So I actually started and ran a nonprofit for about 12 years that used documentary theater to get people talking about mental health, and that was before I became a social worker.

Beverley Glazer:

My goodness. So you were really drawn to that profession For sure, yes, and drawn to trauma once you were a social worker.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

Yeah, I think so. I hadn't necessarily planned on going back to school to become a social worker. Part of what led me there, though, was becoming an adoptive parent, so I realized how much my son was struggling and, in turn, how much we were struggling as a family, and I felt like I wanted to deepen my own knowledge base. I wanted to be able to have more tools in my toolbox, and so many things seemed more accessible if I actually became a professional social worker.

Beverley Glazer:

Did you always want to have a family?

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

I did, yeah, I. I remember thinking about adoption actually when I was in high school. So, yeah, I would have dreams, like actual sleeping dreams, where I had an adopted child. I'm not really sure where it came from. It's not like I knew a ton of adoptees growing up. I knew a couple, but it would just come to me and so I knew at that point I think that's the path I'm supposed to go on. But I didn't adopt until much later. I didn't adopt until I was in my 30s. But I knew that I wanted to be a mom. I've always loved young people, um, and had a special way with them, even with the nonprofit I did a lot of work with with young people and they just made sense to me.

Beverley Glazer:

So yeah, Well, so to be able to be an adoptive mom, you have to go through the system. Yeah, and the system can be very difficult for a single woman. Did you find that?

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

I did. Yeah, I remember so when I first decided, okay, I'm going to go forward with adoption, I remember going to a local agency and we sat in like the adoption one-on-one experience, and during it they said you know, we'll just be really candid with you. As a single parent, your options are not great. Um, they're like cause. Ultimately, birth moms will likely first choose a dual parent household you know, man and woman then they'll go to a lesbian or gay couple and then you're sort of last on their list because you represent in some ways what they feel they already are right, which is a single person oftentimes trying to be a parent. And so they were like you could wait four to five years and you might never get chosen.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

And that was really defeating to me at the time. And I remember thinking, okay, well, I don't know if I could wait four or five years and then have my heart broken because I never get an opportunity. I also didn't like that. It felt almost like a dating profile. You were marketing yourself by putting together this book that you were then selling yourself to someone. So that felt uncomfortable. And so I remember then going maybe I am not meant to adopt, maybe I should try infertility treatments, and so I actually did, to look at the possibility of a donor. That didn't work after two or three times, and I remember thinking, okay, maybe I'm supposed to go back to what my initial purpose was, and my initial purpose was to adopt. And so that's when I started looking at international adoption, because different countries had different, um, openness to single people and that's in part how I ended up adopting from Haiti, because they're pretty open to single parents adopting.

Beverley Glazer:

Huh. So did you ever find the history of the child? Was anything screened? Did you know anything before you adopted from Haiti?

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

Well, I knew very little and at the time, as a prospective adoptive parent, I really didn't know what questions to ask. Right, because, number one, I had never adopted before. But there's also language differences, there's cultural differences, there's medical system differences. So I was given a very small little packet of information, probably two or three pages, and really all they highlighted was that he was malnourished. They didn't say anything about what his first two years of life were like. They didn't say anything about the health and wellbeing of his parents At that time. It was saying that they didn't have a known father. I've come to find out later that wasn't actually the case. So, yeah, there was really no discussion about trauma, um, and I really only found out so many more of the details when my son was about eight. Um, we had a chance to meet some of his extended birth family and it was during that time that they shared things like that there was domestic violence in the home, um, that there was addiction, that my son was exposed to alcohol in utero. None of that was ever mentioned.

Beverley Glazer:

So it came as a complete surprise. Yes, but you brought this child up and now you're living in the Chicago area. Yeah, complete culture shock. Yes, how did you handle it? You're a single mom and you have work to do as well, and here is now a child that doesn't just adjust to going into the school system, to make new friends, to do anything. Everything is new. What went on there? Walk us through that.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

Yeah, I will say. I mean, there is adoption and that part is extremely tricky. But I was also just very ill prepared as a single parent. I had had some friends growing up who were single parents before I adopted. I went to single moms meetup groups, I read books, but nothing prepared me for going from having complete freedom as a single person with no responsibilities outside, outside of dogs, to overnight within 24 hours.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

I had a two-year-old who was mobile, who didn't speak English. He had a handful of words in English. He could say mom and yes and no, but he didn't even have words in Creole either. And so all of a sudden, I was figuring out what do I feed a child, right? What? What does a sleep schedule look like? What do you put in a day bag when you're going, you know, to figure out what you're going to do for the day?

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

There were just so many things. I mean, I couldn't leave him alone to go to the bathroom, right. I had to bring him into the bathroom with me. I only could sleep. Or I tried to work during his nap time, right, I had to bring him into the bathroom with me. I only could sleep. Or I tried to work during his nap time right, or I would put him to bed at six o'clock and then I would work from six to 12, right To try to get as much done.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

Because you know right away I noticed my son had difficulty with self-occupying, so he wasn't naturally someone who could just go into a corner with a bunch of toys and create an imaginative world. He was always a very big bodied kid so and I don't mean like he was physically big bodied, but he longed for big body play. So he wanted to be on a bike, he wanted to be running, he wanted to be climbing. He was very naturally physically skilled, but that meant I was on all the time, um, so that was tricky, I think, just from a single parenting standpoint. But then with adoption you know, one way that you're very ill prepared is you come home and you get two or three visits from your social worker but then after that they kind of walk away. So I didn't know about so many things, and this was somebody who had been in mental health for 12 years, but not necessarily infant mental health and not adoption-based mental health. So I found out about a screening where he could get free physical therapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy up until the time he was three. I found out that from a woman at the park who I ended up just getting into a conversation with and she was like oh, by the way, you could get free speech services at your house, and so I actually had someone come for six months and offer speech therapy.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

But I feel like even understanding how do you apply to preschool, what preschool would be appropriate for a two-year-old? Because when you're a parent, from birth on, you have that first couple of years of life where you're focusing more on basic things like feeding, sleeping, holding, nurturing. I was suddenly like, oh my gosh, my son's supposed to start preschool in a year. How do I even navigate that? And with a child who I could tell pretty quickly had some emotional regulation challenges, so separation was really difficult for him. He wanted to be held quite a lot. When he was upset he would bite, and so that was difficult to figure out. Oh, is that because he doesn't have language or is that because he can't communicate to me that he's hungry? But also, you know, kids ages two to three are doing things like having temper tantrums or, you know, doing things like biting or hitting, when they can't always communicate their needs, so it was hard to know what was adoption and what was just a kid.

Beverley Glazer:

And as life continued. Did it get better or did it just continue? Um, did you adjust?

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

Yeah, I mean, I think I adjusted to parenting right Because it's like a muscle and so you start to learn. Okay, like this is what navigating a day looks like. This is what looking for childcare looks like. This is what building relationships with educational professionals look like. So I think in some ways, yes, it got easier. I think where it got harder is that my son's needs grew exponentially. You know, when you're three or four, parents and other parents and school professionals understand when your kid has some level of challenge. But as they get older and the expectations grow to sit in a classroom for seven hours a day or to participate in after-school sports or to engage in you know, deeper kinds of connections with people then we started to hit different roadblocks.

Beverley Glazer:

Okay For parents going through this. What type of roadblocks did you hit?

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

roadblocks did you hit? Well, I think there were a lot. I would say one is that a lot of people do not understand the complexity of adoption. So, even though I very quickly sought out services, Even people that say they're adoption competent usually don't understand the complex nature of what our kids have to navigate. But also, most services are an hour. You can do an hour of occupational therapy or an hour of play therapy, but that doesn't really get at the many, many different needs. I mean my son had sleep needs, my son had issues with urinary incontinence, my son had issues with executive functioning. All of those things can't really be navigated in a system that tries to offer bite-sized care. Right, so that was a big challenge. I think.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

Another challenge is, you know, educational professionals are not really trained on trauma. Even trauma-sensitive schools that try to be that way oftentimes are kind of steeped in behaviorism. So there's a lot of well, there needs to be consequences and the consequences are you lose a privilege or you get suspended or you have some sort of talking to. I remember even I had forgotten about this, but when my son was in kindergarten he was wiggling during his music class and the music teacher didn't like that. He was wiggling during his music class and the music teacher didn't like that he was wiggling and made him stand for the rest of the class right as like a punishment for not following her direction.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

And as I've gone on to work in schools as a social worker, I realize how many schools are just set up that way they're set up with. Even systems like PBIS, which is supposed to be building skills, is still sort of carrot and stick right you do what I say and you get a prize. You don't do what I say and you don't get a prize. And so that was really also difficult was trying to navigate a system's steeped in a lot of old school ways of doing things and that tends to parent blame when your kid doesn't behave according to whatever the standard is.

Beverley Glazer:

How did you go through all this for yourself? Where did you get that break? Because this sounds like 24-7.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

Yeah, well, I think a huge piece of it has been educating myself right. When I went back and got my degree at the University of Chicago, it blew me out of the water to really learn about the neuroscience of trauma. That was stuff that no one had ever really brought up. I mean, I was the person who went to every class I could that the adoption agency offered, and part of it was they maybe didn't necessarily have access to that information at that point in time either, but no one was talking about the ways in which the brain, what happens to you in the first two years of life, impacts where you go in your next 18. And no one was really talking about that. So the more that I learned about like Dr Bruce Perry's work, bessel van der Kolk's work, the more I understood about the brain body connection. I think that really opened my eyes to better understand that so much of what my son was experiencing was not willful, it wasn't purposeful. It was literally a brain inflamed that was trying to survive. So that was huge.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

I've done so much, whether it's going to classes, going to workshops. My house is full of books where I've tried to learn as much as I can about what adoptees go through. I've been on so many Facebook groups. That's been enormously helpful because I've often found that parents actually know way more than the professionals do, because professionals, while they care, it's not their life, and so they go home at the end of the day and can kind of move on. But when you're a parent, it becomes your passion and your purpose. So I've learned so much from other parents. That's been enormously helpful. And then also, I think you know, finding activism, finding a way to challenge systems through my creativity, I think has also been a big thing.

Beverley Glazer:

What would you say? The biggest myths about adoption? Oh wow, Parents that don't know.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

Yeah, well, I think one huge adoption myth is that if you love them enough, that that solves the problems. And it doesn't. A lot of our children have developmental trauma and reactive attachment issues. So love actually feels like poison to them because it feels like it's going to destroy them. Because when they loved, even before they could put love like the word love around it, they were left with confusion and loss and disappearance and lack of consistency.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

So I think a lot of adoptive parents believe, oh, if I just bring a child in and give them all the love I can, that's going to heal the wounds. Um, so that's one big myth. Um, I think another myth is that services will actually heal wounds as well. Right, if I do occupational therapy, if I do play therapy, if I get the right medication, um, and while those things can help, these are root wounds that will never go away.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

I've had so many adoptees say I have a hole inside and I try to fill that hole in any way I can. I've tried to fill it with substances, I've tried to fill it with television, shopping, food, I've tried to fill it with going in and out of relationships, right, all thinking that that's going to put a bottom to my boat. But the bottom line is I have a boat that doesn't have a bottom, and so you can pour all you want into it, but the boat keeps sinking. And so I'm not saying that healing isn't possible, but I think there's this sense that healing is I did it and now we're fine as opposed to realizing that healing is a lifelong journey.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

And then I think one of the last myths also is that this is a traditional parenting job that will end when your child is 18 and you can just let them fly off into the world. Um, so many adoptive families I talk to are like no, my child is 30 and they still live at home. Or my child is 50 and still needs help with their Medicaid paperwork. Um, right, this is a parenting role that is likely a lifetime parenting role, and you will have to likely give up family who don't understand, friends who you can't relate to. You will have to give up your free time you will have. This is navigating. This is like a second and third job.

Beverley Glazer:

And you're writing a book, yes. What do you hope your readers will learn?

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

Oh well, I'm so excited about this book. I'm excited about it because it's not necessarily a book that you will find at like a Barnes and Noble. It's a book that's going into university libraries around the globe, um in social work departments, in um medicine for people that want to become physicians, in disability studies, in um criminal legal studies, because a lot of our kids unfortunately um have contact with the criminal legal system because they're misunderstood. And so my hope is, with the book is to better prepare educators, better prepare social workers, better prepared doctors, so that more and more families get care that's actually helpful quicker. So, just as one example, many adoptees and kids in foster care were exposed to alcohol and nicotine in utero.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

There is still a massive myth that you have to have particular facial features in order to be diagnosed with FASD, and what we've discovered now in the last five years of research is that 85% of the kids don't have the facial features, and so they're getting misdiagnosed with things like ADHD and autism and mood disorders and all sorts of things, when they could have been diagnosed from the beginning as having a traumatic brain injury that needs a different kind of intervention, and so if we can get these stories in front of future pediatricians. No pediatrician ever brought that up to us. So if somebody at age two could have seen that and been aware and recognized it, that could have changed the trajectory for my family and a lot of other families, social workers, who immediately think, okay, if I do play therapy, that's going to address XYZ issue. I'm hoping that in reading the book, they'll be able to acknowledge their own clinical capacity, their own clinical lack of awareness perhaps, and that they'll be able to say, okay, there's a lot I don't know here and I'm not going to pretend I do know. So I'm going to bring in people from a wide range of fields so that we can collectively collaborate on solutions, and so that's my hope.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

It's. What's exciting to me about it being a cross-disciplinary book is because one of the things I do in it is I set out exercises and activities for these future professionals to do together, and one of them is to think about how do we think about lifetime disability? How do we think about long-term housing? How do we think about employment opportunities? How do we think about alternative schooling? How do we think about respite care for parents, right? So this is being done in a comprehensive and holistic way, with people across disciplines talking to each other.

Beverley Glazer:

Wonderful, B righid. What would you like to leave our listeners with?

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

I would say break the silence, share your story. I think a lot of adoptive families are afraid to share our stories because we don't want judgment, we don't want blame, we don't want to feel isolated and alone, and so we keep things close to the best. And so I would say if you're an adoptive family, speak out center adoptees, center birth parents, because they have stories too that need to be heard. I would say if you're not an adoptive family and you're considering it, please talk to us first so that you understand what you're stepping into. And if you're not connected to adoption at all, but this is just an area of interest for you, I would say believe us, offer us empathy, give us compassion and come at us with curiosity, because that's how we'll ally with you and how we can create some kind of change going forward.

Beverley Glazer:

Thank you, you're welcome, thank you. Thank you, Brighid. Brighid O'Shaughnessy is a licensed social worker, an adoptive mom and a documentary theater artist who gives voice to the raw experiences behind adoption, trauma and healing. Her work in schools and in her project Adoption Uncovered helps educators, professionals and communities to better support adoptive families with empathy, truth and transformation. Brighid is currently working on a book chronicling the stories of adoptive mothers, which will be placed in university libraries around the world.

Beverley Glazer:

Here are some takeaways from this episode. Adoption isn't a fairy tale. It's complex and it deserves understanding. Systems don't support trauma. People do, and you don't have to be a professional to be informed and know about trauma.

Beverley Glazer:

If you've been relating to this episode, here are a few things you could do for yourself right now. Reach out to someone who gets it. Talk to a friend. Talk to a professional or a support group. Just talk. Ask yourself what do you need, even if it's 10 minutes a day of quiet time, try that. Say no to something that drains you. You have to be strong too. For similar episodes on healing trauma and the arts, check out episodes 127 and 131 of Aging with Purpose and Passion. And if you like podcasts for older women, check out Older Women and Friends with award-winning host Jane Leder, who is challenging the myths all about older women, is challenging the myths all about older women, older women and friends set the record straight and it explores the contributions and wisdom that women are anxious to share. She has her links, which will be in the show notes and Brighid, what are your links? Where can people find you online?

Brighid O'Shaughnessy:

Sure, the best place to find me is at wwwreturntotheroots. org. That's my website. It talks about my adoption work, my work in schools and also my work with women, health and healing, so that's a great place to find me, terrific.

Beverley Glazer:

And Bridget's links are in the show notes and they're on my site too. That's reinventimpossible. com. And so, my friends, what's next for you? Are you just going through the motions or are you living the life that you truly love? Get my free guide to go from stuck to unstoppable, and that is also in the show notes below. You can connect with me, beverly Glazer, on all social media platforms and in my positive group of women on Facebook, women Over 50 Rock. Thank you for listening. Have you enjoyed this conversation? Please subscribe to help us spread the word and drop us a review and send it to a friend. And remember you have only one life, so live it with purpose and passion.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for joining us. You can connect with Bev on her website, reinventimpossiblecom and, while you're there, join our newsletter Subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, keep aging with purpose and passion and celebrate life.

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