From Fear to Love: Healing and Hope in Adoption with Brian Post

In this heartfelt and transformative episode, Sherry Eldridge sits down with esteemed guest Brian Post, a renowned adoption and child behavior expert. Brian, an adoptee and former foster child, shares his compelling life story—from his early experiences in foster care to reuniting with his birth mother decades later. His journey underscores the resilience, trauma, and profound emotional growth that many adoptees experience.

Brian discusses the power of love as a healing force, the critical importance of self-awareness, and the hard truths about the foster and adoption systems. He reveals how stress inhibits secure attachment and how we must confront our deepest pains to foster genuine healing. Sherry and Brian also touch on the complexities of anger within the adoption community, the challenges faced by foster parents, and the impact of "rehoming" on children.

This episode provides invaluable insights for adoptees, adoptive and foster parents, and professionals in the field, highlighting the necessity of facing trauma head-on and the importance of creating safe, supportive environments for children. Join us for a candid and inspiring conversation that embraces vulnerability, resilience, and the path from fear to unconditional love.

All Rights Reserved. @sherrieeldridge

Transcript

Hi there friends through adoption. It's Sherry and it's a beautiful day in Indiana. What a gorgeous time in Indiana, all the leaves are turning red and orange and it's warm even in the outside, even though it feels chilly in the morning, but it's a wonderful time. And I've been so looking forward to this podcast because I'm going to be interviewing a dear friend of mine by the name of Brian Post.
And let me just tell you a little bit about him. Brian Post. We've been colleagues for many years, so here we go. Brian is a retired clinical social worker. He is an adopted and former foster child. He is one of America's foremost child behavior and adoption experts, and the founder of the Post Institute, the Leaf Company, and Major Media League, which is, I think, for young people, if people want to look into it.
It's very cool. He's a renowned clinician, lecturer, and best selling author of, from the book, From Fear to Life, The Great Behavior Breakdown, and 10 other books, and more than 100 video and audio programs. Brian has traveled throughout the world providing expert treatment and consultation to a variety of groups and internationally recognized specialists in the treatment of emotional and behavioral disturbance.
Brian specializes in love based treatment approach. The focus is on developing a deeper understanding of the trauma, stress, and fear, and how they rule our lives. He counters this by offering an enlightening perspective on the all encompassing power of love to bring us peace and healing. The love based, family centered principles and concepts offered by Brian, did I say this already?
They've been taught to more than a million parents and professionals around the world. So welcome, Brian. Thank you, Sherry. 
It's such an honor to be here with you. 
It's an honor to have you, my friend. 
I've been a long term admirer of all your works and your books. This is just a great gift for me to be able to spend this time with you.
Oh, it's a gift for me, too. Thank you. Well, I just wondered in the very beginning if you could just tell us your story about being a foster child and also an adoptee. 
I'd be happy to. I was conceived to a young mother who had three siblings already. She was married and her husband at the time was in Germany, he was in the military, and she didn't think he was going to come back.
And so she fell in love with my father, who was also a very young man at the time, and she became pregnant. However, and this is in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and I, there's a Merle Haggard song called, uh, Okie from Muskogee, so I always tell people, that's me. So, however, my father went across town and got her cousin pregnant when my mother found out she was heartbroken and she didn't want to be a single mom in Muskogee, Oklahoma with four kids.
So she called her husband and she told him that she would become pregnant and he told her that she needed to have an abortion. She said, okay. And so 37 years later when I called her and I said, I think I might be, um, the little boy you placed for adoption. She said, let me call you back. And, um, I said, I don't want anything.
I'm not a crackhead or anything. I don't need money. I just want to know a little bit about who I am. And, uh, she said, okay, I'll call you back tomorrow. So we hung up and she called me back 30 minutes later and she said, baby, you're right, I'm your mom. I've been praying for you every single night since you've been gone.
She said, I had to tell my husband. She was still married to the same man, his name's Arthur. And, uh, they'd still been married all this time, and he thought I'd been aborted. The only two people that knew I existed was my mother and my Aunt Gloria, who's since passed away, is my mother's oldest sister. The only two people that knew I existed.
So, shortly after, when I had the reunion with the two of them, he was the first one out the door, and he gave me a big hug, and he said, I'm so sorry, I hope you can forgive me. I said, there's nothing to forgive, this has all been divinely orchestrated. And so after my mother, going back to when my mother, after she gave birth to me, she placed me for adoption.
I was in a couple of foster homes, just two homes for a short period of time before I was adopted by my adoptive parents, Bill and Opal Post, who raised me. That's the story in a nutshell. 
That's quite a story. People may try to abort us, but God planned our lives, 
right? That is exactly right. People ask me all the time, Sherry, how I got into this work, and I said, this is what God prepared me to do.
I was born to do this. Every moment, Even the conception is exactly the way I was supposed to be. And I was supposed to have all the experiences that I had to prepare me for this podcast right here today in this moment with Sherry Eldridge. Yes. And 
I think we could both agree that the sovereignty of God is the answer to every question that we could ever have.
Hey, hey, amen. 
Yeah. There may be some adoptees that are searching that are mad at us for that, but I really believe that's the answer. So, one of your books, From Fear to Love, was this a story you just told me about fear to love, or was this a transformation that you went through, because you were a maverick, right?
You were a maverick in the field of social work, Is that the story of how you changed during your growth process as a 
maverick? Yeah, you know, it's pretty much my entire life story, but it's definitely my story as an adoption professional. Unfortunately, I'm still a maverick. I'm teaching a message that is just not common, and I wish it was common, but love is just not a common message when it comes to parenting.
And definitely not when it comes to adoption, parenting, and children with challenges. And so in that regard, I've continued to be a maverick and say things that people don't always agree with or appreciate, but I feel like the truth is the truth. And from Fear to Love, Sherry, is also about my journey from being a clinician I cut my teeth as a clinician learning fear based practices.
I didn't realize it until I pretty much had an awakening, an awareness one morning, a moment of enlightenment, a God moment, where I became intimately aware that as long as you're stressed, because you and I being in the adoption and the attachment field, There's so much talk about children and attachment and attachment disorders.
And a question I asked for years at the beginning of my career was, attachment's great, I have so much admiration for John Bowlby, but what is it that leads to attachment? And I never could really grasp what that answer was. And one morning, I was in Vancouver, Canada, I was seven. And first of all, it started at about two in the morning.
I woke up and that question was in my head. I've been asking that question for probably four or five years. Ever since I went to my first ATTACH conference, I've been asking the question, what is it that leads to attachment? So I woke up that morning and then I fell back asleep. I woke up and was driving to a treatment center where I was the director and it was raining.
It was 7 30 in the morning and the answer was stress. As long as you're stressed, you can't develop secure attachment. And it changed my personal life as well as my professional life because it gave me insights into myself But then I had this just intimate awareness that as long as you're in a state of stress, you can't develop secure attachment And attachment is a two way street.
It's attachment and bonding. So we spend so much time on children developing attachment, zero, so much, so little time on parents being secure figures for bonding that we end up just going one way all the time. And so from that, I just continue to study and then Learn, you know, through my studies, learned about the two primary emotions being love and fear, and it's just developed over time, and it's the thing that's most radical for my own personal life and practice and everything that I've done since.
We can't even be present in our bodies to connect with one another if we're stressed. I mean, learning to listen to our body, soul, and spirit is just a new thing. 
You're absolutely right. And when we're stressed, we're in survival. And as long as you're in survival, you can't be present. You can't pay attention.
You can't listen. And the thing is, is we don't always know when we're stressed. We don't always know because it's so unconscious. Most of the time, when we've constricted into a place of stress, we don't know when we're operating from a place of fear and as long as we're not conscious of that. We're not conscious of our behaviors.
We're not conscious of the way we show up for our children. We're not conscious of the way we show up ourselves in life. And I know that one of the questions that you had mentioned to me, and I know that as a fellow adoptees, you and I have seen this through the years, you know, a lot of our adopted adult adopted counterparts are really angry about being adopted.
I don't know how common it is. I think it's probably more common than I'm aware, but they also in that anger of adoption, they lose the awareness of their own sensitivity, their own stress, their own overwhelm. And there's so much that can be gained when you can let go of that anger about your origin story and you can grow into an awareness and an acceptance of it.
And the acceptance and the awareness that you're a beautiful person. You went through all of those things, good, bad, or indifferent to shape you to be this amazing person. And I believe, Sherry, that adopted individuals are gifted individuals. I believe the very process. of going through adoption changes the brain and shapes the brain in a way that sets an individual up for a lot of giftedness.
If we can just find it through all the emotional turmoil, I believe it leads to a magnificent individual. 
That is so cool. I love that idea of being super gifted. It's because we've been through a lot, right? And we've survived and God has given us the grace and, but I love what you were saying about self awareness, because as anybody, adoptees or adoptive parents or birth parents, we have to come to a place of humility.
Where we want to develop that self awareness and because as adoptees, because of the extreme trauma, we may not have any idea of the impact that we're having on other people. 
Oh, that's so true. One of the things that I've been spending a lot more time with in probably the last five years is deepening my understanding of energy and vibration and frequency.
When you say that we may not have any idea how we're impacting other people, it's so true. Because when you're not conscious and you're not mindful of who you are and what you're thinking and how you're showing up and what your energy is, you're sending a vibration to other people, and they are reacting to that vibration.
Which, if you're sending out a negative vibration, you're probably getting a lot of negativity back, and so then you wonder why you keep getting all this negativity in your life. Well, we have to learn to look at ourselves and we have to learn to take account. Whatever you're getting back in life is probably what you're putting out to begin with.
And that's a really hard, difficult kind of a self awareness because we don't like to think about the world as being nasty to us because we're feeling nasty or we're putting out nasty. You know, it's so much easier to feel victimized. The very nature of feeling victimized is sending out a negative energy.
It's sending out a negative vibration, which is going to get that back to you. 
Yes. And so we have to do the hard work, right? We have to take a hard inner look. We have to get a heart MRI. 
Oh, yes. 
And we have to see if there's hate in our hearts. I mean, Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. I thought there was no hate in my heart until I started doing research for my next book when I was researching about my relationship with my adoptive mom.
She tried so hard, but I had hatred toward her. I had to deal with all that. And a lot of power of forgiveness, it sets us free. 
It is so powerful, and yet it is so difficult to get to. You just used the analogy of a heart MRI. Do you know how much I dislike getting MRIs? They're the worst experience, and that makes me think about how hard it is to do a heart MRI.
Speaking using that analogy, that's hard to go into that pipe. That pipe is the pipe within ourselves. It's the pipe within. And that hum is all of the pain and the stress and the heartache you've been through. You just have to sit through it. And you have to breathe through it, and you have to cry through it, and you have to be mad through it.
You have to grieve through it. The only way to get out of it is to go through it. So 
Brian, how would you recommend that adoptees grieve that loss? What is the process that you have found works? 
Well, the process that I have found that works most effectively for me and the people that I've taught is giving yourself permission.
And this is so hard. I wish I could make this so much easier for people. Giving yourself permission to honor how you truly felt at whatever age you had that loss experience. It doesn't matter how far you go back. It doesn't matter where you start. You could have had a loss experience yesterday. Maybe that's all you can get to.
Honor that loss experience. And as you're honoring that loss experience, and when I say honor, I mean to assign intent no greater and no less than what's deserved. So you close your eyes, you get quiet, you breathe into your body, and you listen. And you go in and you think about that loss, you sit with that feeling that comes up, whatever that feeling is, whatever that feeling is that comes up, you sit with that feeling, you open yourself to that feeling, and what you're going to find is what that feeling is an experience of you at that age.
And then when you see yourself at that age, in your mind's eye and in your heart, give yourself permission to have that pain. That is the pathway. To touching your grief and it may start with anger. You may need to start with anger because you think you're angry start with anger You don't have to be where you're at Start where you're at if you're angry be angry and when I say be angry, I mean Be all the angry you can be.
I mean, yell, scream, cuss. But just right there in that space, if you need to fall on the ground, and you kick, and you hit, and you just scream, and I Give in to that anger, and what you're gonna find is underneath that anger is deep sadness. Is deep loss, deep shame, deep pain. It's a deep wound and you just dive into that one.
Like you're diving into a swimming pool and you just bask in it for as much as you can, as much as you can. And here's the thing, Sherry. We think that we need to avoid that pain because if we go into that pain, it's going to take us away. It may kill us. We may not be able to recover from it. But here's what I'm going to tell you from 25 years of doing this work, one good deep experience of having that pain is going to probably last you about 10 minutes.
And it's a deep one. If you go longer than 10 minutes, I'll be surprised. Because usually, you'll just cycle through. And it doesn't mean it's all gone after 10 minutes, it just means you've done what you needed to do in that round. Give yourself permission to have more rounds, and to grieve as much as you need to grieve.
To hold that space for yourself as much as you need to hold that space. Because you want to take something that's unconscious, and you want to make it more and more conscious. Because that's how you heal trauma. https: TheBusinessProfessor. com That's how you heal pain. That's how you heal loss. You take something that you've shoved down and, and no one else has held for you.
And you just honor it and you own it. And you become more conscious of it as much as you can, as often as you can, until you start to gain some freedom around it. And when you gain the freedom, you gain awareness. See, that's all freedom is. Freedom is awareness. You're no longer judging it. You're no longer ashamed of it.
You just feel it. You know, every time someone tells me, Brian, why don't you start by telling us your story? I go all the way back. I'm telling you a conception story. And I'm telling you a conception story because I've grieved all of that. 
Brian, can you tell us what it was like to get back to the conception story?
First of 
all, there are no words. It's a felt sense. It's a feeling. Before I even had reunion with my biological mother, Sherry, I knew two things. Number one, I knew that she took care of me when I was in the womb. I just had a sense she took care of me when I was in the womb. And number two, I always said, and this is just intuitive, And intuition is a sensory pathway.
So we all have intuition when we listen. Intuitively, I knew that the scariest time, the most terrifying time of my life was when I was in the birth canal. Because I was leaving something that felt good, and I was going to something dark that I did not know. And that was the scariest time of my life. And so I've done work all through that period.
When I got into reunion with my, my old mom and we did some therapy together, I asked her, when did you know you couldn't keep me? And she said, at the seventh month, I had to start acting like you weren't there anymore. She said, but for that first seven months, she said, I loved being pregnant. I ate right, I slept, I didn't smoke, I didn't drink, I exercised.
She did all the good stuff. But she said, at that seventh month, I knew I wasn't going to be able to keep you. And I had to try to forget that you were there. I can grieve that pain to this day. That's the thing. Painful experiences never go, they never go anywhere, you just learn to not let them control you any longer.
That's part of who I am. I can still grieve that little baby. You could give me two minutes to go into my body and find that little baby and I could be with his suffering. 
Well, I was told by my birth mother that she was raped. And that has showed up in different ways. Like a counselor that I went to, the first question he asked me was, Was your birth mother raped?
I was unwanted. I was on brand. 
That's why you're here. I love that Sherry because over my career I have become so intimate with emotion. I love emotion. I love pain and I love the painful story. The more painful the story or the origin story, it just moves me. I just feel it. And I'm like, most people would want to run away from that, that maybe they were the product of a rape or maybe that they were unwanted.
It's like, Oh, no one wants to feel that, but you live it. You live it. So the best thing you can do is to feel it and to get one with it. So you can know it so intimately when it shows up. Sometimes when it shows up, you can just say, Hey, we're okay. Yes, 
well, I've been thinking about foster care a lot because there's a lot going on in Indiana and without a doubt, there's a foster care crisis going on in this state.
Oh, it's nationwide. That's 
what I wondered if it was nationwide. And just to give the credits here, two nonprofits called Hands of Hope. The contingent along with Child Protective Services have come up with a new initiative called Every Child Indiana. And Susie Roth, the executive director of this new initiative, says that 50 percent of foster parents quit the first year because of hard demands.
So, what would your wisdom be? That is 
such an exceptionally high statistic. And it is so unfortunate because there are so many dollars spent trying to recruit foster parents. I believe that where we're messing up is in the very beginning. We're not honest with potential foster parents about the challenges that they're going to encounter, and we're not honest with the fact that it is going to trigger all of their deepest pain.
I feel like we don't go deep enough into the realization that parenting foster children and adopted children, parenting someone else's biological child is different than parenting your own biological child because the vibration exchange is different. The sensory experience is different, and so, in our desperation to get foster parents, we make it too easy for them to become foster parents.
We need to require deep emotional work. I mean, what if you did that? What if you required some deep emotional work, even if it was just groups? Some deep emotional group process work. You know how many people wouldn't make it past the first session? Because they would go, this is not for me. They would not want to go on, probably.
That would, uh, do a lot of already hurting kids a great service. To not put them at risk of being in a home that really can't meet their needs. And the other thing, Sherry, I think that we mess up in the foster care system is we put too many kids in homes too soon. We don't give enough consideration to the emotional capacity that an adult is able to have when it comes to parenting trauma.
We're trying to put too many kids in homes. I see it all the time. Parents are not prepared. Not only are they not prepared, but we overwhelm them. Even the prepared ones we overwhelm. 
What about, uh, Nancy Verrier's, you know, The Primal Wound? Is that something that people should read or shouldn't read my book?
Uh, 100 percent they should read your book. Your book should be required reading for foster parent training and for adoption training. And Nancy Verrier's book, that should most definitely be read. definitely be a consideration for all new adoption and foster parents, but here's the thing I want people to remember, and I don't want them to forget, or maybe I want them to know.
It starts with us as adults. That Primal Wound book, we all have a Primal Wound. 
Yeah, goes back to me, right? Exactly. That's right. Well There's, uh, also some social media going on locally about what can adoptive and foster parents do when the kids are out in public and they give a bad report about the parents or go to school and say, my mother beat me up or whatever.
Can you address that? 
Well, that is unfortunately for some children, it is their best defense mechanism when they feel stressed and when they feel scared. And here's what I want to say to parents. Number one, don't be surprised by it. So don't be surprised by it when it happens. And not every child does this.
This is typically children who've been through some really adverse childhood experiences. They've had some really significant traumas in their lives when they make those kinds of false self reports against foster parents or adoptive parents. Don't be surprised by it. When you don't allow yourself to be surprised by it, you don't get caught off guard and you're not shocked by it.
You can simply say, I know that what he's telling you is very concerning. My child has a history. Here's a number to his counselor, here's a number to his social worker, you can call and confirm. I understand that this statement is very alarming, but this is a very common thing that we're dealing with and this is going to be okay, but by all means, if you need to call someone, here's a professional that you can call just to confirm.
And so that way, you just immediately, for the parent, it gives them some sense of, you're not going to just have CPS knocking down your door. Which happens sometimes. You know, for valid reasons, I have 150 staff in Northern California, Sherry, and we work in homes every single day. We're mandated reporters, but I have to have the conversation with my team that being a mandated reporter and showing up and being a support in someone's home is a very fine line you have to walk.
Because there's something those parents are doing that you disagree with, that doesn't mean that you file a CPS report. Because as soon as you do, you're probably going to lose relationship with them, and you're going to lose the ability to trust. You have to have discernment. You have to have discernment for what you're reporting, and you have to understand that these parents, the ones that hang in there, They're really working hard, and they're really stressed, and they need support.
I'd really like to encourage the parents to have a professional on standby in case it's needed, but number two, don't be surprised and don't be caught off guard when kids make those kinds of statements. I'll finish this thought. It's the same thing with kids who've been sexually abused. When you work with a child who's been sexually abused or you're the parent of a child who's been sexually abused, you know, one of the things I always say, have parents say to these kids is adults don't have sex with kids in our home.
In our home, adults don't have sex with kids, adults don't do inappropriate things with kids. I just like to make it right up front. And so the same way, if you got a child who may go to the store, may be likely to make an allegation, you just say to that child right up front, Hey, if you feel scared, if you feel stressed, and you don't feel like I'm a safe person, you should go talk to somebody.
I just want you to know, because I want you to feel safe. I don't want you to be scared. I want to be a safe person in your life. And if you don't feel safe, you go tell someone if you don't feel like I'm keeping you safe. Just make it right out up and up front. And when the child knows that your interest is in their safety, you're not going to get those kinds of false allegations.
Thank 
you so much. You're welcome. Okay, let's switch gears a little bit because earlier we had talked about the hatred that exists in the world of adoption. I'm just very sad to see all this happening on social media and so on, and what is a way do you think that we can, as professionals, contribute to the health of the adoption triad?
We want the whole triad. We want first parents. Adoptive parents and adoptees foster kids. 
I think one of the most powerful things that we can do is learn to be present with people and honor what they feel, honor what they feel without discounting them, honor what they feel without being afraid that they're going to make someone else feel bad.
If an adult adoptee has pain and anger, then we've got to honor that for them. And here's what I like to do with that. Not just honor it, but go all the way back, as far as we can go. Let's just go back to the first time you got really pissed, and let's just give in to that. Let's just give me all that anger.
Give me all of that hatred that you're feeling. Let's get it out. And I want to hear it. There's not enough that get an opportunity to express themselves. 
Where do they do that? I mean, do you a therapist? Or not in a group, right? Not in an all adoptee group or whatever. That would just multiply. That's 
gonna be difficult, but here's the thing.
Let's say you're in an all adoptee group and you're angry. Can you encourage others to honor the anger that they feel, to own the anger that they feel? Because see, here's what we usually do with that anger. We try to blame our anger on someone else. As long as we're blaming it on someone else, and I know the horrible things some adoptees have gone through.
Not just the abuse, but the downright theft that occurs, the kidnapping that occurs that has occurred in the adoption community. And it's unfortunate, but it happens. Once you've gone through that, can you give yourself permission to honor what you feel? Because to make it about someone else, regardless of what it was and how bad it was, to make it about someone else is to give all your power away.
Be angry and say how angry you are and grieve that anger and then encourage others to do that. You can do that in an adoption group and you can be a catalyst towards empowerment and not disempowerment. We just don't realize that as adult adoptees, when we're angry and pissed off at the world, we're just feeling disempowered.
Well, let's call adoptee groups to do that. We're calling them to do it right now, right? Yeah. Somebody's responsibility. There's a lot of anger from adoptees toward adoptive parents, which makes me so sad. A lot of times they don't want adoptive parents in their, their big conferences. That's 
horrible. Yeah, we do.
But the only way we get over it is that we work through our traumas associated with it. It's an unfortunate experience of humanity, because I see it almost every day, an adopted child who's in a home that is overwhelmed, stressed out, not loving, rejecting, abandoning, threatening, shaming, diagnosing, medicating, sending them away.
The mental health system, it is as much their responsibility as it is anyone's responsibility. Adopt for parents, go to mental health professionals looking for support now. Mental health professionals end up blaming the adopted child. They end up diagnosing and labeling the adopted child and contributing to the stress and the overwhelm the adopted child feels.
Being born sensitive to rejection and sensitive to abandonment, now you've got a trajectory of years in the mental health system of them making you feel worse. Because the mental health professionals, number one, haven't done enough of their own self work to be able to help adoptive parents do their self work, so adoptive parents can help their children grieve and heal through their trauma.
The only truly logical place for us to start is with ourselves. We've got to be willing to grieve our loss and grieve our pain and get over our anger and find some forgiveness. Find it with yourself, find it with your biological parents, your first parents, find it with your adopted parents because they were victims to some adult as well.
We've all just suffered. And I had, my adoptive parents, Sherry, were children of alcoholics. My dad's dad was an alcoholic, got shot in a bar, he was the oldest parentified child of nine. My mom was the oldest parentified child of ten. Her dad, when she was nine years old, he was an alcoholic, had a heart attack.
Those were my adoptive parents, and God bless them, they did the absolute best that they could do. But they were violent, they were emotionally absent, they were shaming, they were threatening, they were consistent, and they provided for us, and they put a roof over our heads, and they loved us the best that they could, but they were just victims of their own childhood.
They just did what they grew up having experienced. They didn't have any help. I could spend my entire adult life being pissed off because my adoptive parents beat us, deprived us, neglected us, weren't emotionally present. I could spend my life in that energy. Or, I could find the gratitude for the fact that they gave me a home, they gave me a community to grow up in, they did love me the best that they could, they kept food on the table, they kept me sheltered, they saw me all the way through 17, through high school, for 17 years and I was not an easy kid!
I lied, I stole, I got in fights, I set stuff on fire, I was not an easy kid! But they hung in there. They didn't send me away. They didn't relinquish the adoption. They hung in there and I'm their son. Because of those two individuals, I have parents. I have a mother and a father. My father's passed away 17 years ago, but my mother's still alive and she's my biggest fan.
It was hell going through that, but we came out on the other side of it. Love won because love always wins. But the only way that you get to love is you got to get out of the fear and you got to get out of the anger and the resentment. Living in that place is just going to keep you victimized and keep you hostage.
Yes. Thank you so much for sharing so much of your story there and the transparency, the honesty. Parents and everybody are going to identify with you. I just want to ask you one more question. What do you think about re homing? Oh, 
I don't like that word at all. That word makes me sad. I understand that there may be adoptive placements that are not successful.
There may be adoptive parents, and this is what I wish adoptive parents could do. I wish they could just own the fact that they don't have the tools and the resources and the strength to create the home the child needs. Don't blame the child. Don't put another negative thing on the child. You're not owning your own shame, your own guilt, your own inadequacy, and you're blaming the child.
You're actually setting it up so they won't be successful in their next placement. So it validates that it didn't work out in your home. If it doesn't work out in your home, my God, it just doesn't work out. And that's okay. Let's set up that child to be as successful as they possibly can. In another home, as long as there are adults willing, I want a child to have an opportunity.
To have a home and to have a family. That's my friend, Pat O'Brien, you know, his foundation, he started You Gotta Believe in New York. They were all about helping older children become adopted. And, and I know they found adoptive families for 25, 30, 40 year olds, because Pat says every child deserves a family.
Every child deserves a home. The concept of rehoming, you know, the word I don't like, I'm not a fan, when an adoptive placement does succeed, as they don't always. Please, as a human being, as an adult, do your best to help that child be successful in their next home. 
Brian, I just cherish the time that we've had together.
Thank you so much. And I just know that many people are going to be blessed by what you've shared. 
Thank you so much for having me. I have so much respect and admiration for all that you've done for the adoption community over all the years. I've always been a big fan and so thank you for having me on to share with your people.
Absolutely, and let me remind listeners to sign Follow the podcast. We'll see you next time. Bye.