Author name: Jana M. Rupnow, LPC

Giving Wisely Matters When people decide to become donors, most do so with kind and generous intentions. They want to help someone experience the joy of becoming a parent. It’s a beautiful act of giving, and it can change lives. But what many new donors don’t realize is that the impact of donation continues far […]

Own your story. Don’t let it own you. I wrote this note to myself on February 2016, as I was uncovering layers of my complicated story. But the credit of “owning our story” goes entirely to my daughter Jade, from a day back in 2010. When my daughter was five, we were sitting around the

I was born into contradiction. Actually, I was born as an adoptee, and that gave me the ability to hold two seemingly opposing truths at the same time. Dialectical thinking isn’t something I learned in a psychology textbook—it’s something I’ve lived. It’s in my DNA (and yet, paradoxically, it isn’t, because I was raised outside

The night of the verdict, I sat down with my husband to play chess. I needed a distraction, something to pull me out of my head. I thought, this will help. It didn’t. I made a few bad moves late in the game, sacrificing pieces for nothing. I saw them too late—too late to take

I don’t know why, but I had a feeling about this jury summons. The night before, I was already cranky about going. My husband even checked online, just in case it had been canceled at the last minute. No luck. I had to show up. So at 8 AM on Monday, I dragged myself to

Narrative Identity Grows with Your Kid It’s not just your kids bodies that change as they age—their minds and the stories they tell themselves about their lives evolve too. This concept, called narrative identity, is the personal story we all create to make sense of who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

The Foundation of Your Life Story is Shaken Our narrative identity is like a house built on a foundation. If you’ve believed one version of your story your whole life, finding out it’s not true, or incomplete, can feel like the foundation is cracked. When the foundation cracks, everything built on it becomes shifty and

November 9, 2024 Many adoptees find themselves “masking” throughout their lives. This concept, common in trauma-informed spaces, involves adapting behavior to blend in, minimize difference, and create a sense of safety. For adoptees, masking can often begin in early childhood and may even become an ingrained way of navigating the world. But why is masking