In adoption, the "constellation" describes everyone touched by it: adoptees, birth and first families, and adoptive families. This show doesn't erase those perspectives, but it does center the one most often spoken about rather than spoken with — the adoptee's. Each episode moves between rigorous research and lived experience: what the data says, how adoption shows up across a lifespan, what clinicians get wrong, and what needs to change in policy and practice.

Expect conversations with researchers, clinicians, advocates, and adoptees about trauma and relinquishment, identity and reunion, the child welfare system, the adoption industry, and the work of building something more just. Whether you're an adoptee, a professional in the field, or part of the wider constellation, this is a space for hard questions, good science, and community — and for rewriting the narrative together.

About the hosts

Ashley M. Toland, DSW, LCSW is a clinical social worker, professor, and mental health advocate. She is also a same-race, domestic, infant adoptee. After reuniting with her birth family in 2018, she confronted how little professional support and research reflected her experience, which led her to Tulane University, where she earned her doctorate and developed The Adoption Trauma Spectrum, a lifespan activation framework for understanding how adoption trauma surfaces and resurfaces across an adoptee's life. Her work culminates in her ongoing study, Adoption Across the Lifespan (N=652), described as the largest single study of adult adoptees of its kind. This study is adoptee-led but not siloed, carried out with an IRB-approved team of adoptee and non-adoptee researchers and peer-reviewed publications. She brings two decades of experience across clinical social work, higher and public education, community mental health, child welfare, and clinical supervision, maintains a private practice, and serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Work at the University of West Florida.

Macy Oosthuizen, LCSW (pronounced Wist-Hay-Zen) is a clinical social worker and therapist, and she is an adoptee herself. Based in Port Saint Lucie, Florida, where she runs a virtual practice, Finding Spaces Therapy. She specializes in adoption, parenting, and family conflict, and works with clients navigating post-adoption issues, trauma, anxiety, grief, and the effects of emotionally immature parents, as well as high-performing individuals who feel stuck. Drawing on training in play therapy, CBT and a relational, strengths-based, mindfulness-informed approach, she's known as a "tools" therapist who sends clients out of each session with concrete strategies. An adjunct professor, she also regularly trains other clinicians in post-adoption therapeutic work, drawing on both her clinical expertise and her lived experience of growing up adopted.