Nothing About Us Without Us
The adoption story has been told about us for long enough. This is a documentary series that centers the people adoption most affects, but who are rarely asked to speak.
We challenge the traditional adoption narrative with honest, unscripted conversations that reflect the full complexity of the adoption experience.
Every episode centers a voice that the traditional adoption narrative has spoken over. We give that voice a stage, a camera, and the time it deserves.
Nothing About Us Without Us is not a slogan. It is the only promise this series makes.
About the Series
Adoption Narrative Shift is an 11-episode documentary series hosted by Dr. Abby Hasberry, LMFT, LCMFT, BCC. Each episode centers a different group within the adoption constellation in honest, intimate conversation.
Siblings. Partners. Children of adoptees. Grandparents. Professionals. Birth parents. The people estranged. The late-discovery adoptee and the DNA surprise. The people who never searched.
This is the conversation that has always needed to happen. We are putting it on camera.
"Nothing About Us Without Us is not a slogan. It is the only promise this series makes."
The Series Promise
The Episodes
Each episode gives an uninterrupted platform to a different group within the adoption constellation: people the system has spoken over, spoken for, or ignored entirely.
These are the people the narrative was built around but never built for.
In DevelopmentTheir stories begin before the relinquishment and continue long after.
In DevelopmentThis episode holds the complexity of love, entitlement, loss, and growth inside adoptive family systems.
In DevelopmentBiological siblings were separated. Adoptive siblings navigate difference. All of them navigate loyalty.
In DevelopmentThis episode explores what it means to love someone navigating an identity wound you did not share.
In DevelopmentThe adoption experience transmits across generations, even without the adoption.
In DevelopmentSome find out at 30. Others at 50. Others still at 70. Each faces an identity rupture that comes with a delayed truth.
In Development23andMe and ancestry kits have become a form of involuntary adoption disclosure. This episode examines the ethics and aftermath.
In DevelopmentInside the industry, this episode centers the practitioners willing to interrogate the system they work in.
In DevelopmentThis episode centers those who chose distance from adoptive families, birth families, or both, and asks why.
In DevelopmentThis episode explores the choice not to look: its reasons, its costs, and its validity.
In Development
Ph.D. · LMFT (TX, MI) · LCMFT (MD) · BCC
Dr. Abby Hasberry is a licensed marriage and family therapist, board certified coach, and the author of Adopting Privilege: A Memoir of Reinventing My Adoptee Narrative. She is also a transracial adoptee and a birth mother.
That combination is not incidental to this series. It is the series. Dr. Hasberry does not study this population from the outside. She has navigated the adoption system from the inside, twice, and has spent her clinical career sitting with those who have done the same.
She serves on the boards of Adoption Knowledge Affiliates and Adoption Mosaic and holds licensure as a therapist in Texas, Michigan, and Maryland.
