Choosing to Breathe with author Emma Stevens
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Choosing to Breathe with author Emma Stevens
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About this listen
In this episode, Emma Stevens joins Bernadine on ReThreading Madness to talk about what it means to choose life, truth, and selfhood after years of silence, fragmentation, and survival. An adult adoptee raised to feel gratitude rather than grief, Emma reflects on how early relinquishment, adoption, and unspoken trauma shaped her sense of identity and belonging. She speaks candidly about the long internal work of listening to the parts of herself that were forced to stay quiet, and the moment when merely surviving was no longer enough.
The conversation weaves through themes from Emma’s memoirs, including Choosing to Breathe and The Gathering Place, where she traces her search for truth about her origins and the slow, deliberate process of reuniting a fractured sense of self. Emma describes how identity can splinter when a child learns early that certain questions, emotions, or needs are unwelcome, and how reclaiming wholeness requires welcoming even the most wounded parts back into the story. Her reflections are raw, meditative, and grounded in lived experience rather than abstraction.
Emma also speaks about her earlier experience of exploitation within a therapeutic relationship, explored in A Fire Is Coming, and how earlier attachment wounds created vulnerability to professional harm. Rather than centering pathology, this episode focuses on agency. On learning to trust one’s own perception, on speaking truth to power, and on choosing to breathe fully into a life that is no longer shaped by secrecy or coercion. This is a conversation for anyone who has felt they were performing themselves for others, and who is ready to begin living from a place that is truly their own.
You can find Emma’s books on Amazon
Bernadine’s monologue 50 Years After I Fled can be downloaded at https://www.spreaker.com/episode/fifty-years-after-i-fled-rural-alberta-is-still-failing-to-protect-its-children--69044526
Music by Shari Ulrich, Omar Rudberg
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support.
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