Showing results by author "Emma Stevens" in All Categories

What if living a life true to yourself meant unraveling everything you were taught to believe? In this powerful continuation of her story, Emma Stevens returns to The Gathering Place and shares the hard-earned wisdom that comes from confronting loss, identity, and truth. As an adult adoptee raised to feel grateful rather than grieve, Emma was shaped by silence, expectation, and trauma. But deep within, resilient parts of her fought to be heard. Through raw and reflective storytelling, she explores what it takes to stop merely surviving and start living intentionally.

The story begins in the warm climes of New Zealand in the South Pacific when an online friendship between an American and a New Zealander blossoms into romance, and it concludes among the Eskimo in the wintry wilds of remote Alaska. For adventurous romantics and armchair travelers alike.

Adoptee Emma's birth mother took steps to remain anonymous. In order to put the pieces of her life back together, Emma embarks on multiple journeys and adventures towards both solving the mystery of who she is and healing from the pain of separation from her origins. It's a story of inner strength and perseverance where Emma welcomes all her parts of self to feel valued and seen. In a meditative and surreal state, under and around a big old oak tree with a simple wood-seated rope swing attached, she accepts the invitation of integrating herself in this stirring memoir.

When Emma Stevens learned her new next-door neighbor was a psychologist, she innocently asked about how to find a therapist for her own issues. Dr. Carol Brenner decided to accept her as a patient. Against a backdrop of the Laguna Beach fire, the insidious drama unfolds as Emma finds herself enmeshed in an unhealthy dependency on her therapist, who not only fostered this dependence but also used it to dominate and control her.