Discovering Yourself After Adoption

Discovering Yourself After Adoption: How Faith, Identity & Nature Can Lead Us Home

What happens when everything you’ve believed about yourself begins to unravel?
For many adoptees, healing isn’t just about discovering where we came from, it’s about untangling the stories we’ve inherited, questioning long-held beliefs, and finding the courage to rebuild an identity that’s authentically our own.

In this deeply moving episode of Because She’s Adopted, Kristal Park sits down with fellow adoptee and dear friend Christy Gilvear, whose journey spans adoption, motherhood, religious deconstruction, sobriety, Indigenous identity, and profound personal healing.
Together, they explore how childhood experiences shape our nervous systems, why perfectionism often masks deeper wounds, and how reconnecting with nature, and ourselves, can become one of the greatest acts of healing.

Whether you’re an adoptee, navigating religious deconstruction, reconnecting with your cultural identity, or simply searching for a greater sense of belonging, this conversation offers hope, compassion, and a reminder that healing is never linear, but it is possible.

Meet Today’s Guest: Christy Gilvear

Christy Gilvear is a domestic infant adoptee, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, mother, plant educator, yoga teacher, and creator of The Rooted Petal.
Her work combines Indigenous wisdom, nervous system healing, mindfulness, and the restorative power of nature to help others reconnect with themselves. Through her upcoming podcast, Green Alchemy, and her growing online community, Christy encourages others to embrace healing, not by becoming someone new, but by remembering who they’ve always been.

Growing Up Adopted and Feeling Different

Christy shares that although she eventually learned she was adopted, the experience quietly shaped how she saw herself. Growing up as the oldest child, the only girl, and the only adoptee in her family, she often carried an invisible sense of being different. Alongside an ADHD diagnosis, repeated criticism throughout childhood reinforced feelings of inadequacy and shame.

Like many adoptees, she internalized questions that would follow her well into adulthood:

• Why do I feel different?
• Why don’t I seem to fit?
• What’s wrong with me?

Looking back now, Christy recognizes that many of these beliefs weren’t rooted in truth, they were survival stories created by a child trying to make sense of complex experiences.

How Brazil Changed Everything

One of the most transformative chapters of Christy’s life came when her family moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Far from the cultural expectations she’d grown up with in Utah, Brazil exposed her to diversity, different belief systems, and a broader understanding of humanity.
For the first time, she experienced what it felt like to simply belong.

Living within Brazil’s Afro-Indigenous culture awakened something she couldn’t yet explain—a deep sense of familiarity that resonated long before she discovered more about her Indigenous ancestry. It planted the first seeds of curiosity about who she truly was outside the identity she’d inherited.

When Faith Begins to Unravel

Growing up in a high-control religious environment, Christy believed wholeheartedly in the teachings she’d been raised with. Like many children, she accepted what she was taught without question. But adulthood, and motherhood, brought difficult questions.
As she encountered experiences that no longer aligned with what she’d always believed, she found herself slowly deconstructing the worldview that had once given her certainty.
Rather than feeling freedom, the process initially brought grief. She describes feeling angry, betrayed, confused, and untethered. Everything she thought she knew about herself, God, and belonging suddenly felt uncertain. For many listeners navigating religious deconstruction, Christy’s story offers a deeply compassionate reminder that questioning isn’t failure, it’s often the beginning of healing. 

Learning That Repair Matters More Than Perfection

One of the most powerful themes throughout this episode is parenting.
Both Kristal and Christy speak honestly about raising children while simultaneously healing their own childhood wounds.
Rather than striving for perfection, they discuss something far more important:
Repair.

Christy shares how therapy helped her understand that making mistakes as a parent isn’t what defines us. It’s what we choose to do afterward. Owning our mistakes. Apologizing. Repairing relationships. Teaching our children that conflict doesn’t end connection.
That realization became one of the greatest gifts in her healing journey, and one many parents will deeply relate to.

Healing Through Indigenous Wisdom and Nature

As Christy reconnected with her Indigenous heritage, she also found herself reconnecting with nature. What began as collecting a few houseplants soon became something much deeper. Caring for plants became meditation. Reflection. Prayer. Healing.

She describes nature as the mother she had always longed to know, a constant reminder that growth isn’t linear, storms have purpose, and every season serves a role.
This perspective fundamentally changed how she viewed herself.
Instead of seeing emotions as problems to fix, she learned to honor them as messengers.

What Does It Mean to “Compost Your Emotions”?

One of the most beautiful metaphors from this conversation is Christy’s idea of composting emotions. Just as compost transforms decaying organic matter into nutrient-rich soil, our painful experiences can become the foundation for future growth.
Rather than suppressing anger, grief, or fear, Christy learned to let those emotions exist, to allow them to break down naturally until they eventually nourished something new.
It’s a powerful reminder that healing isn’t about eliminating difficult emotions.
It’s about allowing them to transform us.

Finding the Courage to Trust Yourself

Throughout the episode, one message continues to emerge: Healing begins when we learn to trust ourselves. 

For adoptees especially, so much of life can be spent seeking external validation, trying to be enough, good enough, lovable enough. Christy’s story gently reminds us that our deepest wisdom often already lives within us. Sometimes the hardest part is learning to listen.