The Long Game: Navigating the Reunion Rollercoaster with Grace - with Elizabeth Barbour & Leslie Pate Mackinnon (Retreat Series #3)

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Elizabeth Barbour: Instagram, website
Leslie Pate Mackinnon: website

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Reunion is not an event. It's not the airport hug or the tearful montage. It's a whole web of relationships your nervous system has to learn how to live inside of - and nobody hands you a map for that.

Until now.

The accidental retreat series continues with Elizabeth Barbour and Leslie Pate Mackinnon, co-facilitators of The Long Game: Navigating the Reunion Rollercoaster with Grace - a weekend retreat happening November 6–8, 2026 at Quietude in Black Mountain, North Carolina, just outside Asheville.

Elizabeth is a reunited adoptee - 27 years in reunion with her birthmom, birthdad, and eleven (!) siblings - a reunion coach, speaker, and author currently writing her third book on building healthy relationships in adoption reunion. Leslie is a psychotherapist and birthmother with four decades in private practice, specializing in adoption and third-party reproduction, and a nationally known trainer of therapists and agencies. Between them: 50+ years of living in reunion.

In this conversation:

• Elizabeth's reunion story - searching for one mother and finding out she's the oldest of twelve
• Why "wounded healers" with lived experience are changing what adoption-competent therapy looks like
• Growing up without a "ghost kingdom" - and hiding inside other people's stories instead
• The both/and of reunion: loving your people AND grieving that you didn't get to grow up with them
• "We were all duped by adoption. There are no bad guys in the constellation."  Leslie on releasing the search for an enemy
• The rollercoaster map: the honeymoon phase, why it feels exactly like falling in love, and the depression and grief that so often follow
• Pacing: why Elizabeth, Leslie, and Julie all say slow down - and what going too fast can cost a reunion
• Reunion in the body: hypervigilance, dissociation, and Leslie's stunning account of reclaiming her body at 78
• The GRACE Methodology - Genesis, Reconnection (self, others, spirit), Authenticity, Communication, Evolution & Expansion
• What actually predicts whether a reunion lasts (hint: it's each person's commitment to their own work)
• Repair after rupture and secondary rejection: Leslie's letter to her son after ten years of silence - sending it with love, then detaching
• Who The Long Game is for: adoptees, birth/first parents, adoptive parents, partners, siblings, grandparents - and NPE/MPE and donor-conceived people reconnecting with genetic relatives
• What they hope you carry home in your body: felt community, the capacity to hold grief and gratitude side by side, and the knowledge that you are not alone

CONTENT NOTE: This episode includes discussion of relinquishment, secondary rejection and closed reunions, dissociation and trauma responses, genetic sexual attraction, and plant medicine as one adjunct healing path. Please listen with care and tend to your nervous system.

THE LONG GAME RETREAT
November 6–8, 2026 | Quietude, Black Mountain, NC (20 minutes east of Asheville)
Capped at 20 people. Includes the full program, three shared meals, and two bonus group coaching calls - one before and one after the weekend. Lodging and travel on your own.

If something came up for you in this episode, DM me on any of the socials or schedule a conversation with me. I'd love to hear where you are in your own long game.

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