"You Don't Owe Them Your Loyalty": Brielle Wilson on Foster Care, Religious Trauma, and Reclaiming Her Story

adoptee adoptee experience adoptee healing adoption trauma brielle wilson emotional journey Jul 30, 2026

A note on content: this episode includes direct discussion of childhood sexual exploitation/grooming, teen pregnancy, foster care system failures, and religious trauma. Please take care while listening, and feel free to pause or come back to this one when it feels right for you.

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In this episode, I sit down with Brielle Wilson - an adoptee, teen mother, wife, and mother of eight who is currently pursuing her MFT licensure after completing her degree. Brielle's story touches nearly every part of the adoption constellation: kinship care, foster care, gaslighting, religious trauma, and what it looks like to be a teenager navigating systems that were supposed to protect her and didn't. She's already published two books, with more resources on the way, and she's building a future where she gets to be the therapist she wishes she'd had.

This conversation covers a lot of ground, and Brielle shares it with a level of honesty that I think will land in your body before it lands anywhere else.

In this episode, we talk about:

Being raised by her maternal grandparents from infancy after both biological parents struggled with addiction, and what "home" did and didn't feel like growing up
Becoming pregnant at 13 after being groomed online by a predator, and the pressure she faced from Bethany Christian Services and her guardians to relinquish her daughter
Her determination to parent despite having no model for what healthy parenting looked like
Being placed in an emergency shelter while pregnant, and commuting to high school with her belongings in a garbage bag
A foster placement that started out supportive and became restrictive - including a foster family later found to be exaggerating her behavior for additional stipend money.
Her eventual adoption alongside a sibling set, and how adoption legally severed relationships with siblings she still saw walking past her house every day.
Carrying her adoptive mother's unresolved adoption trauma, being treated as a caretaker in the home, and having her worth tied to productivity.
Therapists appointed by her adoptive family who reported information back to them - and what that did to her ability to trust anyone meant to help her.
The role religion played in both pressuring her toward adoption and, later, in the surveillance and performance she felt inside her adoptive family's church community.
Marrying her husband and leaving her adoptive home at 18 - and the slow, honest work of realizing how entangled she still was in that family system even after she left.
Why she chose to pursue an MFT, and what it means to become the clinician she needed as a teenager.
How she's parenting her own eight kids with transparency instead of silence.
Her belief - and the research behind it - that adoption trauma exists in every adoption scenario, even the "good" ones, and why two things (grief and gratitude) can be true at the same time.
Her two books: Writing Over the Lines and Consumed, and what led her to write each one.