Bridging Resilience A Guide to Healing for Adoptees and Former Foster Youth, Families, and the Leaders Who Walk with Them

by McMillan, Mary Ann

• ISBN13: 9798384522034
• ISBN10: 8384522030
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2026-07-21
• Publisher: B&H Books
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Summary

What if the healing we long for isn’t found in returning to the past, but in learning how to carry it forward with wisdom, faith, and honesty?

Bridging Resilience: A Guide to Healing for Adoptees and Former Foster Youth, Families, and the Leaders Who Walk with Them is a compassionate, spiritually rooted guide for adoptees and former foster youth, and for the parents, caregivers, and leaders who walk alongside them. Written by a former foster child and adoptee, this book blends lived experience, therapeutic insight, and biblical reflection to explore the lifelong impact of early separation, identity disruption, and attachment trauma.

With grace and courage, Bridging Resilience speaks to the complex realities of adoption and foster care. It offers language for grief, tools for healing, and vision for what redemption can look like across generations and systems.

The book is organized into three sections:

• Between Bridges and Ruins: Healing for Adoptees and Former Foster Youth, which speaks directly to adoptees and those who have aged out of foster care. It gives voice to the invisible wounds of identity loss, gratitude pressures, and fragmented family ties. This section gently affirms the complexity of adoptee grief while offering both faith and therapy as healing companions.
• Sacred Privilege: A Call to Parents and Guardians, which is written for adoptive, foster, and kinship caregivers. It invites parents and guardians to approach their role as sacred stewardship—not saviorhood—rooted in humility, cultural awareness, and lifelong commitment. It addresses trauma responses, identity development, and what it means to stay when love feels inadequate.
• Reimagining Care: Systems, Churches, and Global Orphan Work, which challenges churches, systems, and global orphan advocates to move beyond shallow charity and toward justice. It critiques harmful language, confronts savior narratives, and calls for listening to lived experience. This section offers a new vision—one where care is ethical, informed, and shaped by proximity.

 

Whether you're walking through your own healing, raising a child from hard beginnings, or shaping systems that serve them, Bridging Resilience is an invitation to step into the hard and holy work of healing. To listen closely. To love better. And to believe that even in broken beginnings, there is still room for restoration. Healing is possible. Connection is possible. And together, we can bridge the gap.
 

Author Biography

Mary Ann McMilllan is a former foster youth and adoptee whose life has been shaped by the realities of family separation, identity rupture, and the lifelong search for belonging. Now a professor, researcher, and global advocate, she writes and teaches at the intersection of trauma, justice, and healing. She holds a doctorate in education and teaches courses in human rights, criminal justice, and international relations. Her academic work focuses on vulnerable children, both in the U.S. and globally, including time spent in Rwanda researching family systems, orphan care, and post-conflict restoration.

A follower of Christ, Mary Ann is passionate about integrating spiritual formation with therapeutic insight. She speaks regularly to churches, universities, and conferences, offering honest, theologically rooted conversations around adoption, foster care, orphan care reform, and human rights. Through her work, Mary Ann invites readers to listen to those who’ve lived through the system, to parent with sacred responsibility, and to believe in a kind of healing that holds both truth and grace.