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Unraveling Me: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Kara Rubinstein-Deyerin & Alan Katz
Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.
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- 2 days ago50 min
S2E1 Unraveling Debbie
S2E1 Unraveling Debbie Season 2 of Unraveling Me asks: How do we move forward after unraveling? To begin that conversation, I’m joined by my friend Debbie. Adopted by her stepdad as a child, Debbie grew up knowing very little about her genetic father. Her mother later told her he had died. Years afterward, she took a DNA test hoping to connect with someone who could tell her something about him. What she learned changed everything.But discovering the truth was only the beginning. We talk about the work of building relationships, making room for grief alongside gratitude, and finding a way forward when some questions may never be answered. Debbie shares what helped her move from feeling like a visitor in her newly found family to feeling comfortable enough to simply show up in her sweats.We also explore how this experience changed her parenting, why being heard matters, and how supporting others became part of her own path forward. As Debbie steps into leading Right to Know, we reflect on the community that brought us together—and the importance of having people who understand.IN THIS EPISODEStep-parent adoption, family secrets, and belongingBuilding relationships beyond the first reunionHolding joy and grief at the same timeBreaking patterns through honest conversations with our childrenGiving yourself grace and finding supportLearn more about Right to Know, find support, or get involved at righttoknow.us. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- 1 weeks ago49 min
S1E52 Unraveling Unraveling Me
S1 E52 - Unraveling Alan & Kara In episode one, our producer, Alan Katz, turned the microphone toward me. Now, as we close our first season, it’s my turn to ask him the questions. Alan has been behind every conversation on Unraveling Me, bringing his curiosity, humor, and experience as a storyteller to the stories we share. His career includes Tales from the Crypt and The Outer Limits, but even he couldn’t invent some of the stories we’ve heard this season.In this conversation, we get to know the person behind the production. Alan shares how listening to our guests inspired him to explore his own ancestry—and opens up about a painful truth he carried for decades. His unraveling began differently from mine, but we find familiar ground in the weight of silence, the shame that was never ours to carry, and the work of learning to tell our own stories.SHOW NOTESTogether, we revisit some of the conversations that stayed with us and explore:What ancestry discoveries can add to our understanding of identity and belongingHow secrets shape our relationships, including the relationship we have with ourselvesLearning to offer compassion to the children we once wereWhy healing takes different paths and happens on different timelinesHow community and being heard can help us find a way forwardWe close this season grateful to every guest who trusted us with their story and every listener who made room for these conversations. As we look toward season two, we return to a question that runs through so many of them: Once we know the truth, how do we move forward?Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- 2 weeks ago1h 15m
S1E51 Unraveling Chris & Mary
S1 E51 - Unraveling Chris & Mary Chris grew up knowing he was adopted—and knowing his genetic family. His parents shared celebrations, built relationships with one another, and made room for everyone in his life. He calls it “integrated adoption.” But even with that openness and connection, Chris struggled with feeling slightly different everywhere he went. Recognizing the grief connected to his adoption brought a question he hadn’t known how to ask: “Is it okay that I feel this way?”His raising mother, Mary, answered without hesitation: “Of course it’s okay.”SHOW NOTESIn this conversation, Kara, Chris, and Mary discuss:Mary’s experience of infertility and how Chris became part of her familyBuilding an integrated family with the child’s needs at the centerHolding the joy of becoming a parent alongside another parent’s griefGenetic mirroring and understanding where traits, interests, and mannerisms come fromWhy access to genetic family medical history mattersNavigating ADHD, anxiety, and trauma with support and without shameRecognizing adoption grief without feeling disloyal to the parents who raised youFinding belonging in the adoptee community and bringing multiple families togetherChris and Mary make space for both love and loss and everyone in Chris’s family. Their conversation shows how openness can support an adoptee while still leaving room to acknowledge adoption’s lasting impact. And why being able to speak honestly about those feelings matters.Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- 3 weeks ago1h 5m
S1E50 Unraveling Corey & Kendall
S1 E50 - Unraveling Corey & Kendall Kendall always knew he was adopted. His parents welcomed his questions, and when his adoptive mother died, his father showed him the name he’d been given at birth. Kendall was ten. He searched through phone books, library records, and adoption registries, and petitioned the court three times for his sealed records. Years of dead ends left him believing he might never find his genetic family.Then his husband, Corey, gave him an Ancestry DNA test. Kendall’s closest match was a brother who had been searching for him, too. That connection led to six siblings and two very different experiences of reunion: a warm welcome from one side and something much more complicated with the other.SHOW NOTESIn this conversation, Kara, Corey, and Kendall discuss:Growing up with adoptive parents who supported Kendall’s curiositySearching for family before DNA testing made close matches possibleThe phone call that introduced Kendall to his brother ChrisFinding connection with siblings while respecting the relationships each person is ready to haveHow Corey supported Kendall through the search and reunionWhy they created Family Twist and the community they found through sharing storiesKendall and Corey speak candidly about joy, rejection, lost time, and the family they have built together. Their story holds room for all of it. Corey serves on Right to Know’s board. For more from Corey and Kendall, listen to their podcast Family Twist. Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Oct 8, 202645 min
S1E49 Unraveling Stephanie
S1 E49 - Unraveling Stephanie Stephanie’s story is about what happens when a lifelong search for roots finally begins. It is also a reminder that success does not always mean finding every answer. Sometimes it means discovering where you come from, building relationships along the way, and finding the courage to keep searching. Stephanie was adopted at three years old from a Mother Teresa orphanage in India and raised in a white Catholic family on Long Island. She always knew she was adopted, but for most of her life, she gave little thought to the identity, culture, and history she had lost.That changed when her husband gave her a DNA test. Stephanie’s limited paperwork said she was born in Patna in northern India, but her DNA matches pointed toward Kerala and the Malayali community in southern India. She also learned that the birthday she had celebrated for nearly 50 years was not her actual birthday. Suddenly, even the most basic facts she thought she knew about herself were uncertain.SHOW NOTESIn this conversation, Kara and Stephanie talk about:Growing up as the only Indian person in nearly every room, including her own homeSearching for other Indian adoptees and finding community through conferencesDiscovering that her adoption paperwork and DNA tell different storiesConnecting with genetic relatives without yet knowing how they all fit togetherReturning to the orphanage where she lived and confronting the life she might have hadThe pressure adoptees face to feel gratefulWhy love does not erase an adoptee’s need for identity, history, and genetic connectionEveryone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Oct 1, 20261h 9m
S1E48 Unraveling Thomas J
S1 E48 Unraveling Tom J Tom Junod has spent much of his career investigating other people’s lives. His profile of Fred Rogers inspired the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and his essay The Falling Man became one of the most recognized pieces of writing about 9/11. But in his memoir, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, Tom turns that investigative lens on his own family. Tom grew up loving and fearing his father, Big Lou: a charismatic, stylish, larger-than-life man who treated masculinity as something to be performed. From a young age, Tom sensed that things in his family were not quite what they seemed. When he finally began investigating his father’s past, one revelation led to another: hidden relationships, misattributed parentage, unknown relatives, and a family history that looked nothing like the one he had inherited.SHOW NOTESIn this conversation, Kara and Tom discuss:Loving and fearing a larger-than-life father—and struggling with whether to become like him or reject his exampleHow Big Lou’s ideas about sex, appearance, and masculinity shaped Tom’s childhoodFinding a path toward his own identity through writingWatching the family history he had always accepted as fact unravel one discovery at a timeWhat DNA revealed about misattributed parentage across multiple generationsHis father’s refusal to acknowledge an unknown sister—and Tom’s determination to find his ownRecognizing something familiar in his half-sister Lizzie before DNA confirmed the connection Navigating gatekeeping, uncertainty, and the decision to make contactWhy a difficult truth can sometimes bring reliefBringing Big Lou’s descendants together at a family reunionHow uncovering the truth can become an act of assembly rather than destructionTom’s story is about fathers and sons, inherited definitions of manhood, and the secrets that shape families long after the people who created them are gone. It is also about what can happen when someone refuses to leave the truth buried—and discovers that unraveling an old family story can create space to build something more honest, connected, and whole.Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Sep 24, 20261h 15m
S1E47 Unraveling MP
S1E47 Unraveling MP MP grew up feeling like the odd person out. He looked different from his brothers, struggled to connect with the man he believed was his father, and was repeatedly reminded that his interests, personality, and appearance did not fit the rest of his family. At 13, he unexpectedly learned that his parents had married after he was born. That first crack in the family story left him wondering what else he had not been told. MP did an ancestry test to explore the Pennsylvania German ancestry he had grown up hearing about and matched with a man he’d never heard of as his father. When he brought the truth to his maternal family, he was met with denial, dismissal, and demands that he remain silent to protect his mother. Refusing to carry someone else’s secret cost him nearly every remaining family relationship. But it also allowed him to stop questioning himself, set boundaries, and begin building a life and identity of his own choosing.SHOW NOTESIn this conversation, Kara and MP talk about:Growing up without genetic mirroring and being treated as the family oddballTurning to religion in search of identity, family, and belongingReceiving an unexpected father match and hearing his own voice reflected for the first timeRevisiting childhood memories after realizing how much of the family story was untrueBeing pressured to keep the discovery secret to protect his motherLosing family relationships after choosing truth and setting boundariesAttempting to build a relationship with his genetic fatherLearning to trust his instincts and take his physical and mental health seriouslyChanging his last name and creating a family crest of his ownFinding belonging through chosen family, creativity, and the interests he once felt pressured to hideMP’s story is about what becomes possible when you finally release the shame that never belonged to you. By choosing his own name, creating his own symbols of family, and imagining a different future, MP shows that belonging does not always come from the people who raised us or the people whose DNA we share. Sometimes, we have to build it for ourselves.Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Sep 18, 202648 min
S1E46 Unraveling Sheridan
S1 E46 – Unraveling Sheridan By 40, Sheridan believed she had already done the difficult work of understanding her childhood. The man named as her father on her birth certificate died by suicide when she was six, leaving her to grow up beneath the weight of grief, religious shame, unanswered questions, and the childhood belief that perhaps she had not been enough to make him stay. In her late 30s, Sheridan began confronting how that loss had shaped her. She recognized the connection between fatherlessness, fear of abandonment, and an identity built around being helpful, funny, charming, and indispensable. With the support of her husband, she worked through much of that grief and entered her 40th year feeling grounded. Then she took a DNA test. It was supposed to confirm her Dutch ancestry before a family trip to the Netherlands. Instead, Sheridan matched directly with a man identified as her father—a man who was very much alive.Content note: This episode includes a discussion of suicide.SHOW NOTESIn this conversation, Kara and Sheridan discuss:Growing up after a father’s death by suicide and carrying the religious stigma surrounding itThe fears children internalize when they believe they might have prevented a parent from leavingWorrying that mental illness or suicide might be part of your own genetic inheritanceHow loss and instability contributed to people-pleasing, overfunctioning, and the need to be indispensableThe lasting impact of fatherlessness and the harm hidden inside jokes about “daddy issues”Loving and appreciating her mother while still making room for grief, anger, and unanswered questionsSheridan’s “psychology of and”—the ability to hold seemingly conflicting truths at the same timeThe surreal moment she realized the father she believed was dead was not her genetic fatherTrying to process an impossible result while her mother insisted the test must be wrongSheridan brings both lived experience and the insight of a therapist to a conversation about grief, worthiness, abandonment, and the stories children create to explain what adults will not tell them. Her story shows that healing is not erased when new information arrives, but it may need to expand to hold a truth we never imagined.Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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About Unraveling Me
Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.
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