Story Work

Storytelling is a form of justice.

When voices are silenced, erased, or flattened into palatable narratives, harm lives on in the body and in the systems that surround us. When stories are honored in their fullness — with grief, complexity, beauty, contradiction, and survival — something begins to heal.

While my work has covered many different themes over the last 25 years including mental and women's health as well as the impacts of racism and segregation, I am currently placing my attention on storytelling and theatre that disrupts adoption mythology. My efforts center on uncovering the stories of birth mothers, adoptees, and adoptive families whose experiences have too often been oversimplified, misunderstood, and silenced. A particular part of my focus is on the complexity of transracial adoption and the lack of preparation, education, and support given to all members of the adoption constellation.

These narratives explore the realities that:

• Trauma that doesn’t disappear through "love"

• Identity is shaped by separation, loss, and a primal desire for belonging

• There is quiet grief, resilience, and courage inside adoptive families that often goes unseen

Birth mothers’ stories have also been buried under shame, silence, and cultural discomfort. Honoring these stories is an act of justice.

Our work centers voices that have been framed as disposable, irresponsible, or invisible — and instead holds them as complex, sacred, and essential. These stories are not oversimplified or sanitized. They are held with reverence, dignity, and care.

This work is held with deep care. Stories are shared with consent, integrity, and attention to safety, privacy, and dignity.

Current & Upcoming Projects

Brighid is currently developing a new documentary theatre piece that centers the lived realities of transracial adoptive families, shared motherhood, and relationships that cross distance, race, and structural inequity.

This project will be presented through the Fresh Produce Festival at Rivendell Theatre in Chicago on December 2, 2025, offering audiences an intimate, human view into the complexities of adoption through the experience of 1 family whose decision to embrace open adoption has led to unexpected, deep relationships and lingering questions. https://www.rivendelltheatre.org/freshproduce

Book Project

Brighid is also writing a book with Lived Places Press that centers the voices of real adoptive mothers whose lived experiences disrupt the dominant myths of adoption.

The book is designed to live in university libraries and professional training environments around the globe — helping prepare future clinicians, doctors, social workers, educators, hospital staff, and juvenile justice professionals to better understand and collaboratively respond to the realities of adoption, trauma, identity, and family systems.

It's A Long Way Home will be published in March 2026 and will be available both in undergraduate, graduate and Ph.D. programs as well as to adoption agencies, prospective parents, and professionals of all kinds.

Reach out to Brighid @ brighid@returntotheroots.org if you'd like to be informed when the book comes out and is available for purchase.

Why This Matters

Whose stories are believed?
Whose grief is allowed?
Whose complexity is tolerated?

Systems of power often reward silence, compliance, and simplification. Truth-telling becomes dangerous precisely because it exposes where harm lives — not only in individuals, but in structures, policies, and cultural myths.

Story work is about dignity.

It is about refusing to let people disappear inside narratives that were never built to hold them.

When stories are held with care, justice becomes possible.

Use the contact form to your right if you'd like to learn more or get involved.

Background on the Work

Return to the Roots Founder, Brighid O’Shaughnessy, has been collecting and sharing true stories through theater for the last 25 years and continues to do so.

The bulk of her work has been around issues of mental health through the non-profit she founded and led for over a decade, Erasing the Distance, which reached over 55,000 people nationwide, but she has also explored other topics related to the concept of home and belonging.

These include pieces like the Folded Map Project highlighting MacArthur Genius Award Winner Tonika Lewis Johnson, Flames, Flaws and Freedom which explored women's health, and Daddy's Girl a docu-drama based solo show with Penelope Walker for Lifeline's 2024 Fillet of Solo.

In June 2025, Brighid brought true stories from adoptees and adoptive mothers, performed by professional actors, to the Attachment and Trauma Network's Building Resilient Communities International Conference.

With renowned trauma expert Dr. Bruce Perry as the Keynote Speaker, the monologues were designed to provide insight into the nuanced and complex lived experiences of adoptees and adoptive parents and to offer participants a window into their often unspoken realities.

In August 2025, Brighid brought the true stories of birth mother, Nikki, and her son Paul to life for a Fundraising Event for the On Your Feet Foundation. On Your Feet Foundation is a nationally recognized non-profit organization that works diligently to support birth parents through support groups, therapy, case management services, birth mother led retreats and postpartum screening for depression, anxiety and other mood disorders.

The goal of the performance was to help attendees have a greater understanding of what can lead some birth mothers to choose adoption, the mental health challenges that adoptees can sometimes face, and what it is like to try and build a relationship with their biological child later in life.