Becoming Bridge Builders is back with a captivating discussion that dives deep into the complexities of foster care and trauma recovery, featuring the incredible Jeanette Yoffe. As an adoptee who spent six years in foster care, Jeanette brings a wealth of personal experience and professional expertise to the table. This episode spans a range of topics, from the nuances of attachment theory to practical interventions for trauma-informed care, including her upcoming book, the Traumatized and At Risk Youth Toolbox. Listeners will gain insights into the critical role that understanding and empathy play in the lives of foster youth, as Jeanette passionately articulates the importance of recognizing their behaviors not as defiance, but as protective mechanisms borne from deep-seated trauma. Her anecdotes provide poignant examples of how a supportive environment can foster healing, and she emphasizes the need for professionals to approach these children with patience and an open heart. Moreover, Jeanette’s unique perspective as a therapist and performer highlights the transformative power of storytelling in trauma recovery, making this episode not only informative but also deeply moving.

In this episode, we’re not just skimming the surface; we’re diving headfirst into the emotional waters of foster care and trauma recovery. Jeanette Yoffe’s insights challenge common misconceptions surrounding foster youth, highlighting the dire need for empathy and understanding. She shares her journey of turning personal pain into purpose, emphasizing that healing isn’t a linear process but rather a lifelong journey that requires ongoing support and understanding. The conversation unfolds with an exploration of her practical tools, such as the self-forgiveness pool and the distress hill, designed to help young people articulate their feelings and reclaim their sense of agency. Jeanette's advocacy for open adoptions and the importance of birth family connections resonates throughout the dialogue, providing a fresh lens through which to view the foster care system. Her warmth and wisdom shine through as she invites listeners to consider the broader implications of trauma-informed care, making this episode a must-listen for anyone involved with youth in vulnerable situations.

Takeaways:

1. The podcast emphasizes the importance of fostering empathy and understanding towards foster youth, highlighting that their behaviors often stem from deep-seated trauma rather than mere defiance.
2. Jeanette Yoffe shares her personal journey from foster child to therapist, showcasing how one can transform pain into purpose through advocacy and creativity.
3. One of the key takeaways is the need for therapeutic caregivers to create safe environments, as safety is paramount before any meaningful therapeutic work can begin with trauma-affected youth.
4. The episode discusses the misconception that adoption resolves all issues, stressing that healing is a continuous journey that requires ongoing support and understanding from caregivers and social workers.
5. Jeanette's insights reveal how storytelling is a powerful tool for healing, allowing trauma survivors to reclaim their narratives and foster connections with others who share similar experiences.
6. The discussion highlights innovative therapeutic tools, such as the 'anger bag' and 'grief mailbox,' designed to help children express and process complex emotions constructively.

Links mentioned in the episode:

1. https://www.jeanetteyoffe.com/
2. https://a.co/d/09GP0XM
3. https://www.becomingbridgebuilders.org/podcast

Mentioned in this episode:

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Welcome to Becoming Bridge Builders, the podcast where we highlight voices that are connecting communities, transforming lives, and creating pathways to healing and hope. I am your host, Keith Haney. Today's guest is someone whose life and work is a testament to the power of resilience, advocacy and healing.

Jeanette Yoff is a psychotherapist specializing in adoption and foster care, and she brings both professional and expertise to professional personal experience to her work as an adoptee who spent six years in foster care. Jeanette has spent over two decades helping children, teens and adults navigate the complex terrain of trauma, loss, and disrupted attachment.

She is the founder of Cecilia Center, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the foster adoption constellation and the clinical director of Yoff Third Therapy in Los Angeles. Jeanette is an author, speaker and performer. Her one woman show, what's yous Name? Who's yous Daddy? Is available on Amazon and Audible.

Today we're gonna dive into her upcoming book, the Traumatized and At Risk Youth Toolbox, a powerful resource for offering over 160 interventions designed to support foster youth. We'll explore her advocacy, her creative work, and her mission to bring healing to those who need it most. Jeanette, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Keith, for having me. So blessed to be here. Thank you.

So good to have you. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

I've done a couple topics on foster care, so I'm sure you will add more depth to that very important topic that most people really don't know a whole lot about. So I'm looking forward to this conversation.

That's right. Thank you for bringing awareness because we're an invisible population, an underserved population. So thank you.

Yes, yes. I've approached this topic from people who've been into foster care, like yourself, to people who are helping advocate for children.

Education, part of it. So it's nice to add your voice to this important topic.

Thank you. Thank you.

I'm going to ask you my favorite question. What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

Well, when I first started doing this work, I was a foster care social worker and my supervisor said to me, you have so much to offer. And that to me was, wow, I actually can turn my pain into purpose. Like, I can. I can do something about this.

Because when you're a child raised in trauma, you feel helpless, hopeless and powerless. You don't feel that you can do anything about it.

But when you become an adult, you realize, wow, I can do something and spring off of what happened to me and turn that pain into purpose.

So that has truly been my mission now, creating spaces and books and anything I can to transform this experience into something understandable, manageable and helpful for families to understand. And professionals working in the field that is so critical.

So I'm curious because everybody has a different experience in life and they bring something unique to the table because of their experience. So what has your own experience and foster care, how has that helped you and, and led you into becoming a therapist?

Well, so my family, we adopted two other children. So I had like education growing up. My sister went into therapy. I went into therapy when I was 13 because I almost ended my life.

And that was an impetus for me to start my healing process. And by being in a therapy room from the age of 13 until 21, I was many, many years in therapy. That really helped me understand. Wow.

I know a lot about this topic. I know I've done my work on myself. Now I want to help bridge that and heal and help others. Because I took the shame out of being in therapy.

I didn't see it as something shameful. I saw it as something helpful. And it served me and my life and it helped me actually build more confidence, self esteem. And I learned how to grieve.

I truly learned how to grieve. And when I was able to do that for myself, and then I started volunteering with children who were adopted and in foster care. I felt this calling.

I felt compelled. Well, well, I can be that role model for this child.

And it was one instance when this little girl came running up to me and was asking me out of almost desperation, are you adopted? Are you adopted too?

And I just got on her level and it was this moment of just her connecting with me and me connecting with her and reassuring her that she's going to be okay. Because, yes, I'm okay. You're going to be okay, and I'm going to be here and help you through this experience.

And that became really my calling at that moment. Wow, I can really do this. And it was right after I wrote my one woman play. So I had done a lot of my own work. I wanted to be an actress.

And then I realized, you know what? I want to be of service.

I want to work with children and families here in Los Angeles because there was such a demand for people who come from the experience. And I felt strong enough that I could do it because it's not easy to share your story and be vulnerable.

And I think my acting background just gave me this confidence and also my healing of being in therapy for so many years. And really understanding my process so that I can be there for other people's experience.

That's so powerful. Yeah.

I always like to ask people who have gone through these kind of experiences, for those of us who don't understand the foster care system, what's the biggest misconception that so many of us are probably living under?

Well, foster youth have a lot of big behaviors. Okay. A lot of big behaviors. And one of my phrases is what's hysterical is historical.

So the misconception is, oh, they're acting out because they want attention. There's negative assumptions of their behavior. They're, you know, they're not going to do well in life because they're ungrateful or difficult.

But really what we're looking at is their defiance is protection. They've been through so much and especially attachment trauma, attachment loss.

So their behavior is a communication of the trauma, their loss and their shame. It's so hard for these kids to be vulnerable. And another piece is once we're adopted, it's not like everything is fixed.

We're not now blessed and we can get over it. We're continuously moving through it. And it's a lifelong process.

I'm still dealing with the grief and loss of my own birth father who won't have reunion with me. I'm still grieving that my own birth family doesn't want to embrace me for who I am, regardless of what happened to us.

So there's a lot of healing that still needs to happen. So we're hurting. This is a lifelong process. We still need a lot of empathy. We're still dealing with wanting and being able to receive. Receive love.

It's not that we don't want love.

We can push away love because we're afraid to trust again because of that loss of our birth families and even multiple foster homes we've been in, we form attachments to. So we do a push pull in relationship, but it's out of fear and protection. So please understand that. And I'll.

I can go a little bit deeper on how to approach what's the best approach from helping heal and help a foster youth begin to trust and love again.

So let's talk.

Let's dig into that because I'm curious about that, because when I did the last episode about foster care, we focus on the educational piece of it, of when a foster child has moved from one home to another, how they're ripped out of a school system and sometimes pop into another one. Not realizing that, you know, if we were being pushed and pulled that way as adults, we wouldn't handle it well.

So you talk about the trauma, but let's dig deeper into what you just kind of touched on.

Yeah. So what happens in this field is people also get dysregulated. Working with a youth who's overwhelmed, resistant, defiant.

We need to work on our nervous systems first. We need to understand that they're not doing this to us. They're doing this because they're having an experience within themselves of protection.

It's not about you, don't take it personally. And another phrase, it's not a rejection of you, it's a reflection of them.

So the first piece is we need to be educated and then regulate our own nervous systems because safety is felt before it's spoken. So a lot of the work that I do is teaching therapists, social workers, parents, to be aware of your nonverbal communication.

Because even a slight look like this can set off that they're about to be abused or hurt or criticized or judged. So we want to be open and always stay curious. Curious with what they're feeling, what they're thinking. Curious. I see.

And also naming what you're seeing. I see. You're really scared right now. So the non verbal communication, we need to be aware of our tone of voice. Think of it like a stray cat.

We wouldn't go towards a stray cat and start trying to teach them how to trust. And there's a Japanese proverb that says, when someone's sinking, that's not the time to teach them how to swim.

And so what we tend to do with trauma behavior, this hysterical behavior, is try to fix it, make it go away, stop it. But we, what we resist persists, and guess what, it gets bigger.

So we need to learn how to be comfortable with the discomfort that these children are projecting onto us. And part of our job is to hold it, contain it, and it's a muscle.

And as you can see, it takes a lot of self strength, restraint, self management, being that secure root for that child. And so tone of voice is really important. Your facial expressions, your posture, how you're holding your body. A lot of people will cross their arms.

That can feel threatening to a child, Right. If you're not open, they're not going to be open. Tone of voice, gestures and timing and intensity of your response, how fast or slow you're moving.

So slow things down. Because for these kids, their inner world is chaotic. So we want to be a source of comfort, not a further source of distress.

So you see, I'm very aware of my Non verbal communication, how I'm talking to them and also being playful. A lot of these kids, they've been living in survival mode. They don't know how to take the edge off. They're very defensive.

So we want to be, create, create creative opportunities for them like art movement. I'll have a lot of kids just squeeze a big squeezy. I have, I'm in my office right now.

Hugging a big stuffed animal can just give them some sensory comfort. They can't just sit there and listen. They need to be moving their bodies, moving through what they're feeling in their bodies.

In a safe environment with someone who is trauma informed and aware of these seven non verbal cues, aware of your tone of voice being a source of comfort and working on your own nervous system. So that a basis of approach and there's so many more things that I.

Teach that's very helpful. Yeah.

Yes.

Let's talk about what motivates you to write your book, the traumatized and at Risk Use Toolbox. Because I looked at it, it's a lot of good resources. Tell us about that.

Thank you. So in. When I first became a therapist, I was looking at all the resources out there that I needed to do this work.

And I couldn't find, I couldn't find it. I was searching, when I have this child in the room, what do I do? What do I do?

And I know if I felt this way, how many other therapists and social workers felt this way. And then I started training county social workers here in trauma informed practices. I started training therapists.

And so I started with the kids that I was working with. I started to create fine tuned approaches like the anger bag.

Because I would have kids who were very angry that they needed containment, they needed a space and a place to put the feelings, hold the feelings and help them process the feelings. So the anger bag, I. This one child kept hitting his head against the wall, he was so angry. So that's a big hysterical behavior. Right.

No one's listening to me. He was screaming and yelling and everybody was trying to make that go away. And I said we need to go into the anger.

So we're going to have a bag filled with anger coping skills for the child to rip paper, rip out these big feelings that they're externalize. Then when I created the anger bag and I saw that that was helping this one child, I said I think I'm onto something.

Then I created the sad bag because there's that layer also. There's anger, there's sadness, there's deep pain and grief and loss. And for me, I learned how to grieve.

And I said, well, it's time for me to pass that baton onto other children who are grieving and give them the permission. So then became the sad bag. Then out of that became the grief mailbox for kids to write letters, unsent letters to their long lost loved ones.

Like, I longed for my birth mother. I didn't know where she was, why she couldn't parent me. I needed a grief mailbox to write her letters on my.

I needed to write me a birthday card on my birthday from her. So it served as a container again for that grief.

Grief and that exchange of communication that we don't get, it's abruptly stopped and ended and we're told to get over it, and we can't.

Our birth families, no matter what happened, kids who've been traumatized, the surprising fact is a lot of them want to go back even if they were hurt because it's their birth family. And so sometimes.

So a lot of the future work is helping more families with their mental health challenges and not just taking them out of that situation, but that's, you know, the future of foster care. And so another intervention in my book that was very important for me was the self forgiveness pool.

Because a lot of kids who've been traumatized believe it's their fault. And I needed to bridge that compassion for myself. It was not my fault that my birth parents could not parent me on my birthday.

There were no kids that they could parent. It wasn't about me. So the self forgiveness pool gives kids an opportunity to point out their strengths. They write their strengths on a rock.

It goes in the pool of water. And then they write how they want to forgive themselves, themselves in for what? On dissolving rice paper. And they put it in the water.

They say it out loud, put it in the water, and they're left with their strengths. And that's truly, we have so many strengths.

So this book really teaches kids how to cope, how to feel safe in their bodies, how to understand what trauma is and how it's impacting their brain and their body for children. Right? I'm helping kids understand the five ways that we cope. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn and flop. Like, I wish I understood this when I was a kid.

No one explained the psychoeducation piece of why am I always on edge? Was my body's way of protecting myself. I get it now. It actually gives us a sense of relief.

So there's psycho education, there's Helping kids make sense of their losses and helping them rebuild their resilience, confidence and self esteem.

So you have 18 chapters in this book. I'm curious, based on your experience, which chapter was the most difficult for you to write?

That's a great question. That's a great question. I think, I think it might be, I don't know, I feel like they're all equally like I really spent a lot of time.

I think it's creating safety in the body. I think creating safety in the body because that's something I've had to learn as an adult. And we don't talk about that a lot in trauma.

We're trying to get them to get over the feeling or work through the feeling. But it really the. The root of trauma is helping us feel safe in our bodies.

So that did take some time for me to really develop tools and put them into practice that I could see had impact. And the basis of mental health is about finding release in the body. That's the goal of mental health. Finding a sense of relief.

So it would be the first chapter actually creating safe.

You had to do a lot of research to put this book together. In doing your research.

I know when I did my book there was always that moment or these moments of research that I came across that were like, whoa, that was something I did not expect. What aha moments did your research produce for you that that made you think differently about certain things?

Actually, Daniel Hughes, he's a leader in the world of attachment and attachment theory. His chapter on shame in Attached in Attachment Focused family Therapy. I just blew me away.

I didn't realize how much shame there was in trauma and how we store it in the body. And it really helped me understand why it's so hard for people to heal. It's the shame of sharing what happened to you. It's so.

It feels so shameful to say that you couldn't live with your birth parents because we blame ourselves. So understanding shame. And one of my interventions is the shame witch. The shame witch. It's helping us separate our.

Who we are from what happened to us. Taking the blame off of us and putting it on the situation. And it's called having objectivity.

Looking at it from the outside and bringing it outside because it's not who you are. And who you are is so much greater than what happened to you. But we need to be able to differentiate that.

And once I was able to do that, I felt a sense of relief in my body and my mind. I didn't have this self blaming and shaming and there's something wrong with me.

No, this is about what's happened to me and my reaction to this experience. So shame. Understanding shame truly opened and expanded my thinking about trauma. And I talk a lot about shame and I teach everyone the shame witch.

And it can work for anyone. Not even if you've not experienced trauma, there may be something small that you feel ashamed about.

Again, you can separate it out, and that's how you have objectivity, gain awareness, and can change.

I really found your chart on the distress hill fascinating because we're living in a culture where so many people are dealing with stress.

Kind of walk us through the exercise a little bit and tell us how you would use this tool of the distress hill to deal with the stress we deal with every day.

Yes. So it's measuring. So in psychotherapy and mental health, it's.

The big question is how do you measure the intensity, frequency and duration of behavior? Right. Because it feels, it's emotional. It feels overwhelming. There's no structure to feelings. Feelings have no structure. So.

And how we name it is how we tame it. And once we can recognize. And there's. There's a term called the thermostat. Like I'll tell parents, you're the thermostat, right.

If your level of distress is at a 10, guess what you're going to be the thermostat. Your child's level of distress is going to be at a 10. So it's actually a subjective unit of distress. It's called suds.

And they use this in trauma to help clients. Patients recognized their levels of distress. And so I called it the distress hill because it is. It builds. Stress builds.

We can go from zero to 30 in three seconds where we're already flipped our lid. Cortisol is flooding our systems. But if we can catch ourselves and go, hold on, what level of distress am I at? So there's four levels.

There's I am at a mild level of distress, moderate, severe, and higher level. The highest level of distress. So there's 0 to 3, 3 to 3 to 5, 6 to 8, and then 8 to 10. So they're cards, they're visual cards.

Because when we're stressed, we do rely on non verbal signals. Visuals are very helpful. So there are different cards.

And so I'm checking in with children as we're doing, as we're processing, as we're doing an intervention. Show me, tell me what level of distress are you experiencing right now. That helps me indicate.

Either we stay here because it's causing them more distress or we continue. Right. So it helps gauge the intensity, frequency and duration of their stressors. Now, I'm a big fan of Bruce Perry. He says stress is a part of life.

And we want to help kids understand that there's positive stress, tolerable stress, and toxic stress. So we want to help kids recognize that some distress is actually okay. It's how we grow, it's how we learn.

It's how we move through challenging things and build our confidence and abilities to manage difficult situations. Adversity is a part of life. So we want to embrace stress, name it, to tame it.

So the distress cards are printable, and you can use them with any child that you're working with to gauge and give them what's called agency, a sense of self control. And that's what we also want when we're dealing with trauma, is help people regain a sense of agency.

So thank you for asking because that's a very important piece about creating safety in the body.

Oh, my pleasure. So you have this wonderful tool. How do you hope it's used by therapists, caregivers, and educators? Because you.

It's a tool that I can see being used by the person going through it, but also the person that's working with kids or anyone else who's dealing with some of the issues that you identify in the book.

Yes. So I really want therapists, social workers, and any trusted individual. There's mentors who work with youth, parents.

We want to teach parents to be therapeutic caregivers. I really want them to utilize this book. And you. You need to go through each phase. There's five phases. The first phase is creating safety in the body.

That needs to be mastered before you go on to the next phase of building coping skills. Children need to feel safe. Then we can go to building coping skills. Then we can go to trauma psychoeducation.

Then we can go to processing their grief and loss. Because we're going to open up this. We're going to go in there and open this up.

And they need to feel safe enough in order to do so, so we don't retraumatize them.

And then building those skill sets, working through their guilt, their stressors, their losses, and then regaining a sense of control, building their resiliency, feeling good about themselves, and then following through with building healthy attachments. The last chapter are many interventions for parents to do with kids to build trust in the relationship, security and stability. So it's.

I really poured my heart and soul into this book. Again, I've Pulled from my life, I've pulled from the 20 years of doing this work with kids to really trust. These interventions work.

They're applicable, they're easy to do. I go through each step by step. You can master it, do it for yourself first before you do it with a child so you really understand how to do it.

You're not doing it on the fly. You want to know and be confident within yourself in applying these interventions.

And I'll tell you, a lot of these interventions are not only for kids and teenagers. You can utilize them as you're reading them and go, you know what? I needed this intervention.

So when I finished this book, I thought, listen, a lot of these interventions help me develop into a self actualized person. And I still use some of these interventions, like tapping in a peaceful place. We all need that, especially in today's world.

It's, you know, we're not feeling safe.

We need to work on and have a daily discipline of tools that we can utilize to help our own bodies feel a sense of control, agency and helping us stay resilient in these challenging times.

I can just tell from talking to you that you're also a gifted storyteller. I how. What role does storytelling play in the healing of the trauma process?

It's really important storytelling because for me, it helps me self organize and it helps the trauma survival, trauma survivor self organize because you can create a beginning, middle and an end of your story because trauma gets fragmented in memory and time. And so storytelling helps create a sequence of that time and helps you make sense of what happened to you. And that really helped me.

It was actually part of what led me to become a therapist because I was able to self organize. It also helps transform pain into meaning.

When survivors narrator are able to narrate their story, they move from being in the trauma to now observing the trauma. And so it helps them reclaim authorship of their story. And it also just helps them create a connection that lessens isolation.

Because when I did my play, I didn't realize and I was kind of surprised how many people showed up and said, I know someone who's adopted, I know someone who's in foster care. I felt less alone and I met so many more adults just like me by taking the risk and going out there and saying, you know what? I'm going to do this.

Because I knew in my heart that it was helping me heal and my hope would have it was going to help other people heal. So it really created my community. That's what really became an impetus for creating Celia center, my nonprofit organization.

And I wanted to know who's out there like me in my community here. So it created connection and a sense of purpose. Again, just writing this story, I'm not alone.

It has meaning, and it's inspired other people to share their stories and open up and. And release the shame that we feel bound by. And it's relieving. I mean, I would go on stage and. And do it and then do a Q and A after the show.

And I. I said, wow, I'm actually. I have impact. And that's the piece for trauma survivors. You have impact, and it takes a lot of strength and it takes a community.

And I was in a theater company that actually encouraged me to write this show. I did. I needed a lot of encouragement.

So it's finding your people that are supportive, that are there, that are pushing and rooting for you, and they are out there. And it's exploring and it's finding your communities. And it's really just taking the first step, like I did.

I'm going to just show up at a little support group and see if I can meet people like me that will help me feel a sense of connection and belonging. And so, yeah, writing that story really became an impetus to becoming a therapist. I thought I was going to be an actress, right?

No, no, this is my calling. This is it.

So tell us about your YouTube channel. What kind of content do you have on your YouTube channel?

Yeah, so my YouTube channel is genetically speaking about foster care, adoption and mental health. And I kept hearing the word genetically genetics. And I'm like. And I would go, that's kind of like my name.

That would make a great name for a YouTube channel.

And I had all this content, and it was actually pre Covid that I put a little video on there called the Hand model of the Brain for kids, which is a psycho education tool based on Daniel Siegel's work on the hand model of the brain. Why we flip our lids and act out from our amygdala, the fear receptor, and what causes fight, flight, freeze, fawn and flopping.

And that little video had over a hundred thousand views. And I thought, oh my goodness, again, I have impact.

So I started putting up videos, training parents in best practices in trauma, informed parenting, grief and loss, helping kids make sense of their stories, how to tell a child a difficult circumstance. And I just often felt like I was repeating myself as a therapist.

And I would say, oh, go check out this video on my YouTube channel that I did at a training for the department of mental Health or a Training for a local adoption agency. And for me, it wow, I can have even greater impact. This is educational and I've had so much great feedback.

I was very nervous at first because we're afraid, you know, am I going to be rejected? Is this what people want? And I've just found so many people are so grateful to be able to go to the YouTube channel, get what they need.

It's very organized. There's a. An Adoption 101 if you're a new parent by adoption.

There's multiple videos there just to understand the basis of the needs of parenting an adopted child. Then There's Foster Care 101 there.

Then there's a playlist of videos for therapists and social workers who want to become more competent in working in this field because there's not a lot of training out there. So it's been really a journey. And I'm, I'm just blessed, really, truly blessed that I can do this work, provide this work and help people.

As you think about foster care today, what are your hopes for the future of foster care moving forward?

Yes, what I would like is less children in foster care. That's number one foster care. We don't want any child to have to be in care. I would like more, more openness in adoption.

I am an open adoption advocate. You know, sometimes families just can't stay together. There's many reasons, right? Addiction, incarceration, even death. And so children.

Adoption will always be a part of our lives. However, kids want and need to know their families of origin, for identity reasons, for medical reasons.

And also to know that the people that created you, you're embraced by your ancestry, by your birth family. To not be embraced and be rejected is so painful. It's a secondary rejection. It's so painful. And I'm dealing with that right now.

And I keep telling myself it's not a rejection of me, it's a reflection of him and his own unresolved grief and loss and trauma. But you see, it impacts us. So we, we need to serve and help birth parents with their mental health and understanding.

They have such an impact on children.

I even wanted to start a program where we went into prisons and, and helped educate parents who had children in the foster care system how important you are to your children, even though you may have done something that you're ashamed about and yes, you're serving a sentence for. We still love you as a person and we still want to know you.

We want to know genetically what we, our talents, our strengths, you know, where we get all of this from. And it comes from our birth parents.

So I think, I believe we really need to support birth parents more and family reunification, family preservation, so that children can remain either connected to their birth families. And we are also continuing to heal and support birth families because there's a lot of support for foster and adopted youth.

But birth parents often get pushed under the rug and they come from their own trauma, their own grief and loss. And so I wish we'd have more programs for birth parents. And there's a wonderful film that I watched.

It's a documentary film, it's called On Life's Terms, where the Department of Children and Family Services did not remove the birth parents from the children due to the unsafe circumstances. And they five women lived under one roof.

They received individual therapy, group therapy, how to make meals for your child, how to have a stable household, how to be a mother. Right. And they were able to do it. And so that was one program that really could be the impetus to really serving families across the country.

It's really a model for what I believe we can do better.

That's very good. Thank you. I love that vision for foster care.

Jeanette, I'm going to ask you my favorite, other favorite question as we book in this wonderful interview. What legacy do you want to leave behind?

I think I want to leave behind a legacy of belonging. We all belong, we all matter. You know, the, the. Oh, get over it, get over it. That doesn't serve us. It's helped me through it, helped me through it.

Really help us. We are struggling. I look at me, I'm an adult. I. I'm still struggling with this. Don't tell me to get over it.

Mental health is meant to help, help us feel it. It's painful what we've been through. So I think having empathy for our pain, it's invisible. We often with a false self, oh, I'm fine.

But we're really not. We're really hurting. There's parts of us that just need so much empathy, listening, gentleness, kindness. Don't take it personal.

Know that we want to love. We just need a lot of patience and guidance and trust. And that comes from those around us in understanding that we need you.

We're doing the best that we can under the circumstances. And we truly want to belong and be loved and be a part of the community like everybody else. We don't want to be different and othered.

We want to feel like others. We're often stigmatized.

And so there's that negative stigma which is truly to answer your question, that's truly what I want to be is erasing the negative stigma of foster care.

Wow. So on season six of the podcast, we do something special. We have a surprise question. Pick a number between one and ten for your surprise question.

Oh, boy. One and ten. Yep. My favorite number is nine. Nine.

All right. Oh, this is a great one. Who would you like most to sit next to on a 10 hour flight and why?

Wow, that is a good one. Wow, that's a good one. A 10 hour flight and why? Wow, that took me off guard. There's a few people that come to mind. I'm about peace.

I'm really a peacemaker and I've always struggled with how do we create peace in our world? So surprisingly, it would be Martin Luther King, because he led his whole presence.

Always amazed me that he could come from a marginalized community being attacked and represent and show up in peace and modeling that. That's truly what I do in my work every day. Every day. How do you maintain. I would want to talk to him.

How do you maintain that dignity, your character? How do you still have love for people that are attacking and hurting you? I've been attacked.

Like I'm of proposing adoption and no, I do not propose adoption on anybody. I've been attacked for many reasons. And it's.

How do you hold on to your character and stay focused on the goal of your mission of creating peace and love and not judging people for whatever has happened to them? We all belong here. So he would just be an inspiration and guide and I would just be blown away.

And just in his presence, I know that I would download so much and be inspired to just continue this work. Because I have to tell you, this work is hard. It's not easy, and every day I need to build my resilience. Why am I doing this? What is my why today?

And so Martin Luther King has been very inspiring. And I was actually at Washington and I stood there at the place where he had his I have a dream speech. And I was just blown away.

Just really blown away. He's an inspiration to our country, to our world of peace and liberty.

And how do we all just get along and love and respect each other for who we are? We all belong here. We all deserve love, and we all matter. So that's who it would be.

That's a good answer. I like that. Well, Jeanette, thanks so much for being a guest on the podcast. And where can people find you and connect with you and buy your book?

Yeah, so my book is on Pessy, which is the publishing company. I published this book p E-S-I.com and I am on LinkedIn, Ennette, Instagram, Facebook, and my YouTube channel, Genetically Speaking.

And so it's my first name-idically speaking. Great.

Jeanette Yof's work is a bridge building between pain and healing, between isolation and connection. Her new book is a gift to everyone working with youth impacted by trauma. Her story is a powerful reminder that healing is possible.

Thank you, Jeanette, for for your courage, your compassion, and your commitment to building a better future for foster care and adopted youth. Thank you for being a guest on the podcast.

Thank you, Keith for having me so much. Grateful to be here.

My pleasure.