The Adoptee’s Guide to Healing, Wholeness & Growth by Lynda Monk
The Story Before the Story: How Adoptees & Others Write Toward Healing, Identity, and Belonging
November 5, 2026
4 PM PST | 5 PM MST | 6 PM CST | 7 PM EST
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Journaling is the safe, private first draft of an adoptee’s story, the place where fragments, silences, and reunion surprises become the raw material for memoir. This can be true for writing any memoir about the tender and transformative stories in our lives. I will speak to my experience as an adoptee, but the tips, ideas and inspiration for fellow writers will be universal.

Every adoptee’s story begins before they can remember it. There are missing chapters, sealed records, family stories told by others, and questions that echo for a lifetime: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where do I belong? For many adoptees, writing is the place where those questions finally have room to breathe.

In this intimate conversation, Lynda Monk — adoptee, social worker, and author of The Adoptee’s Guide to Healing, Wholeness & Growth — joins Linda Joy Myers to explore how journaling can become both a path to healing and the raw material and emotional well for writing a memoir. Drawing on her own experience of adoption and reunion with her birth family, and on more than 30 years of guiding people through expressive writing, Lynda will share how to write into the gaps, the silences, and the surprising emotions that adoption, or any other story related to who we are, can stir.

You’ll hear how private journaling creates the safety needed to tell the truth, and how those pages can later be shaped into stories meant for readers. Lynda will offer gentle, practical prompts for exploring identity, loss, belonging, and being enough.

This conversation is for anyone writing about family secrets, identity, or finding home within themselves. You’ll leave with fresh prompts, renewed courage, and a deeper understanding of how writing can help you reclaim your story, one page at a time.

What writers will gain

• Why journaling is a powerful, private starting place for writing about adoption, identity, and other tender family material
• Gentle prompts for exploring identity, loss, belonging, and being enough (on and off the page)
• Ways to move from raw journal entries to memoir scenes that readers can enter, without losing your truth
• Practices for writing about living family members with honesty, compassion, and self-care

Bio
Lynda Monk, MSW, RSW, CPCC, is a Registered Social Worker, certified coach, author, and speaker who has spent more than 30 years helping people write their way to greater wellbeing, self-understanding, and creative expression. She is the Director of the International Association for Journal Writing (IAJW.org), a global community dedicated to the transformative power of journaling.

Lynda is also an adoptee who has experienced reunion with her birth family, a journey that deeply informs her work and her writing. She is the author of The Adoptee’s Guide to Healing, Wholeness & Growth (2026) and co-author/editor of Transformational Journaling for Coaches, Therapists, and Clients, The Great Book of Journaling, The Coaches Guide to Completing Creative Work and Affirmations for Self-Love with Eric Maisel, as well as Writing Alone Together with Wendy Judith Cutler and Ahava Shira. She is currently writing her own adoptee memoir. She lives with her family on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada. Learn more at lyndamonk.com and iajw.org. You can find her new book at adopteesguide.lyndamonk.com.