Today’s blog was written by our guest, Dr. Adam Anthony,* founder of EmpowerMENt™. He was moved to write this blog in response to one of our training videos about our Tri-Spective concept.
What the TriSpective Approach Taught Me About My Own Reunion
I recently watched a podcast episode from Growing Intentional Families Together (GIFT) featuring their three coaches —Sharon Butler-Obazee, Kim Noeth, and Sally Ankerfelt discussing what they call the TriSpective Approach. The framework is simple in concept but profound in practice: adoption isn’t one story. It’s three stories happening at once: the adoptee’s, the birth parent’s, and the adoptive parent’s, and those stories are permanently linked. GIFT calls this Tri-Relational Interconnectivity: what happens to one person in the adoption relationship ripples through to the others, whether anyone names it or not.
Watching the episode, each coach’s perspective landed differently for me, and each one pulled at something from my own life.
Siblings Who Share Blood, not a Story
Sharon spoke from the adoptee’s seat, and what struck me most was her framing of sibling dynamics; the difference between an adoptee and their biological siblings who were raised by their birth family. Same genetics, often wildly different outcomes. Different exposure to family medical history. Different inherited trauma patterns, some visible, most not.
There’s a kind of quiet observation that adoptees do in these moments, watching for what’s familiar and what isn’t. Shared facial features, maybe a shared sense of humor, but potentially different value systems, expectations, and ideals, shaped by completely different households. Same blood, but a missing chapter of ancestry and family story that the adoptee never got to live inside of.
It’s not a tragedy framing, necessarily. It’s just real, a thing adoptees sit with, often in silence, because there isn’t always language or space for it in the rooms we’re in.
When Reunion Becomes Real
Kim spoke as a birth mother, describing what it was like when her adult son, placed for adoption, showed up for reunion. She’d wondered about this moment for years. And when it happened, it was a shock, even though it was something she’d hoped for.
This is the part of the episode that hit closest to home. I’ve had my own reunion with my birth mother. Kim mentioned that her son had discovered a letter, which set things in motion. I’ll be honest: part of me was glad there was a letter, because I never had anything like that to find. At the same time, I understood when she shared that her expectation, a warm embrace, a coming-together with her son’s adoptive parents, didn’t happen the way she may have pictured it.
But here’s where I land: just because something isn’t realistic or doesn’t happen, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth hoping for, or that someone doesn’t deserve it. I don’t know if my birth mother ever considered that possibility before we met, whether she pictured a different outcome, or braced herself for something less. That’s one of the things reunion does. It takes years of imagined scenarios and compresses them into a single, real, often anticlimactic moment.
The Funeral That Revealed the Silence
Sally, speaking from the adoptive parent’s seat, shared something I hadn’t considered before, attending the funeral of her adopted daughter’s birth mother. She described it as surreal. The birth family was there, curious and affirming, wondering how the daughter had turned out, welcoming her warmly in that moment.
What stayed with me was Sally’s larger point: the adoption experience, as it’s often structured, promotes separation. It doesn’t naturally encourage interwoven connection or shared story. Everyone ends up siloed from each other, not because the people don’t care, but because the system was never built for ongoing connection. And yet, in moments like a funeral, you see that the separation was never really true. The connection was there the whole time. It just wasn’t given anywhere to live.
Why TriSpective Matters
What I appreciate about the TriSpective framework is that it doesn’t ask anyone to pick a side or rank whose pain matters most. It just asks: what if we looked at all three perspectives at once, as parts of the same interconnected story?
For me, that reframes my own reunion. Caution about expectations wasn’t a rejection of hope for anyone involved, but their own TriSpective awareness, yet unspoken. And my own desire for more, for a letter I never received, for a different kind of welcome, isn’t naive. It’s just the adoptee’s side of the same interconnected story Sharon, Kim, and Sally were describing from their seats.
Maybe that’s the real value of TriSpective thinking: it doesn’t resolve the complexity. It just makes room for all of it, at the same time, without anyone needing to be wrong.
*Bio
Dr. Adam Anthony is a Black same-race adoptee whose life and work sit at the intersection of story, identity, and healing making him a uniquely powerful voice for the families, clinicians, and professionals gathered here today.
As the founder of EmpowerMENt™, Dr. Adam has dedicated his career to creating intentional spaces where adopted and foster care-experienced boys and men can explore the lifelong impact of their stories with honesty, complexity, and care. His work bridges the personal and the professional drawing from his own journey as a male adoptee and from partnership with adoptees, foster care alumni, and the organizations committed to serving them well.
Dr. Adam understands firsthand the layered, often unspoken questions that adopted boys carry questions about belonging, worth, identity, and faith that don’t disappear with time, but can be met with the right support, the right community, and the right care. That lived experience, combined with his professional expertise, is what makes his message resonate across the full spectrum of this audience: parents who love their sons deeply, clinicians who want to serve them well, and professionals working to build systems where boys can truly flourish.
He holds a Doctor of Education in Leadership from Trevecca Nazarene University, where his scholarly work has centered on the experiences of male adoptees and Black male college students, populations whose stories are too often underrepresented in research and in the room.
Today, Dr. Adam invites us all to a deeper understanding of the inner world of adopted boys because when we understand their story, we can better guide their future, together.
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