American Thought Leaders - Devastating Effects of Divorce on Kids: Adam Coleman

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

When Adam Coleman was 8 years old, he was institutionalized after contemplating suicide. He shares his struggles—and the struggles of so many others in America—of growing up without a father in his new book, “The Children We Left Behind: How Western Culture Rationalizes Family Separation and Ignores the Pain of Child Neglect.”“I went through a lot when I was a kid, and I want my story to be an example that, yes, certain things happen to you when you’re a child, but when you’re an adult, you make life happen for you. So, it is possible to overcome these circumstances,” he says.Only 60 percent of children in America live with married biological parents. Among black children, it’s 33 percent.What’s fueling the rise of divorce and family separation in the West? How do we make resilient, two-parent families the norm?“There are a lot of people who are afraid of marriage, afraid of having children, afraid of being alone with the opposite sex because of their childhood situation,” says Coleman.“If we demonstrate a household that is proper, that is healthy, then you have more kids who grow up with a good, positive image of having children, wanting a bigger family, of having marriage as the priority.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

I went through a lot when I was a kid. And I want my story to be an example that, yes, certain things happen to you when you're a child, but when you're an adult, you make life happen for you. So it is possible to overcome these circumstances. When Adam Coleman was eight years old, he was institutionalized after contemplating suicide. He shares his struggles, and the struggles of so many in America, of growing up without a father in his new book, The Children We Left Behind, how Western culture rationalizes family separation and ignores the pain of child neglect. Only 60% of children in America live with married biological parents. Among black children, it's 33%.

There are a lot of people who are afraid of marriage, afraid of having children, afraid of being alone with the opposite sex because of their childhood situation. If we demonstrate a household that is healthy, then you have more kids who grow up with a good positive image of having children, wanting a bigger family, of having marriage as their priority. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Adam Coleman, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you for having me.

Adam, as the name of your book suggests, you point out this child abandonment as being, I guess, the key driver in your mind of some of the worst of the social malaise that we're experiencing in society. Tell me why you think that. I think it's because I've seen it up close. I've seen it with people who are struggling with drug addiction. And I've heard their stories of people who end up in prisons, things of that nature. And there's always this common link between them, whether it was physical abuse, sexual abuse, abandonment. There's something happening within their home when they were children.

And so for me, I'm looking at also my situation. We talk about mental health a lot in America. But every time I see people who are struggling with mental health and you start digging a little bit deeper, you find out they're coming from a dysfunctional household when they were kids. And it created this anxiety, this instability in their mind. And that's much of my story of questioning myself,

questioning my mental state, whether I'm of value or not, stemming from being abandoned by my father and watching my mother struggle, and sometimes even saying, am I the reason why my mother is struggling? So it's not just I saw it around me and just anecdotally talking to people that I know and familiar with, but I'm also looking at my story and what I experienced. Well, it's kind of unbelievable even to think about. You were actually institutionalized when you were eight years old because people thought you were going to kill yourself. That is very hard for me to fathom. But give me a little bit of your

background. How did it get to that and what happened there? So for much of my life, I kind of blocked out these memories until my sister brought it up to me, I want to say almost a decade ago, my early 30s. And when she did, like all these memories came rushing back to me as far as what happened. But essentially, we had moved from Virginia to upstate New York to live with a family member and it wasn't working out there. There was yelling between us. It was kind of like a verbally abusive environment specifically towards me, between my family member and myself.

Oh, OK. My mother was trying to go to school. She was working as well. So there's a lot of time that we were home either by ourselves or under the care of family members. That situation went awry and suddenly one day I came off the bus and my mother's like, we're leaving. From there we didn't really have any place to go so we ended up in hotel rooms. We stayed with a woman who offered a room in a trailer. And it was the three of us, myself, my mom, my sister,

staying in a trailer. And eventually, after about two, three months, my mother had enough money. We got our own apartment. But by then, the amount of instability that was happening, on top of, I don't think really anybody in my school knew what was going on. You know, I'm going to school every day, but coming not home, but to a hotel room. So by the time we got into the apartment, you'd think everything would be fine. But for me,

it was just incredibly chaotic. And I didn't know how to handle it. I didn't know how to express myself. My sister, she's four years older than me, so she remembers it a little bit more vividly, but she remembers one specific day I was underneath the kitchen table and I was like in a fetal position just screaming. And it was like I was having a mental break. And my mother remembers me asking her, well, not asking her, telling her that if she loved me, she'd help me die. And from my memory, I don't remember those specific moments of saying that, but I remember how I felt.

I remember feeling in distress. I do remember one day getting into a car, heading somewhere that I've never been before in upstate New York, going into some facility and my mother handed me off to somebody and I didn't know where I was. You know, no one explained to me what exactly was going on. It took me a little bit to realize where I was and I was in a mental hospital. And subsequently I was there for three months. And the way I kind of explain it to people is,

you know, when you go to jail, you know how long you're gonna be there for. Generally speaking, you're sentenced. But when you go to a mental hospital, it's up to them as to when you leave, so you don't know. And as a kid, you know, when you see your mother coming to visit you, you think today might be the day I get to go home, and she has to tell you no.

You know, within the book, I reveal that, you know, talking to my sister about this was the first time I heard my mother's perspective. You know, after those visits, I was coming to see her son, you know, the entire drive home, she's crying because her little boy is locked away. And I never really thought about my mother's perspective when she went through it, especially now as a parent, I understand, you know, the difficulties my mother faced and how hard that must be to have her little boy locked away

like that. You struggled with your lack of relationship with your father, who basically was completely absent aside from some semblance of child support or something. Just tell me about that a little bit. Yeah. I know, I was born in Detroit. My father always lived in Detroit. He was married, but he was just married to somebody else. You know, my mother left because she needed support. She wasn't getting much of any support. And Detroit was getting worse crime-wise

and things of that nature. So that's why we ended up leaving the city. But after we left, especially, I didn't really see him. I would see him once every couple of years, something of that nature. I might get a phone call. But as a kid, it felt like the phone call wasn't really for me.

It was for somebody else. It was just like an obligation. You should talk to your kids kind of thing. I could be wrong, but that's how I felt as a kid. But nevertheless, I didn't really hear from him. And even if I did talk to him, it was always very, how was school? School's fine. Okay, two minute conversation. My father didn't know anything about me. I didn't know it. And still to this day, I don't really know anything about my father. You know, he would come through living in the Northeast, in New York, in New Jersey.

He might come through to go to New York City to get fabric because he was a tailor. But he would stay with us for a few days, but it wasn't really to see us, it was a place to stay. And every time he would come, I remember feeling somewhat excited to see him. But then quickly, like, he wasn't engaging with me. And he would always leave in the middle of the night and he would tell me. If that was me and my son, I would be like, hey, I'm leaving in the morning. Give me a hug before I go to bed or something like that.

I would just wake up and he was gone. So the last time I saw my father, I was 16. He took me to the mall and bought me some clothes. That was the extent of it. And the last time I talked to him, I was 21. I called him after my son was born, but I didn't talk to him for very long because it didn't seem like he was interested in speaking with me. So I never told him that he has a grandson. And I never closed the door if he attempted to call me. I allowed for it to happen, but he never tried. And he died some years ago.

So there was never any sort of establishment or reconciliation. Just a moment comes to my mind where you're describing seeing him happy in photos with other people. Yeah. While I was writing this book, it allowed for me to talk to my mother when she told me that my father died. He had died a few months before my mother found out. She just happened to Google his name and found the funeral home and found his pictures. So while writing this, I was like, you know what? I've never Googled my father's name. And I went to the funeral home website and I saw his pictures and I just saw a bunch of people around him. I had no idea who they were. I don't know if they're family, friends, no idea.

But my next thought was, I wonder if any of them know that he has children that he abandoned. And I think that was much of the motivation of writing the one chapter in the book, Socially Comfortable Terrible Parents. How many people do we have in our lives that get to be comfortable around us adults while we actively know that they've abandoned their kids or they're treating their kids terribly They yell at them scream at them

They they treat them like dirt and they get to hang out with us go to the movies come to the family gatherings And no one ever says anything to them. And so the outside of my father I've seen that you know in different families that I've gotten to know. And I'm like, wait, that's a situation? Is that a secret? No, everybody knows. Oh, so everyone knows. And it's shocking how common that is. Well, there's two things here. One is that when you describe child abandonment, it's not necessarily where the parents are entirely absent. They can just be absent because of selfishness. I want to touch on that in a moment. Or narcissism. This is a

bizarre feature of our current age. Let's focus on that. Yeah, the narcissism part, or if you just want to call it selfishness, putting yourself ahead of your children, making detrimental choices that you know are going to negatively impact your kid, but you're going to do it anyways. Now, I'm not saying that these people are evil or anything like that, but we just have a culture of rationalizing things

to kind of swallow the outcome that's about to happen, how it's going to affect their kids. So we say, well, mommy and daddy are getting a divorce because we're not in love with each other. But if I'm happy, my kids will be happy. That puts the parent as the primary focus, not the child. The child becomes secondary in that type of rationalization. But that's enough for people to split up their family, blow up the world for their child.

It's not to say that I'm anti-divorce or anything like that, but there are parents who are choosing themselves or their kids periodically, and especially for really big monumental choices. You fit that into the broad concept of abandonment. I found that very interesting. But this is a broader societal issue. Just look at our birthrate. In basically every free nation in the world, it's below replacement. That is shocking to me. When you really think about it, it just means we don't really value our children enough to actually replenish the society. That seems kind of crazy and nihilistic almost. I don't know what your thoughts are on this.

I think there are a lot of people who are afraid of marriage, afraid of having children, afraid of being alone with the opposite sex because of their childhood situation. You know, marriage to them is what their parents did. And if you grow up in a happy, healthy household, of course marriage looks fine, right? You have a blueprint. It feels good. It looks good.

You learned a lot. But if you grew up in chaos or your parents got divorced when you were 10 and you saw that marriage doesn't last forever and it hurts people and all this pain associated with family, then I understand why people don't want to procreate, don't want to get married, they don't want to do any of that stuff because they don't see it as a guarantee. They don't see it as overall productive. All they do is associate hurt with it. So for me it's rational to see someone make that choice and often when I see people who make that choice it's not just I decided not to get married. It's I've decided not to get married. It's, I've decided not to get married

because of a whole slew of very personal anecdotes to them. I think that exists throughout the West. Obviously there's economic means, people don't feel like they can afford it. You have to have two incomes these days. There's a lot of things that kind of contribute to it, but I don't think we talk enough about the young people who may be getting into relationships who are afraid.

They're operating off of fear because of what they saw. They saw chaos. And if we demonstrate a household that is proper, that is healthy, then you have more kids who grow up with a good positive image of having children, wanting a bigger family, of having marriage as their priority. I've had some thoughts about this. My parents were divorced right around the time I finished high school. And when I was younger, they had a difficult relationship, and I often wondered why it made sense for them to be together. As I look back over the years, I find myself incredibly grateful for the fact that they

clearly chose to maintain the relationship for the benefit of the kids, despite it being very difficult. That's interesting because that's changed over the course of my life as I look back. It really is a very different way of looking at the world. I don't know how many people would do that anymore, based on the social zeitgeist. Not too many people would choose to do that, especially if they tell other people, I'm struggling within my marriage. Because the first response is that you got to leave. If you have a good friend, they'll tell you like, well, you know, I'm here for you.

You know, here's how you might be able to resolve it. It's usually you're right, they're wrong. And ultimately leading towards, well, nothing's being resolved, I guess you gotta go. And it's difficult, relationships are difficult. Maybe in certain circumstances, you gotta leave, right? There are the obvious, you know, some sort of abuse. Very clearly, this is not healthy for the partner

or for the children to be around, right? That's far more detrimental. So, I don't know if a lot of people consider these things. Divorce isn't you just sign a piece of paper, everyone goes in their merry way. There's an emotional impact that happens for the kids. There is an emotional impact that happens for the person who's being divorced. It's not always amicable. One person might be trying to hold on to it and the other person's trying to let it go.

Maybe there is infidelity. There's a lot of emotions that are tied up into it. On top of just the general, a lot of people who get divorced feel like they failed. And that sense of failure stays with them on top of you trying to raise kids who are now starting to feel rejected. It's very much so,

far more detrimental than people acknowledge. I'm going to read something that jumped out at me from the book. Exactly in this vein. The single most important duty of parents is the preparedness to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of their children. That includes sacrificing their pride. Yeah, you have to sacrifice your pride sometimes. You have to be willing to say, you know what, I was wrong, instead of trying to fight something. Or maybe it's not about being right and wrong. Maybe it's just finding a resolution. If you're looking at your partner as a combatant, if you're looking at them as someone you're competing against, right, which is a common mentality. If you're measuring things, well I do more than they do, right,

if that's the constant back and forth, rather than figuring out, well what is my role in this relationship? Maybe the role is a little bit lopsided, but that's what our roles that we agreed upon. And we're told there are no roles. You know, everyone just does what they want. But very clearly, there are relationships that start falling apart because one party feels like they're doing more than the other party,

and they're measuring, I'm working hard. This person doesn't appear to be working hard, and it happens in both sexes. If we lowered our pride and actually talked to each other, then you have to find some sort of resolution from that. But this is also, honestly, I think this goes back to choosing the right partner. And so I think a lot of people fall into relationships. They start having sex and they like each other. So, you know, then they just kind of get married

because they've been together for so long. And oh, someone's pregnant, right? It's not a conscious choice. It's just things are happening to them rather than they're dictating how their life goes. And they've never really talked to each other, not in any sort of deep way. So I see that very often.

You know, I got married later in my life, but I got married to the right person because she's my friend, and I could talk to her about anything. Well, it's interesting that you say that because you had a son who I've met, who seems like a wonderful young man. You played a role in choosing to have him alone. Yes. I've always been there. I've always been active in his life. I thought maybe one day I want to get married. It's not that I shied away from it. I just didn't know even how to approach it. There were a lot of shortcomings for me as a young man to figure out how do I even approach relationships from a male perspective. And so I just got with someone that I liked and she eventually got pregnant.

I wasn't thinking. I'm the very case of the scenario that I was talking about. But it stems from ignorance. It stems from ignorance and it stems from not being showed this as a kid. And I didn't have an example. You know, I didn't have a stepfather. My mom really didn't even have any boyfriends. My mother never got married.

I never really saw what a relationship looked like within my household. So I was kind of going at it with a blank canvas, like I didn't know how to approach this. So it's no sort of regret. I love my son's death. But, you know, every parent makes a mistake. They make several mistakes. But I tell him that what you should do is get married first, then have children.

You need to improve yourself. Right now, you're 19. You need to work on yourself and improve yourself. Don't chase women, right? When you improve yourself, the women will be there. They'll all, you know. That'll be fine. But I've had these conversations with him that I never had when I was younger.

No one ever explained these things to me. And so my son's not lost in the world, chasing girls to try to feel good about himself. My son is focused as he should be as a 19 year old who's trying to build a career, who's trying to build himself and discover himself. So that's why I ended up in a circumstance where I did have a child out of wedlock. I never got married to his mother.

But one thing I told myself when my son was born was that I was always going to be there. I wasn't going to be my father. He always knew who his father was. His mother got married at one point, so he had a stepfather for a period of time. But when they went through their divorce, he always knew he can come to me and we could talk about it. I built a relationship with him based on communication, based on honesty, and we talk about things. And when he wants advice, he can always reach out to me. So many vantage points here. One is the incredible setup for success when you actually grow up

in a two-parent household. That's very interesting. And that actually speaks a bit to what we were talking about earlier, is parents choosing. I suspect even when that relationship is fraught, when those parents stay together, that still creates a lot of opportunity. That's one side. The other side is being there for your kid when that's not possible, nonetheless. And that, of course, is a whole different level than the third option, which is neither of those things. You talk about discipleship. This is the first time that I've seen it discussed in the context of parenting. Tell me about that. One of the most controversial things that you can talk about as a parent is discipline, because the question becomes, do you hit your child or do you not hit your child?

And discipline comes from discipleship, right? It means to teach. And by hitting your child, what are you teaching your child? You'll hear some people say, it's to get a reaction out of them. Well, you can get a reaction out of a child multiple ways without putting your hands on them. And for me, that's not an expression of love. In no circumstance would we say,

well, it's okay that you hit your wife because you love her. And like, no, you don't hit people that you love. Nevertheless, a child who's defenseless, who's a third of your size, who has no recourse for anything that you love. Nevertheless, a child who's defenseless, who's a third of your size, who has no recourse for anything that you do. So for me, I'm about teaching my son. Doesn't mean I haven't yelled at my son or anything like that, but it means that my focus

was always about teaching him. I think we get too carried away with punishment, right? You can punish him, you're grounded. Or frankly, lack of it, if I may. When I hear you talking, I don't think the problem is that people are giving out too much punishment. At least from everything I've read and seen, the lack of boundaries, the lack of discipline seems to be more of the incredible permissiveness. If I may, please continue. No, you're absolutely right. It's both. At the end of the day, we're talking about an

imbalance. For the people who are disciplining, I sometimes see that they're going above and beyond what they should be doing. But then there's also an imbalance where they're not doing anything. And for the people who aren't doing anything, they want to be their child's friend, right? But being your child's friend puts you at an equal level. I can't tell you what to do. I have no authority over you if you're my friend.

But if I'm your parent, I have an authority over you, which means I have to tell you what to do. But if you reduce that authority and always to see yourself as your child's friends, well, they won't listen to you. You don't punish them. You give them everything that they want, right? You're trying to be a quote unquote good friend. You need to be a good parent.

And there's a difference between not being your child's friend and not being friendly. Of course you'd be friendly with your child. I respect my son. He respects me. There's a certain level of authority that I have over you and a certain level of respect that I want exemplified for me. Just in the same way I don't overshare with my son. He doesn't engage well when he was a child. He didn't engage in adult conversations.

Right. engage, well, when he was a child, he didn't engage in adult conversations, right? And I do think for the people who are avoiding discipline, being a parent is a far greater status than being a friend, and they've yet to realize that. We have friends who are here for five years and disappear, you never talk to again. But when you're a parent, that's for life. And so there is something that is honorable and beautiful about being a parent. There is something fleeting about being a friend. What do you think is the single most important thing you could do when you know you have a fraught relationship with your child? Do you mean in a circumstance where your child is still a child

or they're an adult now? When they're still a child. With accountability and acknowledging that you are hurting your child, that's the pathway towards healing. So it doesn't necessarily mean that you acknowledge it, I am sorry, I know I hurt you, they still may put the wall up and ignore you. But here's the thing, when they do that it's because they want you to hurt like they're hurting. And they want you to fight to get back to relationship because all they've seen is that you've given up. And so if they put that wall up and you're like, well I tried, and you walk away, you validate that you've abandoned them, right? See? He wasn't serious. He's not even trying. So I do think that reunification is really important, which

is why I talk about forgiveness in the book. If you're a child who's been abandoned, speaking of myself, even though my father's not alive, when he was alive I forgave him, right? Always left that door open if he did wanna call and say, you know what, I was wrong. I was a young man or he wasn't really a young man, but you know, in the past I made mistakes, I've come to realize these things and I am sorry

and I just wanna get to know my son because I don't know who you are. I would have allowed for that to happen. I think a lot of kids would have allowed that to happen, but the mistake of parents, and I've talked to fathers in this situation especially, who are trying to get back into children's lives, the child has a version of what happened.

He has a version of what happened. And so when the child says, well, you did X, Y, and Z, he's like, no, no, no, you don't understand because your mother did. It becomes they're missing the point. And it sounds like the only reason you're talking is so you can validate what you did and try to legislate all these different components of the situation that maybe the child wasn't aware of, rather than they just want you to acknowledge that you didn't do the best thing and that they're hurting.

That's it. And so sometimes the parents who are trying to get back in their kids' lives are debating the issue. Or if it's a father, he's like, you don't understand, your mother was doing X, Y, and Z. Well, guess what? That child loves that mother. And trying to build a case against someone that they love

is gonna be a losing battle. Especially, you're coming from the weak position of not being in their life. So that stuff becomes the noise when it comes to reunification. Whatever they say that you did, it doesn't matter what you did. That's how they feel, that's what they believe. And maybe one day,

they'll be open enough to actually hear your perspective, and then they will make a decision. You know what? Maybe I am misremembering that. But battling them on details is a losing battle, and giving up on them when they do push back will ultimately validate their feelings. What about in situations where a parent really abused the child in terrible ways? Is it reasonable to expect someone to forgive in that sort of situation? Is it necessary? We also have to look at the word forgiveness, or actually the meaning of forgiveness, because forgiving means for you to release your anger and animosity, right? The forgiveness is for the person who is victimized.

It's not for the person who's the perpetrator looking for some sort of clemency or something like that. So ultimately, when I say, I forgive my father, I forgive my father so I let go my anger, my depression, my feeling of rejection to let all that stuff go so I don't have anything dragging me back and I can move forward in my life. And so if you were abused in some particular way, is it beneficial to hold on to anger, that feeling when you were a child that was abused? Is it beneficial to hold on to that or is it beneficial to release it?

And so the forgiveness is to release that, right? It's not to excuse their behavior. It's not to rationalize their behavior, say it was fine. Now from there, if they want to get into a new relationship with that parent, despite them abusing them, then that's purely up to them. In those situations, I would never say, no, you must take them back or anything like that. These are very difficult, extenuating circumstances. So I would purely leave that up to the person who was victimized.

The forgiveness, the core of it is to the person who was victimized. The forgiveness, the core of it, is for the person who was victimized. Whether you choose to let the person who victimized you know this is completely up to you. But I do think that forgiveness is the starting point if there is going to be some sort of reunification with abuse or not abuse. Forgiveness is at the core of it. You talk a lot about people or children recreating the trauma of a C from their parents or their people in their lives. And then there's this sort of chain and the idea is to break that chain and that makes an incredible sense to me. There are also what we now call people

with antisocial personality disorder. It's not an insignificant portion of the population. Those people get some sort of weird benefit from traumatizing people actively. How do those types of people factor in? They're not that way because someone traumatized them necessarily. Well, I'm not a psychologist. We'll say, let's say someone who's a legit narcissist, that stems from insecurity. More often than not, that stems from childhood insecurity, but it just gets exaggerated as they get older.

They don't believe anyone will look out for them. And so they can't trust anyone. They are highly insecure about anyone else. So if you're insecure, it's going to come out in a particular way. And the way that specifically for narcissists, they lash out when you hurt their image. So they usually are these types of people who want to get you before you get them because they're highly afraid of being vulnerable. So one area that you seem to focus on in particular, even though you yourself were not in that set up, is the foster care system and significantly higher rates of this abandonment or abuse or these chains of abuse being in that system. Someone recently has been talking to me about this. I've just been learning

about the levels. I'm more familiar with incredible success stories of the foster care system, which there's some kind of unbelievable ones. But actually, there's some huge, huge problems. In some cases, people will bring more children in because there's a financial dimension to it, and they don't actually care for the kids as much. And so there are these success stories, but there's also a lot of trauma, generational trauma created. So tell me about that. And you have actually a specific interview that you decided, this wasn't your experience, but you decided to feature it in your book. Yeah. And you're absolutely right. When it comes to the foster care system, it's one of those things that we know is bad, but we don't know to what extent, right?

And a lot of people, either they don't tell their story, maybe they feel embarrassed, insecure or something of that nature, or maybe it's just too traumatic to talk about, which I completely understand, especially publicly. But I coincidentally came across someone who became a friend of mine by the name of Carrie Bartholomew. And I featured her story. I interviewed her, so her mother hated her. She treated her as such.

She was physically abusive. She was grooming her to become a prostitute at one point. She's mixed race. You know, her mother is white, her father is black. But she had a grandfather who was part of the KKK. And so she basically had sex with a black man to piss off her father, and she got pregnant.

So here she has this child. She doesn't really like black people like that. And so she sees her child almost like a dirty child, and she treats her as such. She's just a thing within the home. She was subsequently raped at the age of five by her mother's friend. Her stepfather was in the process of, you know,

starting to molest her and was going down that route. She describes having to hide in a basket from her mother because her mother was so physically abusive that she would hide. She ultimately turned herself in to the authorities at the age of eight. She thanks God every day for giving her enough of a mental understanding to do such a thing. Talk about courage of an eight-year-old kid to do something like this.

That is just astonishing and unbelievable. Yeah, but she had no family that she could really turn to. Funny enough, her grandfather, who's part of the KKK, after she was born, he left the KKK because of her, right? And he ultimately died when she was young. So the one family member that actually loved her, and she remembers very fondly, was the former KKK member grandfather.

Like that's how weird the world is sometimes. But she had no one, she had no one. So she had to turn herself in at the age of eight, and she stayed in the foster care system until she aged out. And she talks about how within the foster care system, she was placed from house to house. And yes, she had kids who were violent that she would live with,

or kids who were attempting to do something sexual with her, more than likely because something sexual was done to them, right, just repeating this type of behavior. Having to hide in the bathroom because her foster brother is trying to do something to her. Like, this is the type of stuff that she did have to go through within the foster care system.

She has no one to turn to. And actually, the person that she gives the most thanks to is actually her social worker. Because the way she explained it was that most kids have cycling social workers and therapists and stuff like that. But for a long time, she had the same one. And so he gave her hope,

and who was actually looking out for her, and it seems sincere. And she remembers his name, she remembers him fondly and everything. So if you met her today, you would have no idea all these things that she went through. She has a child, she's married, she's a happy person. She's a believer in God as a Christian.

And for a lot of people, they think to themselves, and I went through that when I was younger, like all these bad things are happening to me. Why would God let this happen? But for her, she's like, yes, these bad things happen to me, but God gave me enough intelligence and courage to get up at the age of eight and turn myself in.

That's how she sees it. So for me, she's remarkable in that, and also because she worked through all the things that happened to her. So when I'm talking to her and she's telling me all these things she's not crying, you know, she's not sobbing, she's being very matter-of-fact because she did the hard work of actually resolving how she felt. And that to me is beautiful to see that she was able to have reflection, self-reflection, but lean on God and improve herself because of it. But the reason I talk about the foster care system within this book is because that's the ultimate child that's left

behind, right? They don't have extended family, Or if they do, they don't want them. They don't have their immediate family. No one wants them. And they're literally just put into a system that will take anything. And so these are all forgotten children who are all experiencing abandonment issues. At the very least, often their parents are drug addicts. Melestation is happening, right? All these different things, their parents

are choosing drugs or choosing a partner over their kids. The state takes them away. So the state ultimately wants to reunify kids with their parents. They don't want to take on these kids, but they have no choice because no one is suitable or no one wants them. Ultimately, how do you view that system now? It also sounds like something that's needed

actually, even though it's very fraught. I think my feelings about it, one, I found a little bit more detail as far as not just the foster home, but like the foster care facility. foster home, but like the foster care facility. You know, I was talking to Pamela Garfield about this because she worked with foster kids at one point when she was in California. And she actually was detailing a facility that sounds like a jail, right? They're the most aggressive, the most misbehaved,

completely destructive children. Right? They're all minors and they literally have to be locked away in their own cells by themselves because they cannot be trusted to not just be in society but be around other foster kids too. How much has to happen to a child before they get to that point? If they're in the foster care system for a period of time, they have some sort of trauma. They're being

displaced, constantly moved, they're abandoned. But there's other things that are on top of that. And these kids are essentially the worst of the worst that she's describing of what they're going through. But for these kids they don't have any hope. Hope tethers us to life, otherwise what's the point? And for these kids, they don't have any hope. Hope tethers us to life. Otherwise, what's the point? And for these kids, they don't have any hope. And they're just being tossed around. All the adults in their lives don't really care about them, or they feel like they're an inconvenience.

They're just being shuffled around. And even their own parents who brought them into this world mistreat them, abused them, neglected them, molested them, you name it. Something you mentioned about Carrie, of course, is that she found faith and that was very important to her. I know it was an important part of your own process, of course. I've spoken with many people, whether Jewish or Christian or Falun Gong practitioners, or a number of different groups, where that rediscovering that connection to God or the

divine more broadly was a central part of figuring out the forgiveness thing or being able to move on. Maybe as we finish up, let's talk a little bit about that. Yeah. Last year, I was baptized. I was able to get baptized in front of my mother, my sister, my uncle, and my nephew. Unfortunately, my son wasn't able to make it. But it meant a lot to make a promise to God in front of my family. And subsequently after that, I had a conversation with my mother and she told me that when I was very young,

I would wear like these little suits and I would walk around with the Bible and I'd tell people about Jesus in scripture. And I asked her, I was like, well, what happened? Because I don't remember any of that. And she really didn't have an answer for me. If I was to try to answer that question, I think that life was happening to me and I lost focus on God.

And I was feeling more and more abandoned by my father. And I think that I also thought my heavenly father was abandoning me too. If there's a God why would these bad things happen to me so there must be no God? That was the kind of thing that would run through my head but I wasn't sure enough to say there was no God, right? So I was agnostic for many years. I hated faking that I was a Christian because I wasn't sure. I had a lot of doubt in my life about myself and about faith. And through a series of events, it's too long for this interview to go into, but I detail in the book.

But especially coming from being an IT guy to a writer and doing all these things, I just kept coming across all these Christians who would say stuff to me that didn't just sound nice, but I felt it, like I felt it in my heart. And over and over people were placing my life for a particular reason. Even getting baptized, I just started working with the person, her name is Monica Matthews, who helped to baptize me. I started working with her randomly. She had an idea and we were working together and she just happened to live in Atlanta. I was like, oh, all my family is now in Atlanta and she's an ordained

minister. And my instinct is to ask her, would she do this for me? And she said, of course I'd do that for you. And helped to plan it and even hosted the party at her house afterwards. So I just, I kept coming across all these people. I kept listening to my instincts. For many years, I didn't listen to my instincts because I had insecurity issues. I had anxiety issues. You don't trust yourself when you're in that mental state.

At this point, I wanted to tell my testimony because especially every time I see a testimony of someone coming to Christ, every single one of them started out with Christianity or something of that nature, started off believing in God and they had a broken family situation and they spent decades struggling, addiction or feeling lost or whatever it might be, and they eventually came back to Christ. But that family separation issue was what slowed them down as far as developing that relationship.

Well, and you don't dwell on this so much in the book, but how important do you think this secularism in our culture is to basically all these realities that you're describing? At the end of the day, you're going to worship something. So if there's no God that you're worshiping for, you're sacrificing for, you're developing a relationship for that is above yourself, it does not shock me when certain people replace God with themselves and say, I will do as I want to do. It's my life and I will sacrifice for no one but me. It's that kind of secularism that I am a bit worried about.

But in the same way, if it's not yourself in that particular way of just making choices for yourself, it's money, right? The idolatry of money is the idolatry of sex yourself, it's money, right? The idolatry of money, it's the idolatry of sex, all these different things, right? Go out there and sleep with whoever you want. That's what's fun. Make as much money as you want. That's the ultimate point of this life. But it's empty. It's all empty. It is miserable chasing these things. And I think it's miserable because that's not what they're here for. They're here to establish a relationship with God. Adam, this has been an absolutely

wonderful conversation. A final thought as we finish? I guess my final thought is, I went through a lot when I was a kid. And I want my story to be an example that, yes, certain things happen to you when you're a child, but when you're an adult, you make life happen for you. So it is possible to overcome these circumstances. You are of value if you were abandoned. It does not mean that you offer nothing to this world. And that's why I do think that faith is really important, because we are made in the engine of God. But say you don't want to deal with

any of that. Whatever you have going on, you can overcome those situations. You don't have to be a victim. You can always be a victor. Well, Adam Coleman, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you all for joining Adam Coleman and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.