Pulled by the Root: An Adoptee's Healing Journey From Trauma, Shame, and Loss

Adoption involves complex trauma that, if unhealed and unheard, will pulse through subsequent generations. Pulled by the Root is a raw, vivid, and cinematic account of Heidi Marble's lived experience as an adopted person. The story is led by Heidi as she pieces together her identity and comes home to her true self. Each chapter is followed by psychiatrist Alysa Zalma's commentary, which extracts the essence of what is happening psychologically and spiritually.

Pulled by the Root is an awakening not only to the experience of being adopted but also to the experience of being human.

Heidi Marble is a domestically adopted person and has an internationally acclaimed podcast focusing on issues surrounding adoption. Since publishing her first book, Waiting for Wings-A Women's Metamorphosis Through Cancer, she has given over 150 keynote addresses. She has been featured on CBS's Bay Area Sunday and ABC's Sacramento and Co., among other shows and publications. Heidi established a charitable organization that partnered with multiple hospitals and the fashion industry. Those endeavors created the opportunity for her to sit on two hospital boards: Providence Hospital in Portland, Oregon, and the NorthBay Medical Center in Vacaville, California. Her advocacy work now extends into the adoption community where she hopes to help reshape the narrative.

Dr. Zalma is a board-certified psychiatrist who received her MD from Tufts University School of Medicine. She completed her medical internship at Harvard Medical School and her residency in psychiatry at Oregon Health and Sciences University. Her areas of specialty include the psychoanalytic perspective on adoption, eating disorders, body image, trauma, depressive and anxiety spectrum disorders, and holistic approaches to mind-body and energy medicine. She is the director of the Surya Chandra Center, an Oregon-based day retreat center that promotes healing, health, and wellness through yoga, meditation, and energy medicine ceremony. She has been in private practice for over 20 years.