In her new podcast, Everything’s Relative, writer and therapist Eve Sturges talks with individuals whose lives have been upended by DNA surprises.

She sits down, for example, with Joy, who was told at age 10 she had been donor conceived and who, growing up, had little if any interest in finding out about her birthfather. But when facts later emerged to demonstrate how much like him she was, she became driven to learn everything she could about him—a process she likened to dating—and thus developed a profound relationship with a man she’d never known, the birthfather who died many years earlier. As Sturges observed, Joy didn’t know she was missing pieces until the pieces fell into place.

And there’s Mesa, who, before learning that she was an NPE (not parent expected), had had a tumultuous childhood and already was no stranger to trauma. Her discovery triggered a bewildering identity crisis; suddenly she had a Hispanic heritage about which she knew nothing. Finding out that she had no connection to the family she’d grown up thinking were “her people” and wanting to connect with her biological family turned her life upside down. In situations such as these, Sturges observed, where NPEs reach out and connect with their biological families, they in some ways also must become disconnected from the families they’ve known.

One guest, who chose to remain anonymous, shared the heartache of learning that the birthfather he never knew had known about him and had always suspected that he was his father. And although “Anonymous” was able to meet a half-sister and learn about his deceased father, nothing could quite compensate him for all he’d lost. “I can’t hug him,” he said. “I can’t talk to him. I can’t look at him.”

Sturges doesn’t control the conversations, add narration, or overproduce. Rather than interview them formally, she lets them reveal their stories, prompting occasionally, chiming in from time to time, and— remember she’s a therapist—asking guests how the experiences make them feel. For the earliest episodes she found guests who lived in her Southern California locale and taped the podcasts in their homes, creating a casual, intimate atmosphere that gives listeners the impression they’re eavesdropping on a couple of friends chatting over a cup of coffee.

In these freewheeling talks, her guests let loose, acknowledging the gamut of emotions provoked by their NPE journeys. When the DNA discoveries were recent, the emotions can be raw, and when the guests have had some time to absorb, there’s reflection. Sturges and her podcast participants make no effort to tidy their thoughts or make them more palatable to those who may not understand. They say it as they feel it. These are conversations about shame, anger, betrayal, frustration, rage, grief, and even, sometimes, joy. There are tears and laughter, irreverence and profanity—all inspired by what’s described as the “mind fuck” that is the NPE experience.

Still in its first season, Everything’s Relative provides a community and platform from which NPEs and others affected by their discoveries can share their stories. People who’ve only recently learned of the change in their genetic identity may think their experiences are unique and feel extraordinarily isolated and lonely. Listening to the podcast, they quickly find they’re not alone, that their feelings and reactions are often much the same as those of other NPEs.

Sturges sums it up this way: Everything’s Relative is “where we talk about all the unexpected shit that happens when you mail in a DNA test.” And while that sounds lighthearted, these conversations fill an aching need and serve a serious purpose. As one guest said, “Listening to the podcast makes me feel normal.” It’s validating, she added, to know that someone else is going through the same craziness. Krista, an NPE and fellow therapist, tells Sturges, “The more we share our stories, the more we normalize them—as abnormal as they are—the easier it will be for those that come behind us.”

Here, Sturges talks about how the podcast came about and what she hopes it will achieve.Professionally I am holding back on the details of my story because—trust me, it’s a good story with at least one extremely interesting character—I’d like to explore different avenues of production resources to tell my story and I don’t want to give it all away just yet. It might be a book, a separate podcast, or a film project someday. I can’t give away all the spoilers in my first season!

My story isn’t over—my life is still happening, and the layers of this discovery are still unpeeling. There are very real and alive people involved, including the mom and dad that raised me, the siblings I grew up with, and the new siblings who have appeared. As I navigate my experience, I am also navigating a lot of relationships and different emotions and reactions from the people in my life. I’m approaching the details of my story delicately because I am giving the people I love a little bit of time to catch up and process their own experience within this journey.

I talk about this here and there in the podcast, but one of the challenges of this type of discovery is the time-consuming nature of it. I would love to visit my newfound siblings. I have a lot of questions for them! They live all over the country. Organizing a trip like that costs a lot of time and money, not to mention emotional resources and the logistical organizing of school and employment. I’m not in a place to drop everything as it is and dive deep into another world. I have three children, a husband, and an active professional and social life in Los Angeles. I struggle enough to find time for my everyday existence, let alone a whole new world of people and histories that I didn’t know about. I hope that doesn’t sound cold, but I have to take care of myself and my loved ones first.In spring 2018, a man reached out to my husband with details of my early life that were eerily specific. He claimed to believe he was my biological father. Having never questioned my paternity before, I figured the best thing to do was a DNA test. It confirmed that this man was correct. A whole history I had never known was revealed to me about my parents’ early 20s and the first years of their marriage.

This affected me in all of the ways that NPEs describe: I felt shocked, confused, angry, and dizzy. I understood the phrase “walking around in a daze” more than ever before. Nothing has changed and yet everything feels different. It’s affected my relationship with my parents the most deeply. We are all struggling to reconcile our different perspectives with one another. We have tried reasoning with one another by talking, fighting, emailing, letter writing, and lots of crying. Each of us has our own journey of grief to explore. Therapy is helping each of us individually. I like to think that our family love is stronger than this unexpected variable, but time will tell.My parents and siblings have always known about the podcast; they are supportive but not exactly enthusiastic. We have never seen eye-to-eye about what should or shouldn’t be kept private.It’s true. I have not yet tested with a mail-in kit like 23andMe or Ancestry. When the man who turned out to be my biological father contacted me, I arranged a test with a company that focuses on the legality of DNA and not so much the community-building. I went to a facility where a nurse roughly scrubbed the inside of my cheeks with Q-tips and shipped them to a lab for me. I received a letter in the mail confirming our relationship 99.9999%. I then did it again with the man who raised me, and the results were 0%.

I intend to do the tests soon, though. I want to learn more about the ins and outs of what people are talking about, and I also suspect there will be more surprises in my genetics and my heritage. It seems like the least I could do, considering my podcast!The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. I think the episodes offer intriguing stories to people who are not in the NPE world, and they offer solace to those who are. There’s no real way for me to know, but I like to think that these stories help listeners make their own decisions about how to handle an NPE reality.Every guest has thanked me for giving them the opportunity to tell their story. I think the “regular world” underestimates how much pressure there is to keep quiet about our experiences. Right now, almost everyone comes to an NPE discovery feeling isolated and confused. By participating in the movement to be seen and heard, my guests feel empowered. It feels good to be of service; they all express the hope that this project helps others feel less alone and less silenced.I strongly believe that sharing stories is a part of creating community, and a part of creating history.My biggest blind spot was the world of fertility clinics, sperm donation, and assumed anonymity. Episode five sheds some light on the subject, but I suspect it’s only the tip of the iceberg. I’m fascinated by the different players involved and the psychology behind each person’s actions. Another surprise has been the vast difference between each individual’s personal beliefs about the definition of family and what this new technology is doing to affect that. More than anything, everyone wants to feel like they belong somewhere, but the ins and outs of how that feeling is achieved is different for everyone based on a plethora of factors.More than anything I think people are struggling with the dishonesty of their parents. I think this speaks to the overwhelming belief (or misbelief) that we know exactly who our parents are. Learning that there’s a lifetime of choices we weren’t previously aware of is unsettling. Parents are the first people to shape our world; some disruption of that shape is a normal part of growing up, individuating, and developing empathy. An NPE-type discovery, however, can completely destroy the shape. It’s too much for a lot of people to handle.I imagine I’ll stick with the NPE and DNA-discovery topics for now, but I’m open to the show evolving as stories come to me. I’d really like to expand beyond the person who directly had the NPE, though, because I want to explore all the perspectives. I’d like to talk with mothers about their decisions to keep paternity a secret from their children, to men who didn’t or did know they had children out in the world, to men who contributed sperm for money in college but are now being approached by adult children asking for answers. I want to hear from every person involved.Yes, I work with genetic identity issues, and it’s almost entirely due to my personal experience. Also there are so many testimonies online from NPEs who have had bad experiences with therapists who don’t understand what they’re going through. I’m determined to be a better therapist for the growing NPE world and also to educate the mental health community about this tidal wave of need that’s headed its way.There are very few in-person support groups for NPEs, although there’s a growing need. I will start a support group this fall that I will facilitate as a therapist. I am also available for individual therapy, but the group offers people an opportunity to share their experiences and learn from each other.I started exploring the idea of a podcast within a support group on Facebook. I asked the community to help come up with a title, and I posted updates as the project came together. Throughout that process, people volunteered to participate. I kept the first handful of interviews local because I wanted to meet in person and have the experience of talking face to face. I’ve got the technology now to interview people from anywhere though, so the circle is expanding. I am always actively seeking new stories!Subscribe to Everything’s Relative on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. And Look for Sturges on Facebook and on Twitter @evesturges.

By B.K. JacksonWhen he was only 25 years old and working as a speechwriter for Barack Obama, Adam Frankel learned a searing truth about himself—one his mother intended him to live his days without knowing.

Secrets, he says, were “something of a family tradition.” His mother, who suffered from an ill-defined mental illness and who at least once tried to take her own life, refused in his youth to tell him why she and his father divorced before he was five years old.  As an adult, he pushed back on his mother’s reluctance to share this family history, until finally the truth came out: his dad was not his biological father.

“I wanted to climb out of my skin,” he recalls. “I felt disembodied. I looked down at my legs, arms, hands. All of it suddenly felt so unfamiliar, like I was inhabiting a stranger’s body.” He was, in that instant, “undone.”

“The Survivors: A Story of War, Inheritance, and Healing” traces Frankel’s agonizing quest to find and come to terms with his truth—to heal what he describes as a rupture in his heart.

The reverberations of the revelation were shattering. His mother’s betrayal, coupled with her refusal to understand its effect on him, strained their relationship, which led to acrimonious encounters with extended family members. Unaware of the truth, they perceived his anger toward his mother as mistreatment and berated him repeatedly for being something less than a good son. Out of loyalty to them and his parents, he kept his mother’s secret from them and “took it on the chin.” More tormenting, he kept the secret from his loving dad and paternal grandparents—his fear not so much that they wouldn’t still love him, but something subtler, that they might look at him somewhat differently. All this, combined with the stress of staring down an identity crisis for which he was wholly unprepared, took a toll on Frankel, disrupting his interpersonal relationships, causing insomnia, ratcheting up rage and anxiety, and—as panic attacks and inexplicable physical symptoms arose—threatening his health.

Like Dani Shapiro’s “Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love,” Frankel’s “The Survivors” is an exquisitely wrought, heartrending memoir that lays bare the heartache generated by the discovery that one isn’t who one thought oneself to be. These books—perhaps unsurpassable yet no doubt the vanguard of an inevitable wave of literary memoirs about genetic identity crises—are aching, penetrating self-portraits of individuals overwhelmed by a sense of betrayal, whose identities were fractured in an instant, and who lived both with the agonizing pain of discovery and the unbearable weight of secrets.

While misattributed parentage is front and center in “Inheritance,” it’s only part of the larger story of “The Survivors.” Frankel takes a longer view and focuses his memoir not only on his own discovery, but also on a cataract of trauma that began in another country, in another time, and cascaded from generation to generation. He begins by writing about his maternal grandparents—his beloved Bubbie and Zayde—and their harrowing experiences as Holocaust survivors. His grandfather, who witnessed unspeakable brutality and more than once used subterfuge to save his own father from certain death in concentration camps, survived Dachau. And his grandmother spent much of the war years in the woods near Poland with a brigade of Jewish resistance fighters. They emigrated to America and settled in Connecticut, all the while guarding a secret concerning their own identities.

Years later, as Frankel struggled to make sense of his mother’s illness, her behaviors, and her treachery in light of his knowledge about the cataclysm of the Holocaust and the fraught environment in which she had been raised, he began to see the intrusion of the past into the present and followed the tender threads that stitch one trauma to another and another over decades. Looking into the eyes of his grandfather, he asked himself, “Was the trauma that he and Bubbie endured all those years ago at the root of everything? Had it in some way contributed to the troubles that had plagued my mother all her life? Somehow created the circumstances that were wreaking such havoc in my life?” He sought answers to these questions, researching and interviewing experts in the fields of PTSD, epigenetics, and intergenerational trauma, asking “Had the Holocaust left some sort of genetic stamp on my family? On me?”

Frankel’s elegant prose renders truth into beauty and elevates pain to art as he explores how we carry with us, often unknowingly, the pain, shame, and sorrows of our progenitors. He laments the fact that the stories of the elders, particularly those of Holocaust survivors, are becoming lost to time. “And yet,” he says “something of history’s witnesses remains even after they depart. Something of what they endured outlives them. Their trauma does not, like them, turn to dust. It is bequeathed to us, their descendants, a part of our inheritance.”

While we may stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, we also carry forth their wounds and scars, and we’re faced with the burden of how to integrate inherited traumas into our lives.

“The Survivors” is a curative for the notion that intergenerational trauma is inevitably crippling, that it somehow strips us of free will and tethers us to the suffering of our ancestors. Ultimately, the book is extraordinarily hopeful. Frankel assesses the cost of the secrets kept from him and the secret he kept and lands at two inescapable truths—families can be the source of both the deepest pain and the most profound relief, and the wounds inflicted by family can also be healed by family.

The book’s takeaway, particularly for anyone affected by misattributed parentage, is that forgiveness and self-expression are the twin paths to healing. Ingrained in him, Frankel came to understand, were not merely his ancestors’ traumas, but also their hope and resilience, which led him back to himself. “I’d begun to hear my own inner voice,” he says, “clear and unmistakable, whispering to me once again.”

For more about Frankel and “The Survivors,” look for a video on the homepage sidebar.