Emma Stevens

Choosing to Breath

What if living a life true to yourself meant unraveling everything you were taught to believe? In this powerful continuation of her story, Emma Stevens returns to The Gathering Place and shares the hard-earned wisdom that comes from confronting loss, identity, and truth. As an adult adoptee raised to feel grateful rather than grieve, Emma was shaped by silence, expectation, and trauma. But deep within, resilient parts of her fought to be heard. Through raw and reflective storytelling, she explores what it takes to stop merely surviving and start living intentionally. Her journey is a call to anyone who’s ever felt like they were performing a version of themselves for others. Honest, insightful, and deeply human—this memoir is an invitation to breathe, to question, and to reclaim the life that is truly yours.

The Gathering Place

The true story of when Emma learns her birth mother wrote and signed a letter about her to the adoption agency, she knew she had to have that letter if she were to ever discover her birth mother’s true identity. Her birth mother had used a fictitious name at the maternity home and used an assumed name on Emma’s original birth certificate. Emma takes bold measures to get ahold of that letter and start solving the puzzle that is her life.

Emma was adopted into a family that expected her to conform to their expectations of who she should be — but she did not arrive as a blank slate. Unable to see that her relinquishment and adoption were not her fault, her soul split into pieces. In order to put the pieces back together, Emma embarks on multiple journeys and adventures towards both solving the mystery of who she is, and healing from the pain of separation from her origins.

Emma powerfully describes a childhood and life profoundly affected by not knowing her true self. Has she ever known her true self?

It’s a story of inner strength and perseverance where Emma welcomes all her parts of self to feel valued and seen. She fights to reunite her fractured soul through love and acceptance of herself, and of others. In a meditative and surreal state, under and around a big old oak tree with a simple wood-seated and rope swing attached, she accepts the invitation of integrating herself. And this reunion all takes place at The Gathering Place.

A Fire Is Coming

The true story of when Emma Stevens learned her new next-door neighbor was a psychologist, she innocently asked about how to find a therapist for her own issues. Dr. Carol Brenner decided to accept her as a patient. Against a backdrop of the Laguna Beach Fire, the insidious drama unfolds as Emma finds herself enmeshed in an unhealthy dependency on her therapist, who not only fostered this dependence but also used it to dominate and control her.

How could this happen? Emma explores how having been relinquished at birth, put up for adoption, and raised by parents who did not treat her well, may have created the fertile ground for an experienced predator-super-therapist to exploit and indoctrinate her.

A Fire is Coming is a page-turning psychological nightmare, as Emma tries to escape the predators and narcissists in her life—who have their own egoic plan. Not only does Emma escape, she takes a hard look back at how and why it happened. Emma’s unflinching narrative serves as a cautionary tale to anyone who might find themselves a potential victim of an exploitative therapist or vindication for anyone who has had an adverse experience with an unethical professional.