Dear Friends,
This year has been challenging for everyone, but we feel we have made substantive progress in providing information and resources, engagement and connections for people with what we regard the existential replacement child condition.
We are extremely grateful to our Advisory Board Members: Abigail Brenner, MD, Patti Hawn, Robi Ludwig, PsyD, Sarah Vollmann, MPS, ATR-BC, LICSW. Thanks also to Honorary Advisory Board members: Albert C. Cain, Ph.D, and Andrea Sabbadini, Dott., C. Psychol.
We are especially appreciative for your contributions and participation in our community.
Here are some of the 2021 developments on the Replacement Child Forum:
Website Development
- We have been lucky to have video recordings of several sessions of teaching on the replacement child condition from our Co-Founder Kristina Schellinski.
- Our blog has been active with contributions from our growing community.
- We link to interviews with our co-founders, magazine features as well as our webinars, and interviews with mental health professionals.
- Our resource links have been enhanced, also thanks to our improved search function for easy access to the treasure trove of information and resources on the site.
In case you need a little lift for your spirit in these difficult times and to see the light shine through the darkness, we invite you to browse through the replacementchildforum.com posts over this past year!
You will find insights and images, letters and blog entries, videos, book and article links.
We thank you all for helping to create this community!
So many of you have contributed your expertise and your experience generously from your heart, so that we could share it with the wonderful people joining us in our growing community.
Many of you have participated in our newest endeavor in 2021: our global webinars, marked by an extraordinary atmosphere of welcoming, trusting and sharing offering help to many who found thus access to this precious feeling: I am not alone. The first global webinar of adult replacement children and therapists took place in March. This zoom meeting gave us a sense of wonder. We are a community of adult replacement children, joining efforts from around the world, to come and feel seen and heard, sharing so many aspects we seem to have in common.
The second global webinar on Identity Issues in April helped us express our concerns and identify the potential we each have to still discover the depth of our original personality.
And the global webinar on creativity surprised all of us with such rich offerings of dreams and music, painting and writing, floral art, puppet-making and sculpture. We were nourished in the spirit and encouraged to create, to give self-expression to our life force.
A video interview on iHeart Radio with Xen Shams and the three co-founders, Judy Mandel, Rita Battat, and Kristina Schellinski discussed how to cope with a pregnancy after loss and how millennial moms could help prevent the ‘making’ of replacement children.
And in the latest video posted just before this year draws to a close, our Co-Founder Kristina Schellinski and Henry Abramovitch, author of Brothers and Sisters, Myth and Reality, shared their dialogue from a global webinar for mental health professionals from around the world. All of these can be viewed under (link to videos).
It was only a very short time ago that there was no recognition of what it meant for an individual living a life as a replacement child, much less, understanding the many possible repercussions of the replacement child role later in life. For many of us, it was many years of just feeling alone and different. The root was elusive.
How wonderful that there is now a worldwide community of us, gaining clarity from each other’s experiences and exploring our own unique place on this planet and helping each other on this journey of discovering ourselves.
We are overjoyed by your willingness to share your experience and the generosity of your contributions as we continue to grow, flourish and expand our reaching out to replacement children around the world with a view of contributing to a healing process.
May your year be filled with kindness, happy moments and unexpected blessings, with good health in body, mind and soul for you and all you love.
We look forward to travelling with you on the road of consciousness in 2022.
Wishing you a good beginning!
Judy, Kristina and Rita