Community Flow Featured Guests
Every month, a new guest guides a five-day Flow inside Unfolding. Meet them here, hear why they do this work, and find your way to more of it.
Community Flows feature real people sharing their own stories across the full spectrum of the Adoptee experience. Each story reflects that individual contributor's perspective — not Unfolding's, and not the Adoptee community as a whole.
Shane Lee
Shane Lee's story began with early loss. After losing his mother at seven and growing up without his father, he experienced abuse, neglect, and a home where verbal and physical affection were often absent. Those experiences left deep abandonment wounds — shaping an inner belief that he didn't matter and a lingering question of whether he was truly loved. They also contributed to hypervigilance and a tendency to avoid confrontation, fearing the loss and rejection that conflict might bring.
Today, Shane's life reflects what can happen when we begin doing the difficult work of confronting the wounds of our past. He is a husband, father of five, and Founder & Principal of HeartShift Collective LLC, where his work centers on transformation, leadership, and helping people move toward healthier ways of living and relating. His journey is a reminder that our earliest wounds can shape us without defining us and that beyond surviving, healing is possible, and on the other side of healing, we can thrive.
Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao
Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao has spent decades reshaping how we understand and support families formed through adoption. She founded the Center for Family Connections in Cambridge and New York, along with PACT (Pre/Post Adoption Consulting and Training), and has trained clinicians, agencies, and courts across the country and around the world.
A lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, she developed the widely used Normative Crises framework, which helps professionals and families recognize the developmental stages every adoptive family moves through. She is also an adoptee herself, and that lived experience runs through everything she teaches.