Raising Ona

Raising Onaicon

by Emilia Ferreira

Publisher
Amplify Publishing Group
Publication
Jan 12, 2027
Format
Paperback/Softback
Illustrated
No
Price
18
Dimensions
5.5 x 8.5 x 0.47 in
ISBN
9798891388420
Pages
224
Age
Adult 18+
Category
Family & ParentingGeneral Nonfiction

Rights Sold

🌍 World Wide Rights Available

Description

This is not a book about resilience. It is about what happens before you call yourself resilient. When you are still sitting on the edge of a hospital bed, bargaining with air. When the word future feels like a language you no longer speak. My daughter was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, and nothing dramatic happened. No violins. No clarity. Just a slow, interior collapse that no one could see—including me. I did what educated people do. I researched. I optimized. I chased therapies. I learned the vocabulary of damage. I tried to outsmart fate with information. And then, years later, while studying neuroscience, something unsettling surfaced: The real injury was not only in my daughter’s brain. It was in the way my own brain had learned to interpret her existence. The words. The diagnoses. The glances. The quiet pity. They had been quietly training my nervous system to live in permanent emergency. This book is the story of realizing that caregiving is not a burden to survive, but a form of intelligence that emerges under impossible conditions—a rewiring of perception, love, vigilance, and adaptation that the world has no category for yet. It is about the moment you understand that surrender is not collapse. It is a neurological event. A shift that returns you to yourself. A HOMECOMING. If you are a caregiver, this book will feel uncomfortably familiar. If you are not, it will change how you see those who are.

Awards & Endorsements

Review
“This is a revolutionary book about embracing life’s inevitable changes and challenges. Emilia Ferreira shares profound insights into nurturing a person with special needs, encouraging us all to trust our practical instincts and adaptability, showing us how to flourish amid uncertainty with open minds. She is a gifted storyteller with a brilliant mind and heart to go with it.” —Liz Krakow, author of Happy Mother’s Daze

“At its heart, Raising Ona is about far more than motherhood. It’s about discovering who we become when life doesn’t unfold as we imagined. Emilia Ferreira beautifully explores resilience, healing, and the lifelong search for belonging, reminding us that our greatest challenges can become powerful invitations to grow. A moving and deeply hopeful book.” —Dr. Nicole LePera, author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers How to Do the Work, How to Be the Love You Seek, and Reparenting the Inner Child

“If motherhood has ever made you think, ‘HELP! I CANNOT DO THIS!’ read this book. Emilia Ferreira has insights backed by neuroscience, zero judgment, and the kind of honesty that makes you laugh, cry, and realize maybe you’re not failing at motherhood; you’re being transformed by it.” —Deva Dalporto, viral video creator @MyLifeSuckers

Author(s)

Emilia Ferreira

Emilia Ferreira is a neuroscientist, storyteller, and founder of Raising Ona, a platform dedicated to rethinking caregiving through the lens of brain science, resilience, and human connection. Her work explores how unconscious bias, stress physiology, and environment shape the way families experience care and introduces biohacking as a practical pathway to access deeper intuition and super learning—tools she argues are essential for redesigning the foundations of how we live and care. The mother of a daughter with cerebral palsy and a neurotypical son, Ferreira writes from the overlap between lived experience and neuroscience, using her own family life as a lens to question inherited narratives about independence, strength, and normalcy. She is also a film director; her feature film The Unattainable Story is distributed by Europa Films. Her previous projects have profiled figures such as the fourteenth Dalai Lama, Ozires Silva, Ernst Götsch, and Katie Fischer in educational initiatives. Ferreira was honored as VIP Woman of the Year by the National Association of Professional Women.

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