Celebrating National Adoption Month

Adoption is a beautiful experience where the lens of love is expanded through choice and commitment. It’s also a deeply personal and complex experience when your identity is blended with your relationship with family, love, and biology. 

It’s National Adoption Month, and we want to take a deep dive into the complex, compassionate world of adoptees, adopters, and the role of love, family, and healing in your story. 

What makes a family?

The shape of family and what it means to make one is painted with broad and brilliant brush strokes. On every canvas, they’ll look different. 

Does a clear image come to your mind when you think about the word family? If you’re picturing your own family or a family you know, I’m with you. When I imagine what makes a family, I imagine the bountiful love in my big, multicultural family. 

For me, family is bright and variable. It’s boisterous and spans multiple generations, cultures, and even languages. It invites connection through genetics and through commitment. My family includes love, loss, marriage, growth, and grief. At the center of some of my most important family stories is adoption. As an adoptee myself and someone who carried on the tradition, I know intimately the challenges and joys that come with adoption. 

When adoption is also a part of your family story, you may have a unique experience of what makes a family. How family feels and what your journey looked like to arrive at that feeling is as special as you are. 

Attachment theory for adoptees 

Children need to feel loved and secure. They require care that is consistent and helps them to feel safe within the boundaries of their world. For children who have been adopted, these requirements of early care and love may have been compromised or erased entirely by a lack of consistent caregivers or knowledge about their biological or situational beginnings in life.  

Because your attachment style is formed in the first year of life, there are often lifelong consequences for adoptees that set the tone for relational challenges. These early attachment experiences may continue to impact the evolution of relational functioning through your developmental life stages. 

This is why we recommend therapy for all involved in the adoption experience to help establish healthy norms and channels of communication. Having an understanding of what attachment theory looks like alongside the experience of adoption can help parents to understand their adopted child more effectively. And even as an adult adoptee, you may find some clarity about the foundation of your own story when you reflect on the role of attachment in your life. 

The complexities of the adoption experience 

Much like the concept of family, the experience of adoption will be unique to every person. Still, common threads of unanswered questions and longing are tied up with a desire to feel loved and belonging. Similarly, pressures and expectations to feel grateful are juxtaposed with a genuine desire to recognize the chance to be a part of a new family. 

It may feel difficult to recognize or feel the full spectrum of your emotions about adoption when the messages so often popularized about the adoption experience are all colored in the same shade. 

Let’s consider the picture that’s painted in our world about adoption. The image is often one of gratitude and happiness. With tones of adopters as “saviors” and adoptees as “lucky,” the role of emotion in the adoption experience feels clearly defined. 

But no part of being a human is so simple. 

Adoption alters the core beginning of your life story. For some adoptees, this may feel as though it’s taken away your power to connect the dots of your most foundational being. You may feel as though someone else has authored important plot points in your story and then ripped the pages from your book. Adoption is complex, and it can be fraught with dueling emotions like betrayal and gratitude; grief and celebration; acceptance and anger. 

No matter what you’re feeling as someone who is part of a family where adoption has expanded the ways you love and feel love, your emotions are valid. Family, love, and connection are complex in their own right, and your adoption story is a core influence for them all. 

How therapy can help you process your experiences with adoption 

When you find a therapist who can sit with you in the space you’re currently telling your life story from, it’s priceless. There are many ways that, with a safe and well-matched therapist, you can find growth and healing through therapy to move through the residual impact of adoption on your life. 

Your adoption story may benefit from different types of therapy. EMDR for adoptees is a particularly excellent option for those who need or want to reprocess memories that you can’t talk about. By skipping over the talking part to take control of your story in the present day, you can avoid emotional uncertainty. 

For other families and individuals, you might feel most supported through narrative therapy that allows you to reauthor your story. You can use these sessions to take back the stories in your life that cause pain or hold trauma and shape your future through the lens of your own honest power. 

Whether you choose talk therapy, trauma therapy, solution-focused work, or some combination of these or other methods, the important part is that you feel seen. This National Adoption Month, we want to invite you to look at the messy, complex, incredible power of adoption. Each person’s experience is uniquely reflective of how many different ways these stories may look. 

If you’re looking for a therapist who can meet you where you are and walk along your unique experience with adoption, reach out to me today. You are important, and so is the truth of your adoption story in this month and every month.