11/23/2025
Adoptees and children in care carry stories that begin before memory — stories written into their nervous systems long before they ever had words.
In my work as a psychologist, and in my own life as someone who is adopted and an adoptive mom, I’m reminded daily that adoption isn’t a single event. It’s a lifelong emotional landscape.
The 7 core issues aren’t just concepts.
They are lived experiences I see — and have felt — in real and tender ways:
• Loss, often invisible to others, but felt deeply in the heart.
• Rejection, the quiet fear that love might disappear again.
• Shame, the sense that something about me caused all of this.
• Guilt, especially when love is split across multiple families.
• Grief that returns with new meaning at each developmental stage.
• Identity questions that run deeper than “Who am I?” — they ask, “Where do I truly belong?”
• Attachment and control rhythms, shaped by early experiences of powerlessness and uncertainty.
These aren’t signs of a child being dramatic, resistant, or “too sensitive.”
They’re signs of a child trying to make sense of a beginning they didn’t choose, carrying emotions that often feel too big for their age.
When we meet them with softness…
when we honor their truth instead of minimizing it…
when we understand that their behaviors are communication, not defiance…
we help them feel safe enough to grow, to trust, to heal — and to write new chapters that belong wholly to them.
