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Adoptee Voices Adoption Lifelong Impact

Adoptee Voices 2023

I had a ‘good’ adoption but I hate adoption. I hate the sense of not belonging of always being outside/other. I resent the way non adoptees usually view adoption. I wish that I’d had support from someone with insight to work through my issues instead of finding the primal wound in my forties and realising that no not everybody feels or thinks that way about things. It totally screws with your head and relationships, definitely your relationships!

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Lifelong Impact Mental health Support Services

Adoption, Brian, and Me

Male adoptees living in the UK, and perhaps living with mental health issues, often put a brave face on things to stay strong and not show the cracks in our minds on the outside. We drink with the lads, we put up shelves, we are the strong ones, and we are the ones people lean on for support, we are not about to start asking for support ourselves for god’s sake, right?!

Categories
Lifelong Impact Personal reflection Reunion

Long Lost Family: an adoptee’s view

But there is a price for this help. Always a price. And that price is having your life put on show, having your complex, raw, unprocessed emotions filmed, Davina leaning in.

Categories
Personal reflection Reunion

A sense of belonging

I can go back to the first house I was taken to when I was adopted, not far from where I now live. The house I grew up in is in the village where I still live today. This is part of my jigsaw.

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Intercountry Adoption Lifelong Impact Personal reflection Support Services

A match made in hell for adoptees?

Let’s remember that we were children but children grow up into adults and those adults want answers as to who they are and where they came from. Coram IAC owes it to us and our next generation. We are not ornaments or souvenirs, we are people with a past history and an origin story that belongs to us.

Categories
Adoption Personal reflection Religion

Adopted into Christianity: A personal reflection

photograph of an open bible
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

In my Christian adoption, it was echoed at every stage: I was chosen not only to be adopted by a Christian couple but also chosen to be welcomed into something bigger than myself.

Categories
Adoption Lifelong Impact

Adoption: the case for an apology

We need the apology, we need the recognition, we need the acknowledgment that what was done to us was so wrong and we need help: we need help to heal, we need help to get our voices heard and we need the government to take accountability and to recognise the role they played

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Birth family Intercountry Adoption Personal reflection

On screen: Intercountry adoption

Freddie’s inability to communicate her true feelings echoes that of us all. We are silenced, unable to articulate the trauma that lives in our bodies. We as intercountry adoptees are made to feel grateful for being saved from a culture that is deemed inferior to western society. However, those same western societies see us as different. This is the paradox of being an intercountry adoptee. We don’t belong to either society and never will.

Categories
Mental health News

It’s ok to take a break – we are!

15th to 21st May is Mental Health Awareness Week 2023. This year the theme is Anxiety. And for us adoptees? Are we more prone to anxiety? I would say possibly, yes. We confront issues that the general population do not – we are faced with issues of identity, loss of genetic mirroring, our ancestry, our […]

Categories
Adoption Personal reflection

Mother’s Day Reading – Maggie Lyng

Beautiful reading from Maggie Lyng on Mother’s Day from the perspective as an adoptee. This is published in the loss section of A Page from my Life Thank you Maggie!