Adult Adoptee Movement
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
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.
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 […]
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!
Every year, I struggled with this Day. Nobody knew. Not one person. Not a teacher, nor my parents, nor my extended family, nor my friends.
Recently Colin Kaepernick has spoken about his experiences growing up as an adoptee of colour. The thing which distinguishes his and so many other adoptions is that his adopters are white. The sad fact is that there are a disproportionate number of children of colour in the system and available for adoption. Take a look […]
What cannot be talked about cannot be put to rest. And if it is not, the wounds will fester from generation to generation. –Bruno Bettleheim Bettleheim could easily be talking about adoptees – I have asked myself these questions many times, with good reason: I am an adoptee and a therapist. It is every adoptee’s […]
Statement by Adult Adoptee Movement Friday 3 March, 2023 There is nothing new in the government’s response and even less of value. The only change they are proposing is one they are already consulting on. To say we have had the opportunity to have our voices and experiences heard and to then do precisely nothing […]
Plenary adoption is what is generally meant when we talk about adoption. It is the legal mechanism by which a child is placed permanently into a family and becomes the child of a new parent or parents. In the UK, the original birth information is placed on the Adoption Register, a sealed record which the […]
Genetic mirroring is being able to see yourself in the family that surrounds you because of your shared DNA, something adoptees are denied