The Adoption Trauma Spectrum

10/03/2026

So proud to have been included on this chapter. Learning from Joan Blakey remains the privilege of a lifetime.

09/21/2026

Thank you, Concerned United Birthparents, for bringing awareness to all sides of the constellation.

4 Birthfathers will share their stories on Friday morning October 9th at this years CUB Retreat in Seattle. We rarely get to really understand birthfathers experiences of adoption loss, grief, legal roadblocks, open adoption, closed adoptions, being found through DNA, reunions, coming out of the fog, or the challenges and complications of integrating families... Join us!
https://concernedunitedbirthparents.org/cub-retreat-2026

09/19/2026

One constant in the interviews we’ve been conducting is the importance of the adoptee community, how nice it is to have peers who “just get it”.

If you’re looking for a good way to connect with other adoptees, check out The Adoptee Mentoring Society! You can schedule with Jenny or any other mentor for an individual or lounge session with up to five other adoptees.

No clinical advice, no prescriptions, no expectations, and no gas lighting - just connection.

09/14/2026

Let's stop calling the system broken.

What my research keeps showing me is that adoption and child welfare policy — sealed records, the private adoption industry, all of it — was built to wreck the very people it claimed to save. Not by accident. By design. It was engineered for a world where information could be controlled: where a child's identity and lineage could be contained, rewritten, and never questioned. The original birth certificate sealed away. A single authorized story, handed to the adoptee as the only version of themselves they were ever allowed to hold.

That world is over. At-home DNA testing kits and open data have made those secrets impossible to keep. The assumptions the whole thing rested on are simply gone.

662 adult adoptees told us what that looks like: honesty instead of "blank slate." History as a right, not a favor. Support that lasts a lifetime instead of ending with the paperwork. Care that centers them instead of gaslighting.

So the question I want us to sit with isn't how we patch what's falling apart. It's what we build next, with purpose - something meant to hold people, not process them.

In a country where fetal personhood is argued in earnest — where the rights of an embryo, of a frozen egg, are debated as a matter of grave moral urgency — surely we can extend some fraction of that concern to adoptees, asking only to know where they came from.

— Ashley

09/10/2026

I read somewhere that today is World Su***de Prevention Day. I double checked the date, and sure enough, it is.

Rarely a day goes by that I don't ask myself, at least once, what I could have done differently, but the reality is, it's too late.

What I know for sure is that love is not enough. We cannot love the trauma or pain out of a person, we cannot take that burden, but we can share it. We can walk alongside and share the weight.

Today, reach out to those you love, those who are struggling with mental health issues, homelessness, substance use, relationship and financial stress - check in the moment they cross your mind; don't put it of until...

And check in on those left behind. A decision that was not ours leaves a mark, soul deep. It never leaves us.

Help is available 24/7 - To speak with someone today call 988
Su***de and Crisis Lifeline - English, Spanish

"It's okay to look back, just don't stare."

09/03/2026

Adoption is not the simple, always-good story we've been sold, and neither is pregnancy. We're adoptee-centered, and these are the beliefs that guide our work, from believing adoptees when they name their trauma, to keeping families together instead of separating them, to real reproductive support so no one is ever forced into an impossible choice.

Swipe through, and share if this resonates. Awareness is growing — and change is already in motion. 💜

09/03/2026

If you are looking for adoptee-centered community and mentorship, look no further. What Angela Tucker has created in the Adoptee Mentoring Society is a healing space for adoptees, by adoptees. Learn more at adopteementorship.org

09/02/2026

Edit: This is not my study. This is an IRB approved PhD candidate dissertation study. Contact information for the principal investigator and faculty advisor’s are below. I encourage you to reach out if you have questions about methodology, positionality, or any other study specific questions.

Hello all! Adoptee-led and adoptee-centered research is on the rise and it absolutely thrills my soul to support my peers. Check out the ongoing study below titled "The Adoptee Experience: Ethnic-Racial Socialization, Racial Discrimination, and Ethnic-Racial-Cultural Identity" and the introduction written by the study's principal investigator, Allison Fila. Use the QR code to enter the study.

Hello!

My name is Allison Fila, and I am a PsyD doctoral student at Northwest University. I am in the midst of collecting data for my dissertation titled, "The Adoptee Experience: Ethnic-Racial Socialization, Racial Discrimination, and Ethnic-Racial-Cultural Identity". I myself am an adoptee, who has traversed life with many unique experiences, and I want to hear the stories of others.

The purpose of my study is to examine the differences in ethnic-racial socialization in upbringing, experienced racial discrimination, and ethnic-racial-cultural identity between transracially adopted and same-race adopted individuals.

I am searching for participants who are 18+ years or older and who were adopted as minors. Interested individuals can access this brief, 10-15 minute survey via this link or QR code. The entire survey is anonymous.

If anyone has any questions about this study, please contact me, the researcher, at [email protected]. If you have further questions, please contact my faculty advisor, Dr. Nikki Johnson at [email protected]. You may also contact the Chair of Northwest University IRB, Professor Cheri Goit, at [email protected] or (425) 889-5762.

05/10/2026

Mother’s Day holds so much - pain, grief, joy, rage, relief. It’s a real beast.

For all of you, the mothers, the motherless, those estranged, those who never got to hold your mothers close, be kind to yourselves.

04/23/2026

Families in the US face an uphill battle as surveillance compounds and reproductive rights are curtailed. Add to that the broad push for a return to white Christian nationalism along with the surge in white saviorism, coupled with the manosphere and trad wife movements, and it’s hard to imagine any scenario in which supports exist for children born from unplanned pregnancies to be parented by their first parents.

The regression of our elected leaders into eugenics, forced family separation, a sense of control and ownership of women and children’s bodies, and the general lack of compassion for human suffering compounds this issue. Most recently, RFK suggested that Black children are violent (due to SSRI rx) and should be sent to “wellness farms” where they can be reparented.

Who would reparent those Black children?

NOT their parents.

We are all frogs and the water is boiling.

Today, adoption is a billion-dollar industry, with an estimated 1–2 million people waiting to adopt at a given time. Cutting this demand would require making adoption, as it is currently practiced, socially and politically stigmatized. Reimagining adoption in the West requires confronting the legal infrastructure that allows for children to be purchased through a private market and families to be policed by the state.

However, the orphan-rescue story has considerable cultural and political purchase, and adoption occupies a nearly unparalleled position in American politics; the Congressional Coalition on Adoption is one of the largest bipartisan, bicameral caucuses in Congress. Adoption serves both sides of the political spectrum: It maintains the right’s ideal of the heteronormative family structure at the same time that it flatters the left’s commitment to the nontraditional “chosen family.”

Consequently, the US is becoming more “adoption-friendly,” and with a capitalist economy that produces widespread deprivation and intense demand for parentage, paired with eroding reproductive rights, it seems likely that family separation will continue, if not expand substantially, in the coming decades. To undermine this deeply entrenched structure requires, in the first instance, seeding a politics of refusal: a disorientation from the idea that there exists a right to parenthood regardless of the means required to secure it, and a rejection of the consumer demand that considers other people’s children as the answer to the desire for parenthood. Read more from M Ceniza:
http://thenation.com/article/society/us-adoption-imperialism-joshua-mast/