Our need for healing is a hard sell to people not living in Adoptee Land. What could we possibly have to heal from? Everyone’s seen Annie get adopted by Daddy Warbucks, or known an adoptee who has nothing but wonderful things to say about adoption, or watched a movie or heard a sermon about the beauty of adoption. Additionally, few in the adoption industry want to discuss the need for healing. To them it’s like selling a car and telling people upfront about the trouble they will likely face with it at some point. No one does that, they just focus on the beauty of the new car. No reason to spoil the buyer’s unrealistic expectations. This car—or in my case, child—will be the cure for all that ails you. 

Often, adoptive parents are obstacles to adoptees understanding the need for healing. After the trauma of being unable to conceive a child and the months of vetting and payments they endure prior to adoption, they must be terrified to admit that anything could possibly go wrong. Then there’s us, the adoptees. Having already been relinquished once, most of us are doing our best to blend in and not cause a stir. With all of this going on it’s not surprising that from the outside looking in, adoption looks great. 

In my own story there are many examples of this dysfunction at play. I remember being tested for special ed classes in elementary school only to be told I was “off the charts smart and just bored.” But strangely nobody suggested I go to advanced classes, and if I was so smart why was I struggling with basic academics? 

Fast forward to my junior year of high school when I found myself in a therapist’s office. This visit was brought on by increased arguing with my mom and me “acting out” in what I now see as normal teenage ways. I looked at ink blots and explained what I saw and then pictures where I had to create a story about what was going on and what was going to happen next. At the end of the session, I was ushered back out to my parents, and we never talked about the results or why I never returned to the therapist. 

As a late discovery adoptee, I look back and wonder if my parents told the professionals they sought advice from that I was adopted. Even as an adult in therapy, I couldn’t see the problem clearly until my therapist asked me to describe myself as a kid. It took a while to come up with an answer that I felt described me well. What I finally settled on was, “I was kind of a dick.” No surprise, she wanted to unpack that statement a little more. I explained that as a kid I just never could seem to get with the family program. I wasn’t good at the things my parents were good at, I wasn’t in good shape like they were, I wasn’t one of the cool popular kids, I had more than my share of rebellious moments, and even as I got older I had very little interest in most things they enjoyed. It shocked me when she asked, “Do you think it was hard for you to get with the family program because it wasn’t your program?” It was the first time someone ever suggested to me that my lack of commonality with my family wasn’t my issue. I was who I was supposed to be, I just didn’t know the truth about who I was. She went on to dig into my rebellions and explained that fitting a square peg in a round hole isn’t impossible, it just requires something to break to make the two fit together. 

This is where my healing began: Understanding as an adoptee that some things were just harder and that wasn’t a comment on my abilities or personality. Instead, it was a reality of adoption. As I’ve worked forward from that session, I’ve learned to have more grace for myself and to lean into things that I used to see as not fitting the family mold but now see as fitting into my own mold. Leaning into my innate passions late in life comes with its own set of struggles. The main one being time. There are so many things I’ve ignored for decades, I can’t decide where to begin. I pick up one thing only to find myself wondering if I should be doing two or three other things. Then the decision-paralysis sets in and I ponder over what to do until there’s little time to do anything. But I know I’m healing because in those moments when I settle on one thing, I feel nothing but peace and happiness.