I was adopted at 13 days old and am the second generation of adoption in my family. From the very beginning of our relationship, adoption was something my mother shared openly and celebrated with me. There were poems in my baby book, letters written by my birth mother during the adoption process, and honest conversations about the circumstances that led to my adoption. I grew up knowing my story.
Because my mother was adopted herself, she also understood something important early on: love and transparency do not erase loss. As much care and openness as she offered, she knew adoption is still a traumatic experience. Adoption often comes with the need to process acceptance and rejection, to make sense of what family means, and to navigate the ongoing questions of nurture versus nature. For me, that also included identity questions — I am a mixed-race person raised by a white mother — and the lifelong work of understanding what is inherited, what is learned, and what is absent.
For many families, including queer families, adoption is a meaningful and intentional way to build a family. It can be rooted in deep love, commitment, and hope. At the same time, adoption is often framed primarily through celebration, gratitude, and “happy endings,” leaving little room to acknowledge the quieter, more complex realities that adoptees may carry. Some of those impacts are obvious, while others — like heightened sensitivity to rejection or attachment — may take years to recognize and unpack.
At QueerPsych, we believe affirming care begins with honesty and nuance. As a platform dedicated to helping queer people find queer-affirming mental health professionals, we aim to create space for conversations that honor complexity rather than simplify it. To understand why adoption benefits from a trauma-informed approach, it’s essential to begin with how adoption is experienced by the child — a perspective that clinicians like licensed art therapist Hannah O’Rear help illuminate.
Adoption as Trauma: A Clinical Perspective
The following perspective is from licensed art therapist Hannah O’Rear.
Because of the nature of adoption, children become separated from their first parents, oftentimes placed in orphanages, the foster care system, or a new environment in general. An initial trauma occurs when the crucial attachment process is disrupted for whatever reason and the child is unable to continue bonding with their primary parent.
Being placed in orphanages and the foster care system is often traumatic because these systems are typically understaffed and underresourced. Those in charge of caring for the children, by no fault of their own, are unable to meet all of their many needs. Not to mention, there are many who exploit these systems leading to children experiencing traumatic experiences such as abuse, neglect, and extreme instability.
When there is such a disruption of attachment through separation, followed by consistent unmet needs from an unstable environment, insecure attachment can form. When a child cannot form secure attachment with caregivers, this can challenge their sense of safety in relationships for the rest of their lives.
Finally the profound loss of family history, culture, and connection is often traumatic for adoptees from childhood through adulthood. Depending on how much information and connection adoptees have with their first families, this can deeply impact the identity development process.
As someone who was adopted at thirteen days old, I recognize that my experience comes with a great deal of privilege. I was not placed in foster care or an orphanage, as my mother was, and I did not experience prolonged instability early in life. Still, even those first thirteen days without a consistent caregiver meant there was no single person to respond to my needs, comfort me, or help regulate my nervous system during a critical period of attachment formation.
Now in my mid-thirties, and after being in and out of therapy for over a decade, I am only recently finding language for a kind of quiet deprivation I carried without realizing it. For a long time, the story I told myself was that I was “lucky,” that my existence should be framed through gratitude alone. What I am currently working to unlearn is the belief that my existence was not enough to keep my birth mother present — even when I know, intellectually, that this was not the reality of my adoption.
Knowing the facts does not always change how the body holds experience. While this is not true for every adoptee, feelings of loss, rejection, or absence can surface later in life in unexpected ways. For adoptees who experience longer separations or prolonged instability, I can only imagine how much heavier that imprint may be. Every adoption story is different, and holding space for that nuance is essential.
What Adoptive Parents Need to Understand Early
Hannah O’Rear on what adoptive parents — including queer couples — should understand from the beginning.
When it comes to adoptive parents in general I think a very clear understanding of attachment is crucial to inform what their child is experiencing and guide their parenting. I encourage adoptive parents to seek their own therapy to become familiar or heal from the ways their own childhoods may impact their parenting. I also recommend enriching the adopted child’s life through building connections that align with their child’s identity, background, culture, and origin.
For queer couples I believe that adoption is a great way to start a family. No matter what the adoptive parents’ sexuality, or gender presentation looks like, I believe the most important factors for healthy child development are parents who can attune to their child’s needs, can remain safe/regulated, and can repair when rifts in the relationship inevitably happen.
In my family, being a family mattered deeply — in part because we looked different. My mother’s way of acknowledging those differences was to consistently center our shared humanity. As a white adoptee with limited access to her own cultural history, she prioritized protection, closeness, and belonging, and she carried those values into how she parented me. Family was defined by care, safety, and connection, rather than biology alone.
That approach offered real grounding and love. At the same time, it also meant that culture, ancestry, and lineage were not always actively named or explored, not out of avoidance, but out of a desire to keep us connected and whole in a world that often highlights difference as threat. Looking back, I can hold both truths: that this emphasis on shared humanity was deeply loving, and that some questions about identity and origin still waited quietly in the background.
These tensions are not failures. They are the natural complexity of adoption — especially within families navigating difference, visibility, and belonging. It is within this complexity that conversations about ethics begin, not as judgment, but as an ongoing practice of listening, learning, and repair.
What Ethical Adoption Requires in Practice
Hannah O’Rear on ethical adoption and centering adoptee experiences.
In my practice ethical adoption looks like supporting parents in understanding that trauma will be a part of their adopted child’s development. Given this difference it’s important that adoptive parents do their due diligence to recognize how trauma-informed parenting may look different and be applied differently than typical parenting. I encourage adoptive parents to commit to their own self work and seek support to learn how to parent an adopted child effectively and safely.
Another ethical dimension is to remember to center the adopted child’s needs, history, culture, perspectives, and curiosity over potential discomfort surrounding these topics. While adoptive parents have real and valid concerns, feelings, and conceptualizations regarding adoption, ultimately the child has a right to experience their own adoption and make sense of it without an obligation to others. Oftentimes adoptees find their stories are told through the rose colored lens of adoptive parents or society. In my practice it is important for me to create space and honor the real lived experiences of what it is to be adopted.
I didn’t understand ethical adoption as something ongoing until much later in my life. For a long time, I believed that love, stability, and transparency were enough — and in many ways, they were. I was deeply loved, and I know my mother did the best she could with the tools she had.
What I can name now is that my mother had never fully moved through her own adoption trauma. Because of that, there were moments when she couldn’t always sense what I was carrying internally. That wasn’t a failure of care, but a limitation shaped by what she had access to herself. Over time, those limitations influenced our relationship, my upbringing, and how I experienced closeness, responsibility, and belonging.
Because we were both adopted, there were places where our experiences intertwined. Some of that created a sense of deep understanding, and some of it led to unintentional enmeshment — patterns I’ve since been able to notice, name, and work through in my own therapy. That process has helped me understand which feelings were mine to carry, and which were inherited through shared, unprocessed grief.
Sitting with this now, I can see ethical adoption not as something that was either “done right” or “done wrong,” but as a relationship that continues to unfold. It asks for curiosity over certainty, repair over defensiveness, and a willingness to keep listening — especially when new layers of understanding emerge.
Conclusion
Adoption can be loving and traumatic at the same time. These truths do not cancel each other out. I often return to the idea that the universe is a “yes, and” place — one where gratitude and grief, belonging and loss, care and impact can exist side by side. Making room for this complexity does not diminish the love within adoptive families; it deepens our capacity to understand it.
When we approach adoption with curiosity rather than certainty, we create space for adoptees to discover and name their experiences in their own time. Some layers surface early. Others arrive decades later. Ethical adoption, then, is less about arriving at the “right” framework and more about staying open to what continues to unfold — within ourselves, within our families, and within our relationships.
For adoptees, this may look like giving yourself permission to explore questions you didn’t know you were carrying. For adoptive parents, it may mean committing to ongoing self-work and support, not as a reflection of failure, but as an expression of care. When we allow room for nuance, repair, and growth, we honor the full humanity of everyone involved.
If you are an adoptee, an adoptive parent, or considering adoption and want support navigating these complexities, exploring therapy with a trauma-informed, queer-affirming provider can be a meaningful place to begin. You can explore the QueerPsych directory to find mental health professionals who offer affirming, attachment-informed care.
