The Adoption Story Doesn't End at Placement, So Why Does the Support?

I read a report this week that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. Adoption UK's latest Adoption Barometer, based on responses from almost 3,500 people across the UK, found that 86% of adoptees don't believe adequate mental health support exists for people like us.

I was born in Chester in 1966. I am an adoptee from the UK forced adoption era so I want to be honest about where I'm writing this from. I've done the whole road: placed as a baby, growing up with questions I didn't always know how to ask, nor could I ask any questions about my adoption. As soon as I hit 18, knowing my birth name from rooting around in my adopted father's papers I began to search. Searching, eventually finding, and living with a reunion that was ok in the beginning, the honeymoon period of reunion, but became complicated and hard in ways nobody warned me about. So when I see a number like 86%, it doesn't land as a statistic. It lands as a room full of people nodding along, quietly, the way we tend to do.

Here's the thing about adoption. It isn't an event. It's not something that happened to you once, on a specific date, that you can file away and move on from. It's more like weather. It's there in the background of everything, sometimes calm, sometimes a full storm, for your entire life. And yet almost every system built around adoption, understandably, focuses on the beginning: the placement, the early years, the paperwork. Once you're grown, the assumption seems to be that you're just done. Sorted. Grateful, hopefully, and getting on with things.

Except most of us aren't done. The Barometer backs this up too. Over seven in ten adoptees said they find it genuinely hard to work out how to access their own records, the basic facts of their own start in life.

Fear, anxiety, the unknown and the disloyalty to our adopted parents stops many people from ever tracing or reaching reunion at all. And this isn't about ingratitude toward the families who raised us, not even slightly. It's about the fact that being adopted shapes us differently. How we attach to people, how we trust, how safe we feel inside our own story. What even is our story? Our identity? None of that switches off the day we turn eighteen.

Lack of support doesn't just mean nobody hands you a leaflet. It means there's often nowhere obvious to go once you're grown. Generic counselling services aren't set up for this. GPs don't ask about adoption history as a matter of course. Support tends to exist around the moment of placement, not around the fifty, sixty, seventy years that come after it. So people manage on their own, quietly, for decades, because there was never really a door marked for us.

Most adopted people I've spoken to, and this includes me, have at some point sat across from a therapist who was kind and well meaning and still didn't quite get it. You end up doing the work of explaining what adoption actually does to a person before you can even start doing the work of dealing with it. Loyalty binds, genetic mirroring, grieving people you never technically had, these things don't always translate to someone who hasn't lived it. That's not a dig at therapists in general. It's just that this is its own specialism, the same way you wouldn't expect a generalist to already understand the ins and outs of addiction or an eating disorder without training in it specifically.

If You're an Adult Adoptee Reading This

I want to say a few things plainly.

You're allowed to still be figuring this out, even decades in. There isn't a deadline on making peace with your own history.

Wanting to search, or not wanting to search, are both completely valid. Neither one says anything about how much you love the family who raised you.

If reunion has happened and it's messy, or painful, or not at all what you pictured, that doesn't mean you did it wrong. Reunions are relationships, and relationships are complicated, especially ones that start with this much history already behind them.

And if you've never told a single soul how much this still sits with you, that's not weakness. It's just that so few people have ever made room for it. There's a difference.

A Small Piece of Homework, If You Want It

You don't need to do anything big this week. Just try this: write down, even just for yourself, one thing about being adopted that you've never said out loud to anyone. Not to post, not to send, just to see it in your own handwriting. Sometimes that's the first bit of movement after years of carrying something quietly.

Take care of yourselves this week.

If, after reading this, you feel you may want to talk, get in touch. I offer Adult Adoptee Support based and informed from real life experience. Please be aware that I do not have a specialist qualification in this field.