Adoption: the emotional journey before the decision and after it

“Well, you can always adopt.”

Almost every couple who has spent years in clinics and waiting rooms hears this sentence. It comes from an aunt at Sunday lunch, from a colleague, sometimes even from a doctor. It is meant kindly, as an emergency exit, a door that is always open. Yet people often say it hurt them more than many an outright rudeness. Because it carries an assumption that adoption is a back-up plan that solves the problem — and that the loss they carry is somehow settled by it.

Adoption is not a back-up plan, and it erases nothing. It is a path to parenthood in its own right, with its own joys, its own losses and its own questions that do not end on the day the child comes home. In this post I write about the emotional side of that path: what happens before the decision, during the wait and in the years that follow. I do not write about the legal procedure — for that, the right place to go is your local social work centre, where they can tell you what applies in your case and how it works.

One decision, two griefs

Most couples who consider adoption come to it after infertility — after years of trying, of treatments and often of losses. This means they do not enter the decision empty-handed. They carry grief for the child they will not give birth to: for the pregnancy, for the resemblance, for recognising their mother’s face or their partner’s smile in a child’s features. It is the loss of something that never happened, and that is exactly why other people overlook it so readily. I have written more about this kind of loss in The grief nobody acknowledges.

Adoption specialists, among them the psychologist David Brodzinsky, who devoted most of his research career to adoption, have been making the same point for decades: before a couple decides to adopt, it helps if they have at least begun to say goodbye to the biological child. Not because grief has to be “finished” — it never entirely is — but so that the adopted child does not arrive in the family as a substitute. A child who has to carry someone else’s role feels it, even if nobody ever says so.

The second grief is one we often miss: deciding to adopt also means letting go of a certain picture of yourself. Of the story “our family will come about the way it does for most people”. Of the sense that parenthood is something that simply happens to you. With adoption, parenthood becomes something you choose, prepare for, discuss with strangers and have assessed by someone else. For many people this is a new and vulnerable experience. If you are in the middle of deciding whether to continue with treatment, you may also find When is enough enough? Deciding to end fertility treatment helpful.

Three sides of the same triangle

The adoption literature often speaks of the “adoption triangle”: the adoptive parents, the adopted child and the birth parents. Each of them carries a loss. The adoptive parents have lost the biological child they never had. The child has lost a first family, often before being old enough to remember it. The birth parents have lost a child, whether they chose this themselves or circumstances were stronger than they were.

As early as the 1960s, the sociologist H. David Kirk described two ways in which adoptive families deal with this difference. Some reject it: they act as if there were no difference between them and a biological family, they do not talk about origins and hope it will never matter. Others acknowledge it: they talk openly about adoption and treat the child’s story as part of the family story. Kirk found that the second approach went together with more open communication and better relationships within the family. Later research added that a middle way helps too: acknowledging the difference without constantly putting it in the foreground.

What research says about adopted children

People considering adoption are often afraid that an early loss will mark the child for ever. Research here is more encouraging than many expect. In 2007 Femmie Juffer and Marinus van IJzendoorn combined 88 studies on the self-esteem of adopted children and adolescents in a meta-analysis. They found that adoptees do not differ from their non-adopted peers in self-esteem — whether they were adopted domestically or from abroad.

That does not mean adopted children face no particular challenges. In other analyses the same researchers showed that children who spent longer in institutions before adoption, or who experienced neglect, more often need additional support. At the same time, adoption is one of the most powerful “interventions” we know of: in a safe family, children catch up a great deal — physically, emotionally and in their relationships. What matters most is what happens after they arrive: how secure the attachment the child develops with the adoptive parents becomes. I have written more about how attachment patterns are passed on in Attachment and parenting: how the pattern passes to a child, and you will find a short explanation in the knowledge base under attachment.

The wait: a time without shape

Once a couple decides, a period often begins for which nobody has a good name. There is no pregnancy to be seen. No due date. No bump for colleagues to notice. Only uncertainty, which can last a long time and which you cannot hurry along. Many people describe this waiting as harder, in its own way, than fertility treatment: there, at least, you were doing something; here, you only wait.

During this time old wounds often reopen. Every pregnancy around you hurts again. Every “So, any news?” is a small reminder that life is on hold. Some couples grow closer during this period; others drift apart because each waits in their own way — one with plans and lists, the other with withdrawal and silence. This is not a sign that one of them is more or less ready. It simply means anxiety shows itself differently in each person. I have described the patterns by which partners grieve differently in Grieving as a couple: why you grieve differently, and the very same patterns appear during the wait.

What helps at this time is not necessarily optimism. What helps is letting yourselves name how things are. Being able to say “I have no hope today” without the other rushing to correct it. Agreeing whom you will tell and how much. And not letting life during the wait become nothing but a waiting room — keeping space for friends, work, your bodies, and for a relationship that is more than a parenthood project.

How it sounds between two people

A conversation between partners who are deciding often gets stuck at the point where one is already looking ahead and the other has not finished looking back. It might sound like this (composite, not a real person):

“I read today about how it all starts. We could ring the social work centre.”
“You’re already there.”
“Where?”
“At adoption. I’m still at the last transfer. I still can’t believe it’s gone.”
“I thought having some kind of plan would cheer you up.”
“It will. Just not yet. First I need to know we’ve grieved together for what won’t be.”

This conversation is not an argument about adoption. It is a conversation about pace. When one partner is planning and the other is still grieving, both can quickly feel misunderstood. The planner feels rejected, the griever feels rushed. Once a couple recognises this, they can stop debating whether to adopt and start talking about when both of them will be ready.

When the child arrives: alongside joy, the things nobody warns you about

The day a child comes home is, for most adoptive parents, one of the most important days of their lives. And that is precisely why many are surprised when, in the following weeks or months, they do not feel only happiness. The nurse and researcher Karen Foli called this the “post-adoption blues” and, with colleagues, showed that some adoptive parents experience depressive symptoms in the first months, similar to those after giving birth.

The reasons are understandable. After years of waiting, expectations were enormous. The child may not return affection the way they imagined, because the child first has to be sure these adults are safe. Adoptive parents often feel they have no right to be tired or unhappy — “we wanted this so much”. And the people around them often confirm this with “Well, now you finally have what you wanted.” If you recognise yourself here: it is not a sign that you chose wrongly or that you will not be a good parent. It is a sign that a big change is a big change — even when it is a wanted one. If low mood lasts more than a few weeks or deepens, talk to your GP about it.

Alongside this, the child’s arrival brings a quiet transformation of identity, the same as for all new parents. I have written about how a child changes the way you see yourself and your partner in Parenthood as a transition. For adoptive parents this transition is often just a little more complicated, because it overlaps with an old loss that had until then been pushed into the background.

The child’s story is not a secret

Research and clinical practice have long agreed: it is good to tell a child that they are adopted, and to tell them early — not as one big disclosure in puberty, but as a story that grows along with them. Brodzinsky described how children come to understand their adoption gradually. A preschooler may cheerfully tell people they “came from another mummy” without understanding what that means. Only at primary school do they begin to grasp that adoption also means someone gave them away — and that is when sadness, anger or questions that are hard for adoptive parents may appear.

These questions are not a sign that something is wrong with the family. They are a sign that the child is growing. In adolescence they are joined by the search for one’s own identity, which for an adopted teenager is a double task: working out who they are and, at the same time, where they come from. You will find a short explanation of how identity takes shape in the knowledge base under identity.

For adoptive parents, the hardest part is often accepting that the child’s grief for a first family is not a rejection of them. A child can love the parents raising them and at the same time miss people they never knew. This doubleness is natural — in the knowledge base we call it ambivalence. If adoptive parents can accept it without feeling hurt, the child will not have to choose between two loyalties.

Where relational family therapy comes in

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we see the family as a place where emotions are passed from generation to generation, even when nobody talks about them. In adoption these are often feelings nobody dares to voice: the adoptive parent’s unmourned loss, the child’s anger at the first family, the fear that one day the child will “go back to their own”. Left unspoken, they often show up elsewhere — as excessive worry, as an unusual sensitivity to rejection, or as arguments that on the surface revolve around everyday things.

Therapy can help at several points. Before the decision, when a couple needs space to work out whether adoption is really the next step or just an escape from pain. During the wait, when tension is eating away at the relationship. And years later, when the child starts asking questions and something stirs in the parents that they did not expect. With all of these questions, though, therapy does not replace the professional support that adoptive parents receive from the social work centre and other adoption specialists.

Exercise: two letters

This exercise is for a couple considering adoption or in the middle of the wait. Each of you does it alone first, then you bring it to each other.

1. Write a short letter to the child you will not give birth to. What did you wish for them? How did you imagine them? What do you regret most? Do not correct or polish it.
2. Write a second letter to the child you may adopt. What do you want to tell them about how they came into your life? What would you like them to know one day?
3. Read both letters to yourself and notice which was harder to write. If you could barely manage the first, that tells you something: perhaps your grief is only just beginning.
4. Read your letters to each other. Do not comment straight away. Each of you says just one thing that surprised you in your partner’s letter.
5. Agree on what you will do with the first letter. Some people keep it, others burn or bury it. What matters is that the loss gets a ritual, not just silence.

Where this view falls short

I have written as if adoption always comes after infertility. It does not. Some people choose it because they were adopted themselves, because they want to give a child a home, or because biological parenthood never mattered to them. For them, grief for a biological child is not the central theme, and it would be wrong of me to impose it on them.

Nor should the emphasis on loss overshadow the joy. Most adoptive families live ordinary lives with ordinary joys and ordinary arguments. If every bad mood of the child’s were explained as a consequence of adoption, we would take away their right simply to be a child. Not everything that happens in an adoptive family has to do with adoption.

And finally: this post does not cover how the procedure works, who can adopt or how long it takes. Legislation and practice change, and these are questions for the social work centre, not for a psychotherapist. With me, there is room for what all of this stirs up in you and between the two of you.

When you decide differently

Some couples, after long reflection, realise that adoption is not their path. That is not a defeat, and it does not mean they did not try hard enough. It means they listened to themselves. This decision, too, has its own sadness and its own freedom — I write about it in Life without children: chosen and unchosen. You will also find a short explanation of how infertility affects wellbeing in the knowledge base under infertility and distress.

If you cannot reach a decision, it may help to bring it to someone who is not part of your family and has no expectations about the outcome. In a session with me we can look together at what each of you truly wants, what you fear and what you need in order to decide together — wherever the decision takes you. I also work in English, in person in Ljubljana.

What to remember

• Adoption is not a back-up plan for infertility but a path to parenthood in its own right, with its own losses and joys.
• Before deciding, it helps to begin grieving the biological child, so that the adopted child does not become a substitute.
• Research shows adopted children do not differ from their peers in self-esteem; what matters most is secure attachment after arrival.
• After the child arrives, there may be low mood alongside happiness — this is not a sign of a wrong choice.
• The child’s story is not a secret: it is good to talk about adoption early and openly, sadness included.