Adoption Literacy: A Practical Guide for Counselors

Abstract

The community-based framework of adoption literacy (AL), outlined in this practice brief, offers organized and tangible guidance for mental health practitioners who may engage with adult adoptees in individual, couples, or family counseling. AL is an ongoing process of learning about, and effectively responding to, dynamic public health needs that surround the institutionalized practice of family separation and adoption, both domestically and transnationally. The author examines AL as a community intervention, therapeutic process, and multidisciplinary conversation. Readers are given background and applications for four core relational cues: humanize adoptee narratives, own your part in the story, promote adoptee-specific resources throughout the lifespan, and elevate adoptees into positions of influence (H.O.P.E.). Additional considerations and recommendations are provided to help practicing counselors and therapists organize their learning, resources, interventions, and outcomes as they seek to ethically and competently address the dynamic counseling needs of adult adoptees through the AL framework.

Keywords

adoptee adoption transracial adoption international adoption adoption literacy adoptee consciousness adult adoptee former foster youth adoptee community

Introduction

Millions of people in the United States are connected to adoption (Javier et al., 2007; Krieder, 2020). Yet, an ongoing tension exists as training and guidance are limited for mental health practitioners to competently provide services to adopted people and their families throughout their lives (Baden & Wiley, 2007; Branco et al., 2024). The Center for Adoption Support and Education explored the impact of that tension through a series of case studies and treatment considerations (Riley & Meeks, 2006), citing one teen adoptee's testimony:

Every time I brought up my adoption with therapists, they said, “I am sure you and your family feel very lucky to have one another.” It was so hard for me to speak about my anger, confusion, and sometimes overwhelming sense of sadness about being adopted. (p. 16)

While adopted children and adolescents are frequently emphasized in clinical research and guidance for practicing counselors, even less is known about adoptee-related counseling needs that exist beyond those earlier stages of development (McGinnis, 2024b). Formal and informal documentation of accurate adult adoptee narratives in general are often obstructed by cultural factors such as ageism, adultism, classism, racism, and saviorism (Raible, 2012). In addition, terms and ranges of adulthood overall (e.g., emerging adulthood experienced by people ages 18–29 years) continue to change along with associated parenting practices, social norms, and treatment considerations (Arnett, 2015). Such gaps in knowledge present an ongoing imperative for practitioners to grow in awareness, disposition, sensitivity, and skill to ethically and competently address the counseling needs of adult adoptees throughout their developmental lifespan (Branco et al., 2024).

Background

Adoption in child welfare has historically been framed as a “win–win–win” solution (Baden, 2016); a solely protective intervention to provide safe and stable families to children, relief to birth parents who were deemed unfit for childcare responsibilities, and hope to adoptive parents who desired to raise a child (Javier et al., 2007). Those cultural assumptions tend to neglect systemic conditions that lead to family separation in the United States and beyond, while youth and adults who experience those forms of relinquishment, foster care, and adoption risk encountering a lack of adequate mental health care through and beyond adolescence, due to the material and relational gains that have been perceivably granted to everyone involved in the child welfare process (McGinnis, 2024a).

The more contemporary view that adoption represents a complex negotiation of losses, connections, adversity, trauma, and transformation has become increasingly accepted and seems to be more aligned with the actual needs of adoptees that present uniquely and universally throughout their lives (Brodzinsky et al., 2022; Lee, 2003). Clinical concerns related to attachment, identity development, socialization, search and reunion, moral injury caused by adoption agency behaviors, and lifelong tensions between belonging and isolation are no longer out of bounds within the adoptee diaspora and throughout public discourse (McGinnis, 2024b; Moftah, 2024). Therefore, culturally curious clinicians and child welfare professionals who work with diverse populations acknowledge the need to understand present-day developments related to adoption not only for the psycho-socio-emotional impact they have on their clients (Javier et al., 2007; Harris, 2018) and the multiple constellations of families to which they are connected (Kim & Tucker, 2019) but to widen their boundaries of competence and consciously apply what they learn.

Adoption Literacy as a Guide

The community-based framework of adoption literacy (AL), outlined in this practice brief, offers organized and tangible guidance for mental health practitioners who may engage with adult adoptees in individual, couples, or family counseling. AL is a convergence of the author's clinical training and practice, along with what the author has learned over the past 15 years engaging with former foster youth and adoptees from around the world. It includes personal, academic, and professional research about child welfare and adoption with which the author critically interacts as a male, cishet, transnational, transracial Korean American adoptee in and out of reunion. AL may be investigated and practiced simultaneously as a community intervention, therapeutic process, and multidisciplinary conversation.

AL as a Community Intervention

AL is a conceptual and practical framework to shield communities from misinformation, support increased understanding, and provide adoptees with effective care at all stages of their lived experiences (Small, 2024b). As a guiding principle, AL ultimately aims to reduce systemic inequities that persist in child welfare systems by cultivating constructive public discourse, informing strength-based innovations that keep families intact, and fostering the ongoing development of equitable and culturally responsive care. Like “financial literacy” or “emotional literacy,” AL is an ongoing process of learning about, and effectively responding to, dynamic public health needs that surround the institutionalized practice of family separation and adoption, both domestically and transnationally.

AL is also a collaboration of exercises. It is not a destination at which an individual or group arrives, or a signal of superior social status to attain, but a harmony of strengths within and between each member of a community that can be worked out to one's own health and for the well-being of those around them. Practitioners can choose from a variety of roles to fulfill as they each work to develop, support, and deliver healthcare services throughout the community with innovation and compassion (Iyer, 2017). Counselors are encouraged to mold the framework to fit their own personalities, clinical backgrounds, and access to resources. AL functions as a cooperative paradigm to foster the discovery and dissemination of knowledge related to (a) the lived experiences of those who have encountered an adoption process and (b) the personal, public, physical, psychological, emotional, social, economic, and historical conditions that led to their relinquishment. AL helps replace a perceived sense of individual and collective helplessness with clear and collaborative steps to not only improve child welfare practices but also the quality of care and life that clients can access long after their first interactions with the child welfare system. While the ongoing intervention of AL is communal, it abides by the International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors’ Code of Ethics (2017) to help counselors “respect the rights of individuals and members to define their relationships and family units beyond boundaries imposed by dominant culture or tradition” (Section J, p. 10).

AL as a Therapeutic Process

AL is both content (i.e., community-driven knowledge) and process (i.e., the therapeutic relationship and interactions that occur between counselors and adult adoptee clients). Counselors may use the framework of AL to co-create and foster reparative experiences that allow adult adoptees to explore new, more coherent, and flexible self-narratives. Where an adult adoptee may have experienced a lack of safety, choice, voice, and boundaries in previous developmental stages (Brodzinsky et al., 2022), counselors may recruit elements of AL to assist clients in modifying their coping styles and relational patterns to be more aligned with the adult adoptee's current needs, strengths, values, and goals. Counselors, regardless of how they identify (e.g., cognitive–behavioral, family systems, narrative, etc.) can use the framework of AL to help adult adoptee clients speak where they may have been silenced, feel in places that were once shut down, and grow in areas that were previously off limits. Herman (2015) affirms the significance of such a therapeutic alliance, “The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of trauma… when the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery” (pg. 1).

In addition to harmonizing with models of cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, and existential, feminist, internal family systems, narrative, somatic, and solution-focused therapies, AL is guided by the assumption that accurate information is a key component to the process of adoptee consciousness (Branco et al., 2022) and can play a key role in positive outcomes related to adult adoptee mental health (Baden, 2016; Baden et al., 2012). The framework for AL can also be applied to other marginalized experiences that exist beyond the status quo.

AL as a Multidisciplinary Conversation

AL is continually in process and linked with the following aspects of technical and critical models of adoptee-informed research and service delivery:

AL intersects with the model of adoptee consciousness (Branco et al., 2022) in philosophy and vision. Components and touchpoints from each framework can host, prompt, compliment, and/or be expressed in one another.

It helps practicing counselors embrace the need to disassemble narratives such as the “every adoptee vs. adoptee killjoy” (McKee, 2019) and “adoptee-Other” (Wyver, 2019) that can obstruct therapeutic relationships with adoptee clients (Riley & Meeks, 2006).

AL presupposes that meaning and flourishing can still happen even in the midst and wake of suffering. Life is inescapably full of the tragic triad of pain, guilt, and death. Yet, when clients find a true person-specific meaning, they may also gain a heightened capacity to know themselves and a deepened will to experience life and love with others (Frankl, 1992).

AL is trauma-informed as much as it is cruciform. While it helps counselors recognize the structure and pace of empirically driven sequences of trauma recovery such as Herman's (2015) Safety and Stabilization, Remembrance and Mourning, and Reconnection with Community, it also helps counselors hold space for those with a background connected to a Christian faith (Langberg, 2020). AL encourages counselors to recognize how the involvement of institutionalized religion with adoption throughout the world has been controversial and has struggled to provide containment or psychological safety for adoptees to process their experiences through an adoptee-sensitive perspective (Helder et al., 2024).

AL promotes self-discovery and solidarity inspired by interpersonal process modalities (Teyber, 2011). It helps adult adoptees gain insight regarding their inner world and supports a moving toward to connect in new ways with those around them, especially throughout the process of their adoptee consciousness.

It helps counselors embrace intergroup dialogue, the exchange of questions and ideas to cultivate mutual empathy between social groups and their associated needs and strengths (Umaña-Taylor et al., 2014; Zúñiga et al., 2007).

As a dialogue, AL can also be used to inform interventions that serve anyone whose life has been touched by adoption. It may especially help clients navigate the status quo and rupture touchpoints of the adoptee consciousness process (Branco et al., 2022) in which adoptees and non-adoptees alike may experience disequilibrium in response to new-to-them information.

Additionally, AL is especially suited to help counselors support adoptees in and through the dissonance and expansiveness touchpoints of the adoptee consciousness process. For adult adoptees, those are common entry points into a formal modality of individual, couples, family, or group counseling (e.g., conflicted emotions, presenting concerns related to tensions and/or struggles related to the lived experience of being adopted).

Finally, it is not of minor importance to note how AL helps counselors infuse core elements of relational–cultural theory (Branco, 2022) to introduce, offer, model, demonstrate, and/or practice growth-fostering relational patterns with the adult adoptees they serve. AL's four core relational cues guide counselors as they seek to incorporate and support corrective emotional experiences through each episode of care; interactions grounded in mutual empathy, relational images, and connections to buffer against controlling images, chronic disconnection, and internalized oppression.

AL in Practice: Four Core Relational Cues

The framework of Adoption Literacy is comprised of four core relational cues best recalled by the acronym HOPE: humanize adoptee narratives (H), own your part in the story (O), promote adoptee-specific resources throughout the lifespan (P), and elevate adoptees into positions of influence (E). The cues may be practiced, delivered, or experienced in a nonlinear fashion, and the number of ways they can each be applied is infinite. However, it is through those four contextual domains that AL can help mental health practitioners organize their learning, resources, interventions, and outcomes as they seek to ethically and competently address the dynamic counseling needs of adult adoptees.

Cue 1: Humanize Adoptee Narratives

Objects alone are not able to grieve or wonder about where they came from, but humans can (Small,, 2024b). Objects by themselves lack the means to lament or rage against preventable inequities that pull families and communities apart, but humans can. This first core relational cue helps counselors recognize that children often enter the system of child welfare with a full range and capacity to experience a multitude of feelings, reactions, and questions but a limited set of skills with which to cope with and navigate that process. In humanizing adoptee narratives, counselors help expand the person as well as their interpersonal and relational skill sets. The therapeutic alliance serves to widen the scope of what an adult adoptee (and adoptees of all ages) are allowed to feel, think, say, and do in response to the experience of being separated from their families, histories, and cultures and institutionally transferred into someone else's: physically, legally, residentially, and relationally (Boss, 1999; Honig, 2005; Kim, 2022). Counselors can use their interactions with adult adoptees to help them discover skills, strengths, and language to be key authority figures not only within their personal processes of healing and transformation but to acknowledge the profound abilities they already possess to inspire change in places beyond the counseling relationship that matter significantly to them.

Adoptee narratives may be humanized in and through a process that runs parallel to the model of “reculturation”: education, experience, and immersion (Baden et al., 2012). In that vein, adoptees engage a humanization of their lived experiences by learning about and interacting with people and places that may affirm, challenge, and/or enhance their worldview as it relates to the lived experience of family separation and adoption (see Figure 1). Such interaction is consistent with the way Kim (2010) explored the concept of adoptee counterpublic:

The adoptee counterpublic is constituted by the circulation of discourses and the performances of a collective identity that articulate a form of personhood otherwise absent or misrecognized in dominant public spheres. (p. 100)

Figure 1.

Adoptee testimonial strategies.

Application. Strategies and resources to help counselors and adult adoptees promote increased personhood through the humanization of adoptee narratives include:

Recognize and promote psychologically safe environments in 1:1 and group sessions to allow, normalize, and affirm reactions to adoptee-related content that goes beyond the dominant cultural process that assumes gratitude and celebration.

Receptive engagement exists on an individual to large-group continuum (e.g., counselors and adoptees review/explore information together in session, engage information on their own time between sessions individually or with others and then process reactions during a follow-up session). See Appendix A for a sample of adoptee-focused testimonies and resources.

Expressive engagement also exists on an individual to large-group continuum. Counselors can help adoptees explore adoptee-related material, events, and gatherings. They might help an adult adoptee practice identifying and expressing thoughts, feelings, and reactions together in session or give clients tools to engage activities on their own time between sessions, individually or with others, and in follow-up sessions to process what the experience was like for them. In addition to individual journaling, art, music, poetry, blogging, film-making, and other options, Appendix B showcases examples of adoptee-led communities that are currently available for adult adoptee clients to explore and engage.

At the core, when counselors take time to humanize adoptee narratives, they provide space for adult adoptees to interact with two basic questions: “Is there more to the story? If so, what supports do I need to better engage with that information?”

Cue 2: Own Your Part in the Story

Adoptees are not always provided with personal or social environments that encourage them to speak openly about their authentic needs and concerns (Branco, 2022). Therefore, this second core relational cue is grounded in making more space for those adoptee voices. Neglecting to build that space with clients risks recapitulating trauma-based patterns in which a person may feel the need to sacrifice degrees of their authenticity to preserve a felt sense of attachment and relational connection (Maté, 2018 as cited in Ferris, 2018). Such neglect can be experienced as an injustice and can lead to additional forms of institutional and betrayal trauma (Tang, 2023). Therefore, it is imperative for culturally competent counselors to (a) attend to and address underlying dynamics of power and trust as they exist in micro- to macro-scale contexts and (b) critically examine how westernized theories of practice (Singh et al., 2020) may be impeding social justice in and beyond their counseling work with adult adoptees.

Counselors interested in helping adult adoptee clients explore and discover layers of personal empowerment may be inspired by a concept posed by trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. In his book The Body Keeps the Score (2014), van der Kolk noted how people's capacity to harm one another is matched, perhaps even succeeded, by their capacity to heal one another. When adoptees are only conceptualized as recipients of misfortune or charity, rather than consulted as key participants in such a dynamic, individual, and collaborative healing process, they are more likely to be separated from their communities and isolated from their authentic, inner sense of self. Part of a professional counselor's role is to be available to support an adult adoptee's will and skill to connect with their inner self and grow through adoptee-sensitive language and meaning-making, somatic skills training and practice, and ongoing reparative ventures throughout their communities to create environments in which families, children, and adults of all backgrounds can feel safe and flourish.

This relational cue also elevates adoptees to reflect on micro- to macro-scale realities both as participants and recipients of the strength-based roles that can exist within and around them. Counselors and adoptees alike can begin exploring that process through Deepa Iyer's Social Change Ecosystem Map (2017). Examples of roles may include the following: weavers, experimenters, frontline responders, visionaries, builders, caregivers, disrupters, healers, storytellers, and guides. Similar to corrective emotional experiences, therapeutic interactions that bring increased layers of agency and autonomy back to the adult adoptee can nourish new possibilities of personhood and locus of control, key aspects of human dignity that can often be stripped from a person through their encounter with child welfare services (Naftzger, 2017).

Drawing from Iyer's and other frameworks, this core relational cue also enlists allies and community partners to consider how they too can help in the fundamental cultural shift to create more space for the adoptee voice, increasing access to more nuanced and adoptee-sensitive conversations. Inevitably what follows is an increase in adoptee-specific resources allowing more adoptees to gain access to the support they need.

Application. Culturally curious counselors can provide adoptees with ways to engage the RISEN Story Map (Small, 2024a) to help them explore and express reactions about their person-specific specific experiences. The following guiding questions can be adapted for those individual and/or community reflections:

Relationship assessment. Adult adoptees may examine the qualities of individual or sets of relationships in their lives through ecological systems (Bronfenbrenner, 1994), stages of awareness/change (Branco et al., 2022; Norcross et al., 2011), a desire for restored balance (Cross, 1997; Cross, 2014), through a lens of acculturation and reculturation (Baden et al., 2012), and within dialogue inspired by relational cultural theory (Branco, 2022).

Guiding Questions: In those relationships, where have you tended to experience conflict in beliefs, values, understandings, motives, or goals? Alignment? Through those relational experiences, what truths about yourself have become more salient or emphasized? Are there realities about others that are discovered or further confirmed? Are there any parts of those narratives you hope could change?

Information dialogue. This includes information and dialogue that supports an increase in an adult adoptee's awareness about aspects inherent to their lived experience of family separation, foster care, and/or adoption (e.g., race, ethnicity, culture, attachment, loss, trauma, healthcare, etc.).

Guiding Questions: What facts or new layers of meaning have enhanced or supported you in your lived experience of grief, identity, empowerment, or even your sense of faith or responsibility? How did you come across that information (e.g., who, what, where, when, etc.)? What words would you use to describe the process of gathering that information and how/why the information became so important to you? Do you feel compelled to share the information with anyone? Are there any parts that remain open ended for discussion or exploration? What questions opened or closed for you; do any pieces of information take on new layers of clarity or continue in ambiguity?

Systemic responsibility. How individuals interpret and enact their lived experiences may be shaped by their awareness of and capacity to engage with past and present socio-political realities (Myers, 2013; Rivas-Drake & Umaña-Taylor, 2019; Watts et al., 2003).

Guiding Questions: As an adult adoptee, how do you see yourself situated within institutional or cultural practices that exist in wide-scale proportions? Do you experience personal barriers or limitations because of any of those relationships? Who has been available to assist you in putting things right? Can you name a principle, outcome, or desire that you wish to be more protected than it already is? Do you notice any allies or forces at work systemically that seem to be positioned to benefit you and others? Where might you benefit, socially or personally, if nothing changes?

Adult adoptees will each have person-specific limits and strengths as they engage the dialogue on systemic responsibility. Counselors can help acknowledge that here-and-now overlap between individual circumstances and broader socio-political realities.

Existential inquiry. This is a reference to the four givens of existence (Yalom, 1980); four inevitable aspects of being human that every individual must face (i.e., death, meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom). Counselors can help adult adoptees engage in an existential process as they support discovery and meaning-making around family separation, loss, autonomy (or lack thereof), adoption, a sense of purpose, language and narratives associated with birth family and birth culture, worldview, and to what degree an adult adoptee has reconciled experiences of isolation through their interactions with the adoptee community. For example, an adult adoptee may feel a growing sense of motivation to overcome personal barriers as they consider their circumstances through the lens of an adoptee counterpublic (Kim, 2010).

Guiding Questions: Perhaps you have had to give something up to reach an adoptee-specific outcome. How do you describe what that process has been like for you? What helped? What challenges did you encounter? Where have you observed adoptee activism disrupting the work of institutionalized adoption? Contribute to it? As you tell your story as an adult adoptee, how do you experience forms of catharsis, humility, and imagination? Do you notice any resistance to or endorsement of a cultural perspective or universal barrier?

Narrative development. This dimension of the RISEN Story Map can help adult adoptee clients recognize and monitor ongoing processes, internally and externally. Counselors may consider how an adult adoptee is continually moving toward, away, or against a practical or philosophical outcome. Adult adoptees may recognize progressive changes in their lives that can be satisfying or unfulfilling, perhaps both simultaneously.

Guiding Questions: How might you put into words the differences (and similarities) between who/where you are right now compared to three months ago; three years ago? How is that trajectory working out for you? Are there any regrets? Have you brought any celebrations with you along the way? What patterns stick out to you as significant factors in your journey to your current circumstances? How have you become aware of them? What is next for you?

Adult adoptees’ lived experiences can be significantly influenced by, and shape outcomes associated with, multiple variables and personal/social narratives constructed within them:

Medical considerations

History of trauma / early adversity (e.g., ACEs)

Stages of trauma recovery

Developmental stage (biological, physiological, emotional)

Use of strength-based language (vs deficit-based)

Immediate circumstances and/or stressors

Expectations (e.g., family, social, dominant culture)

State and trait emotional cues and self-regulation skills

Storylines, characters, plots, tension, climax

Presence of mutually empathic and growth-fostering relationships and community

Additional Questions: Do you find yourself living in problem-saturated storylines? How does the environment restrict or allow your sense of personal freedom? How would you describe your access to truth and creative practices? Are you satisfied with how the process is working out? What would you change?

Culturally curious counselors may explore together with clients what it means for each of them to own their part in the story, especially supporting adult adoptees as they attend to and clarify those narratives represented in the RISEN Story Map. When content- and process-oriented reflections about the adult adoptee experience can be witnessed and validated by others, clients become better positioned for targeted interventions and referrals to person- and adoptee-specific resources that promote holistic, lifelong health and well-being.

Cue 3: Promote Adoptee-Specific Resources Throughout the Lifespan

While some adoptees may not find a need for formal counseling services, the ones who do need to know there are counselors who have undertaken specific research and training to navigate adoption-related concerns with knowledge and sensitivity (Baden & Wiley, 2007). Therefore, not only do counselors need to be made aware of the network of resources currently available to adult adoptees, but specialized adoptee-specific resources need to be developed and made available in the first place. This third core relational cue of AL helps counselors and adult adoptee clients deliberately increase their sense of attunement to those barriers and solutions that may exist through emerging adulthood and beyond. The cue also provides a practical imperative for healthcare and child welfare organizations to thoroughly examine and enhance the resources they offer to former foster youth and adult adoptees. Each of the four domains below serves as an opportunity for counselors and adult adoptees to explore and engage domain-specific outcomes.

Micro: This domain, informed in part by ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner & Ceci, 1994), supports adult adoptees as they navigate activities, social roles, and relationships in their immediate environment, including those in which adoptee-specific microaggressions and microfictions are prevalent (Baden, 2016; Garber & Grotevant, 2015). Through broaching such topics or addressing them directly, counselors hold space in session for adult adoptees as they consider how factors such as loss, early adversity, and adoption can have an impact on their nervous system development, cognitive and somatic functioning, racial–ethnic socialization (Simon et al., 2024), tensions they may feel between personal and social identities, experiences with pregnancy and childbirth (Kim et al., 2024), and birth search and reunion processes (Branco et al., 2023; Kim et al., 2020; McGinnis, 2000). This domain also acknowledges the need for ethical DNA testing domestically and abroad (Branco, 2020), paired with adequate language and interpretation services for when matches are discovered and family members involved are favorable to next steps.

Healthcare: This domain helps counselors and adoptees navigate the tangible and intangible values inherent to adoptees gaining access to their health records, along with targeted health screenings particularly when genetic health histories are sealed or falsified. Such screenings can assist adoptees in receiving potentially life-saving interventions (Baden & Wiley, 2007; Eldred, 2024; Lee, 2024).

Legal: This domain refers to the need for qualified legal representation and legislative oversight on laws that range from original birth certificates and birth family processes before, during, and after relinquishment, to the adoptee citizenship act being proposed through congress at the time of this publication (Adoptees United, 2024; Congress, 2024). This also includes reparations sought from adoption, government, and religious organizations under investigation for malfeasance abroad and in the United States (Associated Press, 2024; Joyce, 2013; Moftah, 2024).

Lifelong: This domain addresses the need for increases in available resources and community interventions specifically designed for and by adult adoptees (McGinnis, 2024b). It is recommended that allies and advocates for adoptees engage and collaborate with adoptee-led organizations, both new and long-established, that are positioned and actively dedicated to cultivating lifelong spaces that promote personal and public discourse on adoptee-specific needs and well-being. See Appendix B for a list of initial recommendations.

Application. Counselors who endorse a pharmaceutical treatment plan alone to treat an adoptee's “oppositional defiant disorder” may observe different outcomes compared to those who contrastingly provide space and guidance to help an adoptee process layers of loss, grief, developmental and racial trauma, techniques to regulate his nervous system, and strategies that enlist allies who can help him advocate for adoption-literate, trauma-informed, race-conscious learning and work environments. Some models of treatment may tend to position adoptees themselves as the problem, while others may offer an increased range of therapeutic options and care-giving (Rose, 2024).

Throughout the fluid phases of adoptee consciousness (Branco et al., 2022), adoptees discover and need support to make sense of shifting values, needs, boundaries, personal responsibilities, racial–ethnic experiences (Gustafson, 2021; Umaña-Taylor, 2016), and evolving connections to their genealogy (Kim et al., 2024): adoptee-specific touchpoints that can significantly impact adult adoptee mental health and well-being. Resources created and led in particular by adult adoptees have been and will continue to serve as lifelines for the adoptee community (Newton, 2022; Trenka et al., 2006). As counselors enhance their professional knowledge about and access to adoptee-specific resources, it turns out they will be in a better position to find and co-create opportunities to empower adult adoptees—even when (and especially when) new information and ways of being that the adoptee is exploring seem to live in tension with people around them.

Cue 4: Elevate Adoptees into Positions of Influence

While this fourth core relational cue holds multidisciplinary potentials, to fit the scope of this practice brief, it focuses on concerns posed through a lens of critical adoption studies (Homans et al., 2018). In their publication on the future of adoption research and practice, McGinnis et al. (2019) noted how, like other historically oppressed groups, adoptee scholars have been forced to navigate a history in which adoptees have been “the observed, not the observer” (p. 6). They drew attention to a long-standing barrier adoptees face: power. Imbalances of power are what tends to hold communities and individuals in a dangerous cycle of information poverty (Samuels, 2024) and false portrayals of adoption, not only through academia but the text and imagery that many contemporary adoption agencies continue to embed throughout their websites and marketing materials (Kalb, 2024).

Non-adoptees and white adoptive parents in particular are often granted the dignity (and funding) to advance their research questions, which rarely collect data on adult adoptees or birth parents, while adoptees’ research questions are often ignored or dismissed, subject to unfair gatekeeping and discrimination. Adult adoptee researchers are accused of holding too much bias as if adoptive parents have no bias when they conduct their research (McGinnis, 2024a). Culturally curious counselors who seek to humanize adoptees in scholarship understand and embrace the inevitable appeal to affirm the legitimacy and the necessity of their work as scholars.

This aspect of AL does not reduce the value of the work of white adoptive parents and non-adoptees. On the contrary, researchers and practitioners alike who hold privileged positions within fields of psychology and public health are invited to not just share their power by allowing adoptees to participate in their studies but also to sponsor and wholeheartedly edify adult adoptees into positions where adoptees themselves could be distinguished as principal investigators; where adoptees are allowed to lead the discovery and dissemination of knowledge that support the vitality of adoptee communities, even if and especially when those processes mature past traditional forms of westernized research methodologies (e.g., poetry, art, film, memoir, polemic, theater, music, dance, etc.). Colin Kaepernick's professional work through Colin in Black and White (DuVernay et al., 2021), Know Your Rights Camp (2024), and Change the Game (Kaepernick et al., 2023) are practical examples of adoptee-led data collection and transmission of adoptee-sensitive information. The Permanency and Adoption Competency Certificate (2024) offered through University of Minnesota's Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare is another demonstration of efforts that elevate adoptees into positions of influence: from the way curriculum is developed to the way it is taught in person and virtually to child welfare professionals across the state of Minnesota.

Anecdotally, many adoptee clients (and their service providers) have scant exposure to experiences that exist beyond predominant adoption narratives based in luck and gratitude. However, while there seems to be a lack of diverse accounts being reported, the reality is that adult adoptees suffer from their community's unwillingness to listen to and address those accounts.

My therapist helped me face my fears, find a solution to my problems, and relate it to my past. No one ever wanted to talk about my past before. (Riley & Meeks, 2006, p. 170)

Adult adoptees need allies and interrupters (Kim, 2018) who want to listen to their testimonies. And more people willing to regard, document, and respond to those narratives. Furthermore, adult adoptees need communities to validate wider forms of storytelling like oration, cinema, coalition-building, and more accurate representations of adoptees and adoption throughout the media.

Because culturally curious clinicians may also seek to integrate empirically driven realities of neuroscience into their work (i.e., connections between mind, body, and spirit), it is the case that data grounded in physiology, social psychology, and trauma-integrated psychology is a boon to the AL framework. However, the term empirically driven is used pragmatically, and the author recognizes how westernized research theories and methods have struggled to include adoptees (BIPOC adoptees especially) in their data collection and analysis (Kim, 2013). From that frame of reference, practicing counselors investing in their personal awareness and boundaries of competence are encouraged to grow together with adult adoptee communities to co-create new, more accurate, effective, inclusive, and pro-social narratives that foster increased flexibility and problem-solving skills, somatically, emotionally, psychologically, and relationally.

Application. Counselors can help adult adoptees take inventory of the places and spaces in their context to see where/how adoptees are (or are not) in positions of influence and practice new ways to engage in reflection–action. Counselors may also enlist colleagues and peers around them to inspire, request, and fund more adoptees into positions where adoptees can lead education and reparative processes locally and globally. For example, educators and practitioners can continue to call for adoptee-specific needs to be represented and addressed within the Council of Accreditation and Related Programs ([CACREP], 2023) core curricula (Branco et al., 2024). As a result of those and other forms of advocacy, adoptees will gain further access to an increasing base of knowledge and training practices along with meaningful control over decisions and resources that nourish their lives.

Multidisciplinary Discussion

AL points to the world as it really was and is, while offering counselors from all backgrounds a framework to envision it further, guiding clinical interventions with adult adoptees and those whose lives have been impacted by adoption. Therefore, it bears repeating that AL recruits elements from attachment theory, interpersonal process, dialectical behavioral therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, existential and narrative therapy, reculturation, internal family systems, feminist perspectives, relational cultural theory, and interventions useful to meeting adult adoptees in various phases of their adoptee consciousness to provide comfort, solace, solidarity, guidance, and the instillation of hope through engaging four core relational cues:

Humanize Adoptee Narratives

Own Your Part in the Story

Promote Adoptee-Specific Resources Throughout the Lifespan

Elevate Adoptees into Positions of Influence

The instillation of H.O.P.E. becomes more practical as adoptee-informed advocacy efforts become more attainable, realistic, and evidently necessary/beneficial. Not only for the adult adoptee engaging in therapy but for the various worlds and constellations of relationships that exist in continual negotiation for them outside the formal counseling space.

Counselors practicing AL are contributing to collective discoveries of adoptee-sensitive personhood, dignity, history, personal responsibility, potentials actualized, and meanings clarified. It is a malleable framework as it helps adult adoptees walk through matured versions of the clarification, integration, and actualization stages from Darla Henry's 3-5-7 Model (2005). Adoptees of all ages are allowed to ask, “What happened?” They are allowed to seek accountability from others as well as practice it themselves. Counselors may use the AL framework to help adult adoptees who face suffering within and suffering without: unaddressed, implicit, and somatic reactions to traumatic events along with the realities of adoptee-specific threats like saviorism (Fessler, 2006), racism, spiritual bypassing (Helder et al., 2024), and microfictions that endanger and exploit vulnerable children and families (Baden, 2016; McKee, 2019; Moftah, 2024, Roberts, 2022).

Implications for Future Research

Data Collection

Treatment decisions rarely exist as a binary, and there is no shortage of complexities to navigate. Therefore, the need for increased data collection, analysis, and discourse becomes increasingly evident so that mental health practitioners have ethically informed, tangible, and effective resources to offer former foster youth and adult adoptees throughout the ages and stages of their lives. As data and developments from the adult adoptee community become more inclusive and accessible, counselors and communities will surely continue shaping and reshaping their engagement with AL. Efforts like the BIPOC Adoptees Docuseries (2024) and Mapping the Life Course of Adoption Project (McGinnis, 2024b) led by adoptee scholars and activists provide clear and effective models of practice for future researchers and innovators to consider as they continue to collect and analyze data from and for adult adoptees.

Outcomes

While an empirically driven examination of literature that investigates the impact of AL is beyond the scope of this brief, partly due to the scarcity of peer-reviewed research and practice literature on adult adoptee counseling experiences, it is reasonable to envision community-based outcomes that could range from increased performance in education and vocation, higher rates of reported life satisfaction, relational factors that foster safety, connection, maturity, intimacy, psycho-socio-emotional development, stronger abilities to cope with the stressors of life, and overall heightened capacities to “learn well, work well, and contribute to the communities around them” (World Health Organization, 2024).

Implications for Individual, Marriage, Couple, and Family Counselors

Parent and Professional Training

In addition to rigorous education and counseling for caregivers before they choose to foster or adopt, the AL framework can be applied toward post-adoption parent training (birth families included) as a vital component in the process of legal, relational, and residential relinquishment and adoption (Kim, 2022). AL helps provide caregivers and counseling professionals alike with tools to recognize the impact of such transitions along with the risks families may face when they encounter inadequate support through and after such transitions. The four core relational cues serve as a buffer against the institutional tendency to pathologize adoptees and seek to preserve an adoptee's sense of humanity, agency, responsibility, ability to discover their own meanings of life, and a personal, dynamic actualization of those meanings.

Individual and Community Consciousness

Communities are always in process and the ways members need and request support ebb and flow. Therefore, AL is manifested through relational experiences that adoptees and those around them can rehearse and discover continually. As individuals and groups practice and contribute to the four core relational cues outlined in this brief, the families and communities into which adoptees have been placed will undoubtedly witness an increase in their tendency toward being with (Circle of Security International, 2024) and laboring for adoptees throughout their lifelong journeys.

A Different Kind of Village for Healing and Empowerment

It takes a village to relinquish a child. It takes another one to keep them from talking about what happened. A lot of people have to be in on it. (Small, 2024b)

The hope for mental health practitioners is that the clinical nature of adoptee-specific resources is improving exponentially to help adult adoptees experience something different, within and without the counseling space, far beyond the confines of childhood and adolescence. A lot of people have to be in on it. AL is a window and a mirror to those lifelong resources. Additional recommendations include:

Create a catalog of interventions and activities to help adoptees and their families explore aspects of AL.

Collect websites of adoptee-led organizations that create and facilitate space for adoptee-focused resources and storytelling.

Subscribe to newsletters written by adoptees to stay up to date on current events, research, and public discourse.

Maintain an active list of books, film, art, podcasts, etc. that help showcase the diversity of adoptee experiences and highlight useful services.

Consider creative person-specific ways to utilize adoptee-focused assessments (e.g., RISEN Story Map) to energize dialogue in and between counseling sessions.

Provide adult adoptee clients with an updated “one-sheet” based on community feedback observed and self-reports received from clients and colleagues.

Engage in meaningful networking to nurture connections to and alongside adult adoptee and former-foster-youth communities.

Counselors can exercise their positions of influence by advocating for adoptees who may be absent from critical decision-making processes; to promote increased awareness and competence, counselors may refer and defer to adoptees for events, projects, training initiatives, and available resources.

Conclusion

Family separation is not a one-time event. Nor is it always a fixed and ultimate conclusion. So it is with foster care, adoption, and all other forms of institutionalized child welfare services. Psychological research and its practitioners have been limited in their capacity to remain attuned to such realities (Branco et al., 2024). To help to ensure adoptees are not left alone in such nuanced and complex experiences, the author has proposed and applied AL as a conceptual and practical framework. AL serves to guide the questions, methods, interpretations, and applications used to increase the skills and sensitivities of counselors who wish to work with adult adoptees ethically and competently throughout their journeys. Soll (2015) articulates in an opening line of poetry a key aspect of AL:

What I knew about being an adoptee growing up was that I was unlovable.

What I know now is that I was and am loveable. (p. 17)

As mental health practitioners and healthcare providers commit to learning more about those who have lived and are living through relinquishment, foster care, and adoption, inviting adult adoptees to speak candidly about their experiences in clinical settings without the fear of being judged, it is the author's belief that many families and individuals across multiple generations, not just those in this current age, will receive more of what they need to tell their stories, perhaps discovering new dimensions of hope in the process. Counselors and therapists who work with adult adoptee clients are encouraged to review the four core relational cues of AL to cultivate the spontaneous and coordinated layers of healing that are innately possible through such informed, ethical, and culturally sensitive practices.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Cameron Lee Small

Appendix A

Adoption Literacy Resources [Books and Publications]

A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung

Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging by Eleana Kim

Adoptees Like Me by Chaitra Wirta-Leiker

Adoption Fantasies: The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood by Kimberlee McKee

Adoption is Both by Elena Hall

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

Ambiguous Loss by Pauline Boss

Being Adopted by Amy Wilkerson

Disrupting Kinship by Kimberly McKee

Eyes That Weave the World’s Wonders by Joanna Ho and Liz Kleinrock

Flip the Script: Adult Adoptee Anthology by Amanda H L Transue-Woolston (Editor), Rosita Gonzalez (Editor), Diane Rene Christian

I Wish for You a Beautiful Life: Letters from the Korean Birth Mothers of Ae Ran Won to Their Children edited by Sara Dorow

I Would Meet You Anywhere by Susan Kiya Ito

In Reunion: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Communication of Family by Sara Docan-Morgan

In Their Voices: Black Americans on Transracial Adoption by Rhonda M. Roorda

Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism by Kim Park Nelson

Journey of the Adopted Self by Betty Jean Lifton

Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.: A Memoir by Jenny Heijun Wills

Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants by SunAh M Laybourn

Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption edited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah and Sun Yung Shin

Palimpsest: Documents from a Korean Adoption by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom

Parenting as Adoptees edited by Adam Chau and Kevin Ost-Vollmers

Parenting in the Eye of the Storm by Katie Naftzger

Relinquished by Gretchon Sisson

Seeds from a Silent Tree: An Anthology By Korean Adoptees edited by Tonya Bishoff and Jo Rankin

Surviving the White Gaze by Rebecca Carroll

The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be by Shannon Gibney

The Wet Hex by Sun Yung Shin

Through the Lens of Ourselves by Suni Miller Zmich

When We Become Ours edited by Nicole Chung and Shannon Gibney

“You Should Be Grateful”: Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption by Angela Tucker

Virtual Adoption Literacy Resources [Audiovisual and Online]

Adapted by Kaomi Goetz [Podcast]

Adoptees On by Haley Radke [Podcast]

American Born Chinese [TV series]

Be The Bridge [Website]

Calcutta is My Mother [Documentary featuring Reshma McClintock]

Closure [Documentary featuring Angela Tucker]

Colin in Black and White [TV series]

Found [Film directed by Reena Dutt]

Korean Adoptee Story [Documentary featuring Dan Matthews]

Liminal Space [Film directed by Sophie Rizzo]

Lucky Girl [Film directed by Sidi Wang]

Side By Side [Film directed by Glenn Morey and Julie Morey]

The Adopted Life [Filmed interviews facilitated by Angela Tucker]

The Janchi Show by Nathan Nowack, Patrick Armstrong, and K.J. Roelke [Podcast]

This is Us [TV series]

Appendix B

Adoptee-led Organizations

Adoptee Mentoring Society https://www.adopteementorship.org/

Adoptee Open Mic https://www.instagram.com/theadopteeopenmic/

Adoptee Bridge https://www.adopteebridge.org/

Adopteen https://theparkcommunity.org/adopteeconnections/beyond-adopteen-2024/

Adoptee Hub https://www.adopteehub.org/

Adoptees of South America https://www.asa-extendedlatinamericas.com/

Adoptees United https://adopteesunited.org/

Adoption Mosaic https://adoptionmosaic.com/

AIRE Roots https://aireroots.com/aire-roots

Also Known As https://www.alsoknownas.org/

Bastard Nation https://bastards.org/

BIPOC Adoptees Docuseries https://www.bipocadoptees.org/

Boston Korean Adoptees https://www.bkadoptee.org/

Chinese Adoptee Alliance https://www.fccny.org/

IAmAdoptee https://iamadoptee.org/

Identity Learning https://www.identitylearning.co/

Inclusion Initiative https://www.theinclusioninitiative.com/

InterCountry Adoptee Voices https://intercountryadopteevoices.com/

Korean Adoptee Adoptive Family Network (KAAN) https://www.wearekaan.org/

Lost Daughters https://www.thelostdaughters.com/

Society of Adoptee Professionals of Color in Adoption (SAPCA) https://www.societyofadoptionprofessionals.org/

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