From Silence to Service

Building an Adult Adoptee Pathway in South West London

by Freddie Louise Bicker

Adoption is a story written about you before you can write your own. For many of us who are adopted, the story is incomplete. Pages are missing, details are redacted, and silences take the place of answers. We grow up learning to live with questions that were never answered, and carrying losses that were never named.

When I began my counselling training as a 48 year old woman at Metanoia, I carried all of this with me—not only as theory, but as lived truth. Sitting in lectures on loss, attachment, and identity, I wasn’t just a student learning therapeutic models. I was also an adoptee, quietly mapping the landscape of my own life onto what I was being taught.

Around that time, I accessed my birth file. Holding those documents in my hands was both grounding and devastating. My beginnings were written about in a clinical tone, by people I never knew, stripped of compassion or explanation. My life was recorded, but not truly witnessed. That experience reminded me once again how much adoptees are asked to hold—grief, rupture, shame, and longing—often without any guidance or support.

Not long after, I began a student placement at CDARS, a South West London charity supporting people living with addiction and mental health challenges. That placement grew into work as a keyworker and group facilitator, and counsellor . Each role taught me something different—sitting alongside people in groups, supporting them one-to-one, and learning to hold space in the counselling room.

I also had the privilege of sitting in multi-disciplinary team (MDT) meetings. There, I listened carefully to colleagues as they shared the complexity of client presentations: people living with addiction, trauma, stigma, fractured attachments, and shame. And among those stories, adoptees were mentioned.

But what struck me was this: while adoptees were present in the system, there was no pathway for them. No dedicated, trauma-informed route that acknowledged adoption as a lifelong experience. No framework to address the grief, shame, identity loss, and longing that adoption so often carries. Adoptees were visible, but provision for adoptees was absent.

As an adoptee myself, I recognised the themes instantly—the silence, the shame, the longing for belonging, the way adoption echoes through relationships and self-worth. And I knew I couldn’t leave it unnamed.

I spoke to my CEO at CDARS. He listened—really listened. He heard the gap I was naming, and together we began to imagine something different.

Now, within a year , we have created the Adult Adoptee Counselling Service, offering free therapeutic support across the five South-West London boroughs. For the first time locally, adult adoptees have a space where they do not need to explain why adoption matters, or defend their grief, or feel silenced in their longing. It is a space where they are met with understanding.

This service is deeply meaningful to me. But I also know my limits. I am just one counsellor. Ethically, I would not hold more than 10 adoptee clients a week. To take on more would not serve them, or me. That boundary keeps the work safe and contained—but it also highlights a wider truth: this cannot rest on one person’s shoulders.

So I find myself asking: what happens next, if this takes off?

We cannot rely on individual counsellors alone. What we need is a movement.

That means:

Training more counsellors to be adoptee-informed. Too many adoptees enter therapy and feel they must educate their therapist. That is retraumatising. Adoption is lifelong. Therapists need to understand its complexity in order to meet adoptees with depth and care.

Expanding capacity. In the short term, this may mean drawing in volunteer counsellors—newly qualified or trainees who are eager to learn under supervision. Longer term, it means securing sustainable funding so that adoptee-informed counsellors can be supported and paid for their work.

Collecting data. For too long, adoptees have remained invisible simply because no one counted us. Without numbers, our needs are overlooked. By gathering evidence—about who comes to the service, what themes they bring, and what outcomes emerge—we can build the case for wider recognition and support.

My journey—from opening my birth file, to training at Metanoia, to working as a keyworker, facilitator, and counsellor at CDARS, to co-creating this service—has been guided by one principle: listening.

Listening to my own story, to the silence in the system, and to the voices of adoptees who too often go unheard.

Adoptees deserve more than to be “mentioned.” We deserve pathways. We deserve services that recognise adoption as lifelong. We deserve to sit in therapy and be understood, not minimised.

The Adult Adoptee Service at CDARS is one step. My hope is that it sparks something bigger: a future where adoptee-informed care is not a specialist exception, but part of the fabric of counselling, mental health, and addiction services across the UK.

For too long, adoptees have been unseen. Now, we are beginning to be recognised.

And that is how change begins.