Adult Adoptee Movement
Creativity and activism as an adoptee, a guest blog by Zara Phillips If someone had said to me when I was younger that I would end up writing books, plays and a film on my experience as an adoptee I would never have believed them! It just seemed to happen. The moment I started doing […]
Will you believe that I have grief for the mother I loved before I was born, the mother I lost with my birth?
The selection of ‘adoption journey’ as a theme for this year’s National Adoption Week shows just how profoundly disconnected the adoption industry is from the experience of actual adoptees.
The theme of this year’s National Adoption Week in England (21st – 27th October) is “adoption journey.” National Adoption Week is an annual adopter recruitment campaign by Adoption England under the #YouCanAdopt brand, funded by the Department for Education. Their marketing campaign utilises celebrity supporters, news stories fed to national publications such as The Big […]
Last night, on meeting an adoptee for the first time, a friend and I were asked “Did you have a good adoption?” In a split second, I had to decide whether to let it go or to challenge this language with a complete stranger. [laughing] “I could give you a rant about why I don’t […]
Is it a battle worth fighting? Today I start a round of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), a therapy recommended for treating the effects of complex trauma, under the NHS. It’s taken me four long years to get here, with frustration and disappointments along the way. With all the hurdles I faced, there were […]
I had a ‘good’ adoption but I hate adoption. I hate the sense of not belonging of always being outside/other. I resent the way non adoptees usually view adoption. I wish that I’d had support from someone with insight to work through my issues instead of finding the primal wound in my forties and realising that no not everybody feels or thinks that way about things. It totally screws with your head and relationships, definitely your relationships!
Male adoptees living in the UK, and perhaps living with mental health issues, often put a brave face on things to stay strong and not show the cracks in our minds on the outside. We drink with the lads, we put up shelves, we are the strong ones, and we are the ones people lean on for support, we are not about to start asking for support ourselves for god’s sake, right?!
But there is a price for this help. Always a price. And that price is having your life put on show, having your complex, raw, unprocessed emotions filmed, Davina leaning in.
I can go back to the first house I was taken to when I was adopted, not far from where I now live. The house I grew up in is in the village where I still live today. This is part of my jigsaw.