I want to tell you something about adoptee guilt and shame.
It’s something that I don’t say lightly; something it took me the better part of four decades to understand.
The shame I carried for most of my life wasn’t mine.
I borrowed it. I absorbed it.
I built an entire identity around it.
But it was never, not for a single day, the truth about who I am.
Where My Story Begins (Before I Was Even There to Remember It)
My birth mother was an unwed woman in 1966. She was sent away from her hometown, quietly, to a mother and baby home in a city hours away, to have me in secret. The shame of an illegitimate pregnancy in that era was not something a family could absorb. So she was removed. Hidden. And then I was born.
I don’t know what happened in the thirteen months between my birth and my adoption. I don’t know where I was, who held me, whether anyone sang to me or whether I spent those months in an institutional crib waiting for a life to begin. Thirteen months is a long time for an infant. The research on early attachment is unambiguous: those months matter. The nervous system is forming. The relational template is being built. And mine was built in circumstances I will never fully know.
At thirteen months, I was adopted into a family that already had a four-year-old biological daughter. A subsequent pregnancy ended badly, and they were told they would never have another baby. So they adopted me. And then, two years later, they did have another baby. A biological child, born healthy.
I became the adopted child sandwiched between two biological children. The one who didn’t quite fit the genetic picture. The one who looked different, moved differently, thought differently, cared about different things. I always knew I was adopted. It was never hidden from me in that sense. But it was also never something I was allowed to talk about. Questions weren’t welcomed. Curiosity about my origins was met with silence or discomfort. The message, however unintentionally delivered, was clear: that part of your story doesn’t belong here. Put it away.
So I did.
The Shame That Had No Name
I grew up knowing, in the wordless way that children know things before they have language for them, that I was different. Not just adopted. Different in some more fundamental way. Like there was something about me that hadn’t quite worked out the way it was supposed to.
I was smart. I was driven. I threw myself at things with an intensity that impressed people. But underneath all of that was a quiet, persistent conviction that I was, at my core, a screw-up. A failure. Someone who didn’t quite belong anywhere and probably never would.
I left home at fifteen. I lived on the streets for a while. And even then, even in the middle of that chaos, part of me was performing: trying to prove something, trying to be enough, trying to outrun a feeling I couldn’t name.
For decades, I explained all of this as personality. I was just like that. Restless. Difficult. Unable to commit. I was the best boyfriend for a while, and then I would get bored and leave. I was employee of the month, fast-tracked for management, and then, right around the three or four year mark, I would move on. Jobs, relationships, friendships, apartments, cities. The pattern repeated itself with such consistency that it became its own kind of evidence: see, I told you. I can’t stay. Something is wrong with me.
The Moment Things Started to Shift
It wasn’t until my forties that I started to put it together.
I remember the specific quality of that realization. Not dramatic, not a single lightning bolt moment, but a slow and slightly disorienting dawning: wait a minute. What if I’m not a screw-up? What if this has something to do with how I started?
I started doing research. I started reading about adoptee experiences. And what I found stopped me in my tracks: I was not alone. Not remotely. The patterns I had spent my whole life treating as personal failings, the restlessness, the leaving, the overachievement, the inability to stay, the shame that seemed to have no source, were shared by adoptees across cultures, across eras, across vastly different family circumstances.
This wasn’t coincidence. This was something systemic. Something that happens to children who begin life with a rupture, whose earliest experience of relationship is one of loss, even when that loss is surrounded by love and good intentions.
The shame I had been carrying wasn’t evidence of who I was. It was a coping strategy. A way a very young child, and then a growing one, made sense of circumstances that made no sense.
What Guilt and Shame Actually Are (For Adoptees)
Let me be precise about this, because I think it matters.
Guilt says: “I did something wrong”.
Shame says: “I am something wrong”.
Children, particularly very young children, are egocentric in the most literal sense. They are the centre of their own universe, and when things go wrong around them, they assume they are the cause. This isn’t selfishness. It’s developmental. It’s how the young mind works.
When a child is separated from their birth mother, they cannot understand the social, economic, historical, or personal forces that led to that moment. What they can understand, at the only level available to them, is something like: I was left. And if I was left, there must be something about me that made that happen.
That conclusion, drawn before language, before memory, before any capacity for nuance or context, becomes a foundation. Everything built on top of it is quietly shaped by it.
For me, it showed up as a bone-deep sense of being a screw-up, even when the evidence of my life said otherwise. It showed up as leaving before I could be left, over and over, in every domain of my life. It showed up as performing, achieving, being the best, as though if I was exceptional enough, valuable enough, indispensable enough, the leaving wouldn’t happen again.
None of that was conscious. None of it was chosen. It was my nervous system running an extremely old program, one written in the first thirteen months of my life, in circumstances I don’t remember and couldn’t have understood.
The Particular Shame of the Adoption Narrative
There is a specific shame that belongs to the era and circumstances I came from, and I think it deserves to be named.
My birth mother was shamed. She was removed from her community, sent away in secret, and expected to return as though nothing had happened. Her grief, her loss, her story: all of it was buried. The shame of what happened to her, the social shame of illegitimacy in 1966, became part of the air around my beginning.
I also grew up in a family where my adoption was not quite speakable. Not because my parents were cruel, but because there was something around it that felt too fragile, too complicated, too much. And when a child cannot speak about something, they learn to carry it internally. The thing that cannot be said becomes the thing that is wrong with them.
For adoptees who grew up being told they should be grateful, that they were chosen, that they were lucky: that narrative, however well-meaning, carries its own shame. It forecloses the grief. It makes the loss unspeakable. And anything unspeakable eventually becomes shameful.
What I Know Now (That I Wish I’d Known at Fifteen, or Twenty-Five, or Thirty-Five)
The shame was a strategy. The leaving was a strategy. The overachieving was a strategy. They were all ways of managing an unbearable foundational wound, the wound of having begun life in rupture, in the absence of the person whose body I had grown inside.
They were intelligent strategies. Remarkably so. They got me through. They kept me moving, kept me functioning, kept me connected enough to survive.
But they were never the truth about me.
And they are not the truth about you either.
If you are an adoptee who has spent years quietly convinced that you are the problem, that you are too much or not enough or fundamentally broken, that your inability to stay or your hunger to achieve or your complicated relationship with belonging is just who you are: I want to offer you the same slow dawning that changed my life.
What if it isn’t who you are? What if it is what happened to you? What if the shame you are carrying belongs to a story that began before you had any say in it, and was never, not once, a verdict on your worth?
That question, genuinely held and gently explored, is where healing begins.
Why I Do This Work
I became a therapist because of this story. Because I know what it is to carry shame that has no name, to live inside patterns you don’t understand, to be a high-functioning person with a quietly devastated interior.
I work with adoptees because I know this territory from the inside. And I work with anyone who grew up feeling like the wrong person in the room, like the one who didn’t quite fit, like someone whose real story was never quite allowed to be told.
If any of this has landed somewhere true for you, I would be honoured to sit with you in it.
You don’t have to keep carrying this alone.
I offer a free 15 to 20 minute intro session where you can share a little of your story and we can see if working together feels like a good fit.