Adult Adoptee Therapy Ontario.
A reflection on the research article Perceived Inequality Between Biological and Adopted Siblings and Behavioural Problems Among Adopted Children: The Mediating Role of Emotional Insecurity. Adoption Quarterly. Abdullah 2026.
I grew up in a Norwegian Family. The lone adoptee in a full biological family. Everyone around me was tall with blonde hair, blue eyes, and pale skin. And then there was me.
When my siblings asked where they came from, they got birth stories… the hospital, the labour, the moment they arrived. When I asked, the joke around the kitchen table was that I’d been found under a cabbage leaf. It was said with lightness, the way families do when they don’t quite know what else to say. But underneath the lightness, a question took root that I carried for decades; “Where do I actually belong?”
I also noticed, as kids do, that the rules weren’t quite the same for me. I was supervised more. I wasn’t allowed out of my mother’s sight. I wasn’t allowed to participate in extracurricular activities like my siblings or play intramural sports. When I brought home good grades, I wasn’t praised; I was either suspected of cheating or told I should have tried harder. I didn’t see that with my siblings. There was always a quiet sense that no matter how hard I tried to be more Norwegian, to fit, to belong, the bar kept moving.
I didn’t have language for what I was experiencing then. I do now.
What the Research Is Finally Saying
I got to thinking about this after reading a recent study published in Adoption Quarterly (Abdullah, 2026) that examined adopted children aged 10-17 living alongside biological siblings in adoptive families in Pakistan. While the cultural context is specific… Pakistani families navigate adoption through informal arrangements deeply shaped by biological lineage and family hierarchy… the emotional dynamics the study uncovered are strikingly universal.
The research looked at what happens when adopted children perceive that they are treated differently from the biological children in the family. Not abuse. Just…different rules. Different expectations. Different levels of trust, praise, patience, and freedom.
The study found three things that I think every adoptee deserves to hear:
- Perceived differential treatment is strongly linked to emotional insecurity. Children who felt they were treated less favourably than their biological siblings reported significantly higher levels of emotional insecurity; that chronic, low-level fear of rejection, uncertainty about whether they truly belong, and the exhausting sense that love might be conditional.
- That emotional insecurity doesn’t stay quiet; it finds a way out. In children, it often shows up as aggression or oppositional behaviour. In adults, it tends to look like anxiety, people-pleasing, difficulty trusting partners, explosive anger that feels disproportionate, or a lifelong hunger for approval that never quite gets filled.
- How a child perceives treatment matters more than what parents intended. This is a crucial finding. The research confirms what therapists who work with adoptees have long understood: it’s not about whether parents meant to treat children differently. It’s about what the child experienced and concluded about their own worth and place in the family.
The Invisible Scoreboard
Many adult adoptees I work with didn’t grow up in families where the differential treatment was obvious or cruel. Nobody sat them down and said “you matter less”. Instead, it was quieter than that.
It was being forced to have a paper route when your siblings didn’t, and not being able to keep the income. It was having to bring your younger brother along when you were with your friends, but not being extended the same courtesy when he was with his friends and you were alone. It was getting good grades and being met with suspicion instead of celebration. It was not being able to play football with the neighbourhood kids because the field they were playing on was not within Mom’s direct line of sight.
It was watching the siblings pack their bags every summer to spend a week with your grandparents in another city, and never once being invited along. Not once. Nobody said “you’re not really their grandchild”. Nobody had to.
It was never once having a sleepover at a friend’s house. Never having a friend sleep over at yours. Watching your siblings do both, and understanding without anyone explaining it that the same freedoms simply weren’t available to you.
It was never having a key to the house. Never being allowed inside alone. Your siblings had keys. You didn’t. And a key is not just a key; it’s a small, solid metal message about who lives there unconditionally, and who is here on different terms.
It was never going to a school dance. Never going on a school trip unless your mother came along as a chaperone, and if she couldn’t be there, you simply didn’t go. While your siblings moved through the world with ordinary independence, you were kept close, kept visible, kept supervised. The unspoken message underneath all of it; “you cannot be trusted out there alone. The world out there is not for people like you”.
That kind of chronic, watchful containment doesn’t feel like love to a child, even when it may have been intended as exactly that. It feels like a verdict.
Each of these things, in its own right, might seem small. But children are extraordinarily perceptive. They are constantly reading the family system for information about their safety and their worth. And when the data keeps coming back the same way… different rules for you… they draw a conclusion. Not consciously, not in words, but in the body, in the nervous system, in the attachment patterns they carry into every relationship that follows,
That conclusion often sounds something like: “I have to earn my place here. And I’m not sure I ever fully will”.
What Emotional Insecurity Looks Like in Adult Adoptees
The research frames emotional insecurity as a child’s chronic sense of emotional unsafety, fear of rejection, and uncertainty about their stability and value within the family. In the therapy room, I see this show up in adult adoptees in ways that can be confusing and painful; especially because so many adoptees have been told, explicitly or implicitly, that they should be grateful.
Here are some of the patterns I see most often:
- Hypervigilance in relationships. A constant scanning for signs that someone is pulling away, losing interest, or treating you as less-than. Arguments that escalate quickly because the stakes feel existential, not just “this person is annoyed with me”, but “I am about to be left”.
- Difficulty accepting praise or success. When your achievements were met with suspicion growing up, genuine recognition in adulthood can feel threatening or false. Imposter syndrome in adoptees is rarely just about competence… it often has roots in early messages that their success wasn’t quite real, or wasn’t quite theirs.
- A shapeshifting sense of self. Trying to be “more Norwegian”. Trying to fit the mould of the family you were placed in. Many adoptees spend years trying to become what they think their family needs them to be, and arrive in adulthood genuinely unsure of who they actually are when nobody is watching.
- Anger that arrives fast and hard. The research distinguished between reactive aggression; explosive, emotion-driven, and more deliberate resistance. In adults, the reactive version often shows up as a hair-trigger in situations that feel unfair or dismissive. It makes sense: if fairness was an early wound, perceived injustice hits differently.
- Chronic people-pleasing or over-achieving. Working harder than anyone else to justify your place. Never quite resting. Never quite feeling like enough. The paper route you had and your siblings didn’t; that sense that you must earn what others simply have, can follow a person for decades.
Why This Isn’t About Blaming Your Parents
One of the things I want to name clearly… recognizing these patterns is not the same as saying your adoptive parents were bad people, or that they didn’t love you.
Most adoptive parents were doing the best they could, often within their own unexamined biases, cultural scripts, and anxieties about adoption. The research acknowledges that differential treatment is sometimes not even consciously intended; it can emerge from deeply embedded cultural assumptions about biological kinship, from the simple fact of not knowing how to talk about adoption, from discomfort that gets expressed as distance.
The cabbage patch joke wasn’t malicious. But it was a placeholder for a real conversation that never happened, and the absence of that conversation left a child wondering, in the quiet of their own mind, what the real answer was.
Therapy isn’t about rewriting your history or building a case against the people who raised you. It’s about finally having the space to look honestly at what you experienced, name what it did to you, and begin to disentangle your worth from the conclusions your nervous system drew when you were small.
How Therapy Can Help.
The research underscores something I believe deeply from both my professional training and my own lived experience as an adoptee… emotional insecurity is not a fixed trait. It can be built. It can be repaired.
In therapy, we work on several layers:
Making the implicit explicit. Many adoptees have never put words to these experiences before. Simply naming “I was treated differently, and I drew conclusions about my worth from that” can be profoundly relieving. You are not imagining it. You are not being dramatic. The research says what you felt was real, and it mattered.
Renegotiating the internal story. The belief I have to earn my place was a survival strategy that made sense when you were ten years old. In adulthood, it’s often causing harm. Therapy helps you meet that belief with compassion and begin to revise it.
Processing the grief. Adoptees often grieve without knowing what they’re grieving. The origin story you never got. The belonging you never quite felt. The version of yourself that tried so hard to fit and couldn’t. This grief is real and it deserves space.
Building felt safety in relationships. Through the therapeutic relationship itself… which is, at its core, a relationship where you are accepted consistently, without conditions… many adoptees begin to experience, perhaps for the first time, what it actually feels like to be held without having to earn it.
You Deserved to Know Where You Came From
You deserved a birth story. You deserved to play on the football field. You deserved to bring home good grades and have someone simply say “well done”.
If you’re an adult adoptee who has spent years carrying a low-level hum of not-quite-belonging, of working harder than others to justify your place, of relationships that feel perpetually unstable… this is not a character flaw. It is a very human response to an early relational environment that gave your nervous system specific information about your worth.
And that information can be updated.
I work with adult adoptees navigating anxiety, trauma, and the complex emotional legacy of early family experiences. If any of this resonated with you, I’d love to connect. I offer a free virtual introductory session; you can book directly through my website at https://londonanxietytrauma.ca/adoption-trauma-clinic/. You don’t have to keep figuring this out alone.
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This post references findings from: Abdullah, T. (2026). Perceived Inequality Between Biological and Adopted Siblings and Behavioural Problems Among Adopted Children: The Mediating Role of Emotional Insecurity. Adoption Quarterly. https://doi.rog/10.1080/10926755.2026.2669469