Find a therapist who understands adoption

Father's Day has many meanings for adoptees and foster youth.

Finding a birth parent does not always lead to connection.

Ambiguous loss is grieving someone who is alive but emotionally unavailable.

The deepest wound of adoption and foster care is often the lifelong search for belonging

Every June, the celebration of Fathers’ Day ignites many feelings for me.

I find myself thinking about the fathers I have had, and still have in my life: My father of origin. My foster father. My adoptive father.In early life, I experienced two separations from fathers: one through birth and another through foster care. But there was a third loss I never anticipated: finding my birth father decades later and losing him again through an unanticipated rejection.As both a psychotherapist specializing in foster care and adoption and as a former foster youth and adoptee myself, I have come to understand that one of the least discussed forms of grief is “the unrequited reunion”.It is grief without a funeral.No casseroles.No sympathy cards.

No social script for mourning someone who is alive but unwilling to meet and know you.For many adoptees and former foster youth, the longing to understand where we come from never disappears. Separation trauma does not end at birth, adoption, or age 18. The nervous system continues searching for connection, identity, belonging, and genetic mirroring long after childhood has passed.And when reunion becomes a rejection, the original wound of abandonment reopens.

The Search for Missing Pieces

When adoptees and former foster youth begin searching for their families of origin, it is rarely a simple journey.

Many spend years navigating DNA databases, ancestry websites, court records, social media, and fragmented family stories in hopes of finding answers.

Not just answers about who their parents are, but answers about themselves.Who do I look like?Where did my laugh come from?Who has my eyes?Was I ever thought about?

Research shows that ancestry, family history, and biological connection play an important role in identity........

© Psychology Today