By Amanda Graham
I was adopted in 1967.
That isn’t the surprising part.
What is harder to explain is that I only found out at 18 and it wasn’t because anyone told me.
I didn’t grow up feeling different. There was no moment in childhood where things didn’t quite add up, no obvious sense that something was missing. My parents loved me, my family felt like mine, and the story of who I was seemed complete.
At least, that’s what I believed.
Because in the world I was born into, silence around adoption wasn’t unusual – it was encouraged. People believed that not telling a child was an act of kindness. That it protected them. That it allowed them to grow up without confusion or complication.
I can understand how they may have believed, perhaps somewhat naively, that they were doing the “right thing.” After all, what could first-time adoptive parents really be expected to know? Yet, looking back forty years later, now equipped with extensive therapeutic training, I feel both anger and disappointment toward the social service professionals responsible for placing children in new families. They should have provided far better guidance and support to adoptive parents.
It may have been 1967, what my own children jokingly call ‘the old days’, but it was hardly the dark ages. By then, important psychological insights were already available. Influential thinkers had begun to explore attachment theory and the potential trauma caused by separating infants from their birth mothers. John Bowlby (1907–1991), a leading British child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, developed attachment theory through his observations of children in British hospitals who were separated from their parents. His work demonstrated how caregivers’ responses to a child’s need for attachment play a crucial role in shaping emotional wellbeing and future relationships.
But understanding it doesn’t mean it had no cost.
When I found out at 18, it didn’t feel like I had been given new information.
It felt like something fundamental had shifted, quietly, but permanently.
Not just about my past.
But about how I understood myself.
What made it harder, looking back, is this:
I didn’t find out late by accident. I found out late because deep down, I believe, I inherently knew that I was different to the family I was growing up in. Not consciously but deep in my psyche I knew. And so, one day, my curiosity simply got the better of me.
In the decades around the 1960s, adoption in the UK was built on secrecy. It was what’s now called a “closed” system, records sealed, identities changed, and in many cases, children simply not told at all.
The idea was simple:
If the child never knew, there would be no confusion.
No divided loyalties.
No questions that couldn’t be answered.
A clean break.
But what we’ve learned since is that there’s no such thing as a clean break, only a hidden one.
Today, the advice is almost the exact opposite.
Adoption guidance in the UK now consistently recommends that children should be told early, openly, and repeatedly about their adoption, not as a single moment, but as something they grow up always knowing.
The reasoning is clear:
In fact, the modern thinking goes even further:
If a child can remember the moment they were ‘told,’ it may already be too late.
That shift didn’t happen by accident. It happened because of people like me.
People who grew up with good intentions wrapped around silence and then had to absorb the truth all at once, at an age where identity is already fragile, already forming, already under pressure.
Because 18 isn’t a neutral moment to find out who you are. It’s the moment you’re supposed to be becoming secure in who you are. That’s the part that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. It wasn’t just learning something new.
It was realising that something fundamental had been withheld for my entire life, not just by a system, but by the people closest to me.
Again, I don’t say that with blame.
But I do say it with honesty. Because there’s a difference between being protected…and being kept in the dark.
And maybe that’s the real lesson that’s emerged over time.
Not that my parents were wrong for loving me the way they did.
But that love, on its own, isn’t enough to carry secrecy.
Because identity isn’t something you can safely reveal all at once.
It’s something that must be lived with, slowly, from the beginning.
I’ve had a lifetime to think about this.
To understand it.
To make peace with it.
To see it not just through my own eyes, but through the context of the time, the system, and the people who believed they were doing the right thing.
And I do believe they meant well. Although it also seems so obviously wrong now.
But meaning well doesn’t erase impact. Our adoption systems should have made this a crucial piece of advice for all adoptive parents, schools, health systems and any carers who had any responsibility for an adopted child should have talked about their development from the ‘adopted perspective’. Sadly, there is still room for improvement today.
What stays with me isn’t anger. It’s the awareness of how something so fundamental, knowing who you are, can be shaped by silence as much as by truth.
How something that happened before I could speak…and something I didn’t uncover until I was an adult…can quietly echo across an entire life.
Today, we know more although there is still room for much more improvement particularly when we look for increases in behavioural diagnoses in our young people.
We understand that identity matters.
That openness matters.
That children don’t need protecting from the truth, they need to grow up with it.
And that’s a good thing.
A necessary change.
But stories like mine sit in between those two worlds. There are many adoptees of my generation who experienced similar upbringings, but who STILL find it hard to know who they are.
Situations like these are not tragic enough to be headline news unless, unlike my secure and uneventful childhood, a child is adopted into a troubled family.
Should the children simply be grateful they were adopted at all? Is that the end of a new beginning? A result. A placement.
So, I’m left with a question, not just for myself, but for anyone reading this:
What would you have wanted?
To be told early, and grow up with the truth, even if it was complicated?
Or to be protected from it… and only discover it later, when everything you thought you knew was already in place?
I don’t think there’s an easy answer.
But I do think it’s a conversation worth having.
Because for a long time, people like me didn’t get to be part of it.
If this speaks to you, whether through adoption or another experience of discovering something significant later in life, I would genuinely value hearing your perspective.
It has taken years of reflection and more recently, open conversations with my adoptive family to come to some kind of peace with what happened to me. I have become sadly aware of a generation (or two) of adoptees that have too often not been treated with the care and understanding they deserve by those in authority.
After all, unless you have lived the experience of adoption, it is difficult to fully grasp the depth of therapeutic support required, not just at the point of placement, but across a lifetime. I understand that now, not only as an adoptee but also as a counselling psychotherapist.
Sign up to my Substack to read more excerpts from my forthcoming memoir and reflections, The Psychology of Adoption.
