The Psychology of Adoption
A personal and professional exploration of identity, belonging, resilience and what it means to become fully ourselves.
I have lived on both sides of the adoption story. First as an adopted child who was never told she was adopted. Later as a psychotherapist with more than 30 years of experience supporting children, adolescents and families.
The Psychology of Adoption is part memoir and part professional reflection. It is my attempt to explore what adoption, attachment, identity and resilience can teach us about the stories we inherit and the people we become.
I was adopted in 1967, but nobody told me
I was born in Middlesbrough in 1967 to a seventeen year old mother who made the painful decision to place me for adoption.
I grew up deeply loved by my adoptive parents, but within a carefully protected secret.
At eighteen, I discovered the truth by accident.
That moment did not answer all of my questions.
In many ways, it created them. The following forty years became a gradual search for identity, an eventual search for my birth mother, Christine, and an ongoing exploration of how two families, two truths and two histories can live within one person.
This is not simply a book about adoption
Adoption is the thread running through this book, but the questions reach further.
Where do we belong?
Why do family relationships matter so deeply?
How do our earliest experiences shape the adults we become?
Can we acknowledge pain without building our entire identity around it?
And what does resilience really mean?
These are human questions.
Personal narrative. Professional reflection. The resilience thread.
Personal Narrative
The story as I experienced it.
Professional Reflection
What psychology, psychotherapy and decades of working with families may help us understand.
The Resilience Thread
A wider exploration of how human beings survive difficult beginnings and continue to flourish.
A book about becoming whole
I do not believe healing asks us to erase the past.
I believe it asks us to make sense of it.
The Psychology of Adoption explores attachment, identity, trauma, resilience and belonging through lived experience and contemporary psychological thought. It is written with compassion for the adopted child, the birth parent and the adoptive family.
Not to assign blame.
To understand more honestly.
Identity continues to evolve
One of the central themes running through the book is that resilience is not the absence of pain.
Nor is it simply the ability to endure hardship. Resilience develops through relationships, belonging, self understanding and the integration of our life story.
Over many years of working with families, I have become convinced that healing comes not from erasing the past but from making sense of it.
Difficult beginnings do not determine our endings.
Read Amanda’s reflections on adoption
Join me as the book takes shape
I am currently preparing The Psychology of Adoption for publication. If you would like to receive occasional reflections, book updates and release information, you are very welcome to join the list.
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