Chapter 1 · Foundations
Check yourself
Two questions on the foundations of this chapter. Pick an answer to see the reasoning, and retake it as often as you like.
A client adopted as an infant has been seeing you for a year for anxiety. She's 31, has done well, and adoption has barely come up. Over the last three weeks she's been tearful, sleeping badly, and preoccupied with questions about where she comes from. She's mentioned twice that she keeps looking at her own face in the mirror. Today, in passing, she mentions she's eleven weeks pregnant. She says it's unrelated, she's happy about it, and she doesn't know why she's such a mess right now. How do you understand this?
She told you the answer and filed it as unrelated. Pregnancy is one of the most significant activations of adult life for adoptees, often the first biological relative they will ever have, and it raises exactly the questions she's raising: where do I come from, whose face is this. The mirror isn't incidental. B orients you to what changed and follows her material without imposing a meaning she hasn't reached. A stops at the biology and misses the specific content. C rewrites a year of her work as secretly-about-adoption, which is your framework arriving all at once, and it will likely cost you the material she just risked mentioning.
A new client mentions, almost as an aside, that she always feels she has to keep everything in her life tightly handled, and that she falls apart when plans change. She doesn't connect it to being adopted. Hearing this through the seven core issues, which theme does it most likely point to?
Mastery and control. The need to keep life tightly handled, and the distress when control slips, is the mastery-and-control theme, a common way that having had no say in a life-altering event can echo forward. Naming it, gently and only if it fits, can normalize something she's carried without language. Grief and identity may be present too, but the specific thing she described, control and its loss, points here. Used well, the model is a place to recognize what you're hearing, held loosely enough to follow where she actually goes.