Watch

Most of us carry one continuous story of where we come from. You were born to certain people, in a certain place, and you can tell that story start to finish, with the usual gaps, on a stable base. An adoptee often carries several stories at once. There's the story from before the adoption, which they may know almost nothing about. There's the life they've actually lived since. And there's the account they were handed as a child, about how they came to be adopted, which they carry as the bridge across the gap between the other two.

That handed-down account is often the first version of themselves an adoptee ever gets, sometimes a kind of bedtime story, told and retold and embellished over the years. And they build on it, for a long time, usually without realizing that's what they're doing, and without any way to know whether it's complete, or even true. Sometimes it isn't. Agencies got things wrong, parents passed on what they'd been told, and years later a reunion, a DNA test, or a single overheard fact can reveal that the story an adoptee has organized their whole life around needs to be rewritten.

This lesson is about that story, the one an adoptee was given, and what it's like when it has to change. I asked an adoptee to talk about the story she grew up with, and how it's shifted. Listen for the moment the story stopped being solid.

A client's story is the frame they've made sense of their whole life through, and for an adoptee that frame may be built on an account that was partial, shaped by what the culture allowed, or simply wrong. Two things to hold. First, when the story changes, everything reorganizes. When a reunion or a DNA result lands, it's rarely just one new fact; it sends the person back to reread their whole life, and that takes time. Second, you don't need to hand your client one clean, final story. Adoptees often carry more than one version at once, the story they were told and the story they've since learned, and the work is usually helping them hold both, rather than pushing toward a single tidy account.

Reflect

Think of a time you found out something that changed a story you'd always believed, a family secret that surfaced, a parent who turned out to have a whole history you never knew. Notice that it did more than add a fact. It sent you back through old memories, and you saw them differently in light of what you now knew.

Write one sentence: what was it like to have the ground of your own story shift under you?

For many adoptees, that kind of shift happens more than once, and it's usually about the most basic facts of who they are and where they began.

Review

An adoptee's story is often several stories at once. Knowing which one a client is working with, and whether it's being revised, helps you follow it.

• The stories they hold. The story before the adoption (often unknown), the life lived since, and the account they were given as a child about how they came to be adopted, which bridges the gap between the first two.
• The given account. Often the first version of themselves an adoptee gets, sometimes a "bedtime story," built on for years. It may be partial, shaped by the cultural script about adoption, or simply wrong, and the adoptee usually has no way to check it until much later.
• How it gets revised. Slowly or fast, through coming out of the fog, search and reunion, DNA testing, late discovery, or an ordinary life event (a birth, a death, a diagnosis) that brings the questions back.

Two reminders for the room:

• When the story changes, the whole life gets reread, not just updated. That rereading takes time; don't rush it toward resolution.
• Adoptees often hold more than one version at once. The work is usually helping them hold both, not collapsing them into a single tidy account.