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Chad Goller-Sojourner, a transracial adoptee, said something about growing up that I haven't been able to put down. He said his source of love and hate came from the same well. His parents looked just like the people who were calling him a racial slur.

That's the piece that's specific here. Every adoptee grows up without genetic mirroring, without a face in the family that echoes theirs. A transracial adoptee grows up without racial mirroring too, in a family and often a town where nobody looks like them, and then walks out into a world that reads their body in ways their parents frequently didn't see. Where are you really from. Hands in their hair without asking. Followed in a store. Mistaken for the help at their own family's party.

And when they brought it home, some parents said "you're just like us," which was meant as love and left the child with no framework at all for what was happening to them.

There's one more layer. The gratitude bind runs harder here, because the culture tells transracial adoptees early and often that their parents did something exceptional. Any complexity about race gets weighed against that. Many transracial adoptees describe waiting until adulthood, or until they found other transracial adoptees, before they let themselves say any of it out loud.

I asked a transracial adoptee about the mirror. Listen for what she needed and didn't get.

Two things for the room. First, be honest about race between you and your client. If you're white and your client isn't, you're doing cross-racial clinical work, and the usual competencies apply: humility about what you can't understand from outside it, attention to the power in the room, and willingness to talk about race directly when it's clinically relevant. A counselor of color working with an adoptee of a different racial group is also doing cross-racial work. And some clients specifically want a counselor who shares their racial experience, which is a legitimate thing to want and worth hearing rather than taking personally.

Second, when a client describes what we've been describing, the useful move is usually to name it as real and structural rather than to interpret their parents. Something like: what you're describing is real, and it's something a lot of transracial adoptees carry. That lets them hold the love and the complexity at the same time without having to choose one. They probably didn't come in for you to diagnose their mother, and offering that will usually cost you the conversation.

And know the limits of one lesson. Read the adoptee scholars, get consultation, and consider co-treating.

Reflect

Think of a time you were the only one in a room, of anything, and you had to decide whether to say so. Maybe nobody meant anything by it. Notice that you still ran the calculation: is this worth naming, will they actually hear it, what does it cost me if they don't.

Write one sentence: what did you decide, and what made you decide it?

Now hold this. A transracial adoptee often runs that same calculation inside their own family, about their own body, with the people who love them most.

Keep — one-page takeaway

Scope note: this territory has a literature written largely by the adoptees inside it, and it does not fit in one lesson. Treat this as orientation. Expect to read further, seek consultation, and consider referral or co-treatment.

The clinical territory

• No racial mirror. No one in the family looks like them. No access to the hair, skin, and feature information biological children absorb without thinking. Many describe wishing they woke up looking different.
• The body read by the outside world. "Where are you really from," hair touched without permission, being mistaken for the help in their own family, being followed, being read as a stereotype. It accumulates, and parents often didn't see it or minimized it when it was reported.
• Community that exists but wasn't accessible. A Black adoptee in a white town had a Black community somewhere; an Asian American adoptee had community in the US. Standard racial identity models assume contact with one's racial community. Transracial adoptees often had none, and finding a way in as an adult is its own clinical territory.
• Love and harm looking alike. When a child is called a slur by a white classmate and goes home to white parents, the people who comfort them look like the people who harmed them. This is a literal visual fact, and it's not an accusation against the parents.
• The gratitude bind, intensified. The culture says the parents did something exceptional. Complexity about race gets weighed against that debt. Many wait until adulthood, or until they meet other transracial adoptees, to say it out loud.

History clients may be working through

• NABSW 1972 position statement opposing placement of Black children with white families. A reference point in the field ever since, revisited by the organization over the years.
• Multi-Ethnic Placement Act 1994 (amended 1996): limited the use of race in placement decisions and increased transracial placements. Argued both as reducing discrimination and as shifting racial preparation onto unequipped white families.
• Indian Child Welfare Act 1978: placement preference to extended family, tribe, then other Native families, in response to documented removal of Native children at far higher rates. Upheld in Brackeen v. Haaland (2023); the politics continue.

Frameworks worth knowing

• Cultural-racial identity model (Baden and Steward, 2007): how transracial adoptees may relate to racial identity differently across the lifespan.
• Adoptee Consciousness Model (Baden, Branco, and colleagues, 2022): extends that framework.
• Use them to recognize where a client may be, without imposing a stage.

In the room

• Name what the client describes as real and structural. Don't interpret their parents unless asked.
• You're doing cross-racial work. Humility, attention to power, willingness to discuss race directly.
• A client's wish for a same-race counselor is legitimate information, not a rejection.

Continued considerations

• What can you not understand about your client's racial experience from where you sit, and how would you say that out loud?
• Whose reading list are you working from? If the authors aren't transracial adoptees, start over.
• Sit with this: what would you do if a client told you they'd rather see someone who looks like them?

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