Published by IVP on June 4, 2024
Genres: Non-Fiction, Adoption, Christian Life, Social Justice
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Every adoption is rooted in loss.
Adoption is often framed by happy narratives, but the reality is that many adoptees struggle with unaddressed trauma and issues of identity and belonging. Adoptees often spend the majority of their youth without the language to explore the grief related to adoption or the permission to legitimize their conflicting emotions.
Adoptee and counselor Cameron Lee Small names the realities of the adoptee's journey, narrating his own and other adoptees' stories in all their complexity. He unpacks the history of how adoption has worked and names how the church influenced adoption practices with unintended negative impacts on adoptees' faith. Small's own tumultuous search for and reunion with his mother in Korea inspired him to help other adoptees navigate what it means to carry multiple stories. His adoptee-centered advocacy helps adoptees regain their agency and identity on a journey of integration and healing, with meaningful relationships in all their family systems.
Cameron Lee Small wrote this book to help adoptees reclaim their voices, tell their stories, and heal from trauma. He outlines common struggles that adoptees experience, such as questioning their identity, experiencing grief and loss over their relinquishment, and feeling like other people don’t understand or honor their complicated questions and emotions. He writes about how challenging it is for adoptees to be honest about their grief, since many people shut down legitimate questions and concerns, spouting platitudes and expecting that adoptees should just be grateful.
Small is a South Korean adoptee and a licensed therapist, and he shares some of his personal story throughout this book. He presents episodes from his early childhood in an experimental, second-person writing style, and he explores adoption-related challenges from different life stages. His reflections about returning to Korea and meeting some biological family members were very interesting and thought-provoking. In addition to sharing from his own experience, Small also includes quotes and reflections from other adoptees, and he shares examples of conversations with his therapy clients.
Small focuses on international and trans-racial adoptee experiences, and takes a deep dive into ways that stereotypes, racism, and the loss of one’s heritage will affect an adoptee’s sense of self. He shares insights on trauma recovery, healthy emotional processing, and identity development for adoptees, and he writes about practical concerns related to navigating complex relationships and pursuing birth search and reunion. He also weaves in faith-based reflections throughout, sometimes sharing solid Christian perspectives, and sometimes taking biblical language out of context to support unrelated points. This book is also very abstract and academic at times, with lots of clinical phraseology and flowery language that make whole paragraphs read like word salad.
Although I appreciated many things about this book, I also have some major critiques. Firstly, when Small shares some scattershot information about the darker side of adoption’s history, he makes a lot of sweeping statements and judgments. It is important to acknowledge unethical practices in adoption history, but these sections seemed to present worst-case scenarios as standard, instead of offering a more representative picture of the whole topic. Small also paints adoptive parents in nefarious terms at times. He refers to adoption as “ownership” of a child, and he portrays adoptive parents’ behavior in an overwhelmingly negative light, without counterexamples of adoptive parents handling things well. This is one of the downsides of drawing so much of the book from counseling contexts, where you’re going to see peak levels of dysfunction.
Also, even though adoption should be a last resort, some of Small’s sweeping statements make it sound like adoptive parents are actively preventing biological families from staying together, rather than stepping in to provide homes for children who have already lost their families. There are many social problems that governments and organizations should address to help families stay together, but that is all upstream, prior to adoption. Adoptive parents often get too much praise, but that doesn’t mean that we should shame them instead, as if it’s their fault that an adopted child couldn’t stay with their biological parents. On that note, Small offers only a few passing caveats about cases where birth parents lose parental rights due to negligence or violent abuse, and he doesn’t address cases where birth mothers create adoption plans before birth and personally choose adoptive parents for their child.
This book appears to be about adoption in general, but it is really about international and/or trans-racial adoption, primarily profiling Asian and Black people who were adopted into white families. Although there are also examples of Hispanic and mixed-race adoptees, there is only one white adoptee profiled. This book’s emphasis on international and trans-racial adoption will be helpful for readers from similar backgrounds, but other readers may feel disappointed by how little they relate to the examples. Frankly, the adoptees that I know in my personal life are more diverse in nationality, race, and opinions about adoption than the adoptees profiled in this book.
It is perfectly valid for the author to specialize with a particular type of adoptive experiences, but I am concerned that other readers will feel sidelined, or will worry that their adoption experiences don’t count in comparison. If you are a domestic trans-racial adoptee, then you won’t relate to all of the material related to losing your first language and country. If you’re white, you’ll be effectively ignored. People will justify this by pointing to how easily white adoptees can assimilate and blend in, but that comes in with its own unique complexities that are worthy of acknowledgement, and international adoptees who happen to be white are still losing their first language, nationality, and culture.
The Adoptee’s Journey: From Loss and Trauma to Healing and Empowerment is a unique, insightful book that will encourage readers who relate to the experiences detailed here. This book validates the grief and trauma that adoptees experience, and it can be especially encouraging for people in families and communities that expect conformity and stifle tough questions. This book’s audience is narrower than it appears, and the writing is full of clinical jargon and is sometimes confusing, but I would recommend this to international and trans-racial adoptees who want to think deeply about the challenges associated with their adoption experiences.