The Choice That Isn’t About Lunch
By Karen Chaston
Sometimes I notice it in the smallest moments.
Kim will be standing in the kitchen, looking at two very ordinary options. A salad wrap. Or her favourite salad.
And I can feel it before she says anything.
The pause. The subtle tightening. The quiet scanning for the “right” answer.
It would be easy to dismiss this as overthinking. Or indecision. Or even personality.
But it isn’t.
Because this same pattern shows up everywhere.
In bigger choices. In life decisions. In relationships.
The fear of getting it wrong. The fear of disappointing.
The fear that choosing incorrectly could somehow cost her connection, safety, or belonging.
So often, what looks like people-pleasing from the outside is
actually something far more tender on the inside. A nervous system trying to avoid loss.
For many adoptees, decision-making isn’t about preference.
It’s about survival.
And what’s confronting is this.
These patterns didn’t suddenly appear in adulthood.
They were observed and documented decades ago.
The Research That Came Too Late to Stop the Damage
By the late 1960s, researchers in the United States were beginning to
publish studies exploring the emotional and psychological impact of adoption on children.
What’s often overlooked is this.
Those studies were not examining a new phenomenon.
They were drawing on the lived outcomes of more than twenty years of forced adoption practices
that began after 1945, an era now known in the USA as the Baby Scoop Era,
and in Commonwealth countries as the Forced Adoption Era.
By the time these studies were conducted, tens of thousands of adoptees
had already been separated from their biological mothers, many within hours or days of birth,
under systems that prioritised secrecy, compliance, and social convenience over emotional and relational continuity.
The research began to reveal patterns that felt uncomfortable.
Heightened anxiety. Hyper-vigilance around approval. Fear of making mistakes.
Difficulty trusting internal signals.
A tendency to scan for what others needed before identifying what they themselves felt and needed.
And yet, despite these findings, the system did not pause.
It continued. And continued. And is still continuing today!
The Part That’s Hardest to Sit With
The part that’s hardest to sit with is this.
Kim was born in December 1973.
By then, the research already existed.
The emotional and psychological impacts of maternal separation
had been observed, documented, and quietly filed away.
And yet, when she was forcibly taken from me, I was told something very different.
I was told that if I loved my baby, I would give her away for a better life.
That I was selfish if I kept her, depriving her of all that life could offer her.
That she would blend and bond easily with her new family.
That she would not miss a step. That babies were resilient. That love would be enough.
I was told this with certainty. With authority. With reassurance.
And layered through it all was shame.
Shame for wanting to keep my baby. Shame for questioning what I was being told.
Shame for feeling that something about this was deeply wrong.
What I wasn’t told was the truth.
Because the truth did not serve their agenda.
Acknowledging the emotional cost of separation would have required
slowing down a system built on urgency.
It would have required listening to mothers’ instincts.
It would have required centering the child’s emotional continuity, not just their placement.
It would also have required releasing shame as a means of control.
So instead, a different story was told.
One that prioritised compliance over complexity.
One that framed silence as kindness.
One that used shame to quieten doubt.
One that asked us to trust, rather than to question.
What I wasn’t told was this.
That she cried non-stop for me.
That her little body went stiff when anyone but me touched her.
That she had already bonded with me in utero.
That all she wanted was to hear my voice.
To be held by me.
To feel my heartbeat again.
To feel safe again.
All she wanted was me and all the so-called adults made sure this was never going to happen!
What We Didn’t Yet Understand
What we didn’t yet understand, or perhaps weren’t yet willing to fully acknowledge, was this.
That separation is not just an event. It is an experience.
And for a baby, it is a body experience.
Before language. Before logic. Before memory as we know it.
The infant nervous system is organised around
familiarity, rhythm, scent, voice, touch, and regulation through their biological mother.
So, when that connection is abruptly severed, the body does not experience it as “change”.
It experiences sudden absence. Loss of regulation. A rupture in safety.
There is no capacity yet to understand why. Only the felt knowing that something essential is gone.
And at a nervous system level, that absence is experienced much like a death.
Not because their mother has died,
but because the regulating presence the baby’s body depends on has disappeared.
So, the body adapts.
Not consciously. Not deliberately. But intelligently.
Survival responses form where safety once lived.
Hyper-vigilance replaces trust. Adaptation replaces authenticity. Scanning replaces settling.
And these patterns do not disappear because a child is placed into a loving home.
They simply go underground.
“What’s Wrong With You?”
For decades, adoptees have been asked, implicitly and explicitly,
to answer a question that was never the right one.
Why they struggle with decisions?
Why they people-please?
Why they fear getting it wrong?
Why they feel different, disconnected, or perpetually on edge?
Why intimacy feels both longed for and unsafe?
Too often, these patterns have been framed as
personality traits, attachment styles, anxiety, or individual shortcomings.
But when we shift the lens from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?”
Something changes.
The behaviour begins to make sense.
Not as pathology. But as protection.
Not as weakness. But as wisdom shaped in an impossible situation.
This refocused lens became the seed from which
The Emotional Fingerprint of an Adoptee was created.
It recognises that early experiences, especially those that occur pre-verbally,
leave emotional and physiological imprints that continue
to influence how an adoptee moves through the world.
Across infancy.
Across childhood.
Across adolescence.
Across relationships.
Across adulthood.
Across generations.
Why This Matters Now
Nearly sixty years on from the original buried research, we are still living with the legacy of those decisions.
The adoptees born during the Baby Scoop and Forced Adoption eras
are now adults. Many are parents, grandparents, partners, professionals, and leaders.
And adoptees are still being born today.
While some practices have changed, the underlying assumption often hasn’t.
That early maternal separation can be neatly resolved by placement alone.
What has also remained largely unchanged is society’s reluctance to
fully recognise adoption as an experience that can carry emotional and psychological trauma.
Not then. Not now. And, for many, not at any point in between.
What’s different now is that we finally have the language,
even as society continues to recognise loss and trauma elsewhere, yet struggles to hold it in adoption,
where collective attention has historically been directed towards gain rather than
the losses carried by the child and their biological family.
We have decades of research.
We have lived experience.
We have trauma-informed understanding.
We have nervous system science, including limbic resonance, where safety is felt through connection.
And we have frameworks, like The Emotional Fingerprint of an Adoptee,
that bring these threads together with compassion, complexity, and depth.
This work is not about blame or shame. It is about recognition.
Because healing does not come from pretending the imprint isn’t there.
It comes from finally
seeing it, acknowledging it, validating it, and responding with love, empathy, and understanding.
#AdoptionReunion #AdopteeVoices #TraumaInformed #EmotionalSafety #AttachmentHealing #EmotionalFingerprintOfAnAdoptee
