To UK governments, councils, schools, local authorities, social services, family courts,
regional and voluntary adoption agencies,
I’m James and I’m a 23-year-old screenwriter from Wales. I was adopted from foster care in
2004, and yet once the adoption order was granted, my parents and I were just sent off by
the local authority and regional adoption agency without support and expected to cope by
ourselves. Like a two-year-old being adopted was some happy fairytale ending that you’d
see in a Disney movie, that because I had the loving and caring environment of a “forever
family” now, I would be like every other “normal” child, but it was in fact the very opposite.
I grew up a hyper-vigilant, traumatised child, drowning in the trauma I’d sustained in my
early years, constantly trying to survive.
There’s still a prevalent idea in society that adopting an infant means that there won’t be any
trauma because they were too young to remember, and so people go into adoption with this
mindset that the child will be normal and that all is needed is love. But all this does for the
adoptive parents is delay the expression of trauma by a few years, because once they reach
five and above, you’ll really start to see the impact of what they’ve been through. What may
seem normal for adoptive parents to do, like a raised voice or shouting in reaction to a
child’s misbehaviour, for us hyper-vigilant children is a threat of danger. It’s our body’s
memory from exposure to the high-conflict relationships and abuse whilst with our birth
parents. If a raised voice is like a scratch to a wound, then the irritation is our response to
that. It’s like a switch has been flipped and all of a sudden we’ve snapped into survival
‘fight’ or ‘flight’ mode, which makes us lose control and become defensive, aggressive, and
violent. What’s really difficult is that despite how much we love our parents and our parents
love us, our hyper vigilance can’t tell the difference because we’re so hyper-tuned to any
subtle change that could indicate threatening behaviour that would endanger us.
Anything that would lead to an argument would lead to me blowing up into survival mode,
and as a result, I would become unintentionally violent towards my parents. I’ve sworn and
said awful things to them, I’ve forcefully pushed them, bitten them, hit them, punched them,
and caused numerous damages around the home, which started when I was around six years
old, and continued until it started to become less frequent when I was 18 and it’s now very
uncommon. When I became like this, it would get to the point where my parents felt like
they had to call the police, social services, or take me to A&E. Fortunately for me, they
never did that, but it should’ve and could’ve never reached that point if only I had been
given immediate and consistent therapeutic support to recover and heal from my trauma,
instead of being left to fend for myself with trauma I didn’t even know I had, nor did my
parents know. This is the damage that has been caused by the view that once a child is
adopted, everything is fine now and all is needed is love, but love is not enough. You
wouldn’t say to someone who’s broken their leg that their mum or dad’s love can heal it,
and it’s the exact same with psychological injuries caused by the trauma of attachment
disruption and exposure to domestic violence.
For the care experienced, normal childhood experiences (forming friendships, the death of a
grandparent, changing teachers, goodbyes after seeing family who live far away, the death
of a pet, and the break-up of a friendship) hit a lot harder because they’re reminders of the
attachment trauma we sustained in our early lives, which just traumatises us further. I was
removed from my birth parents and placed into foster care when I was two and a half
months old, and that attachment disruption, we know, is traumatic, even if there had been
harm like in my case. I had four families (birth, two fosters, adoptive) in the first two years
of my life, and that’s a massive thing for a child to go through, especially as the first two
years of a child’s life are a very crucial stage. The transition between my second foster
family and adoptive family was also very rushed, because it was only nine days after I’d
met my parents and had seven days out with them that I moved in with them, and because of
Social Services being against children having contact with their foster family post-adoption,
my mum would bring me to see my foster mum, but only for a few times. All of this trauma
has had a big impact on how I form and sustain attachments, and I’ve always had a fear of
abandonment. I’ve also found endings and goodbyes extremely painful, because whenever I
would have to leave family/family friends who lived far away, I would say a quick goodbye
and then just wait in the car for my parents to come. It’s the exact same when family/family
friends would have to leave after visiting, I would just say a quick goodbye and usually stay
in my house or quickly go inside. A big example of how attachment trauma impacted me is
a traumatic friendship breakup that happened when I was 14. At the start of Year 9, I met
these two girls that were already friends, and we eventually became a friendship group. But
when a family friend in the same year joined the group, I became hyper-vigilant to the threat
of being abandoned, which made me fear that I would be replaced and left behind. This fear
bubbled away over weeks, making me become jealous and frustrated until one day when we
were all together, I had an emotional outburst and trashed my family friend’s bedroom. After
this, the two girls left me, and the friendship group broke up, leading to a decline in my
mental health as I went into Year 10 and 11, adding even more pressure to what was already
a stressful time. My attachment and abandonment trauma are part of what caused me to try
and end my life when I was 17. I love my parents and they love me, but being left without
support has affected our relationships, especially with my dad, which started a few years
after I was adopted and is still a difficulty to this day.
Then there’s the uncommon and unexpected childhood experiences like divorce, a parent or
sibling becoming unwell or even dying, and if this happens in an adopted child’s life, it will
only traumatise them further. I can speak with experience of this because when I was seven,
my mum went on a business trip to London and nearly died from a brain haemorrhage. I
remember when my dad and I said goodbye to my mum and watched her train leave the
station, which caused me to burst into tears. This was the last memory of my mum before
she nearly died, and it would’ve been if she had. I then had to stay with family friends for a
month, while every weekend my dad would come down and take me up to London so I
could go and see mum. Again, even with this traumatising event, I was given no therapeutic
support, apart from some CAMHS family therapy for less than a year when I was nine,
which wasn’t even to do with that. What happened to my mum has deeply impacted me
because ever since I’ve been constantly scared of it happening again and whenever I’ve
gone up to London, it’s made me anxious and physically ill. No child should ever have to
experience something like that, of course, but imagine what it does to an adopted child and
how much deeper the attachment trauma and fear of abandonment is made.
I hope that this and every other letter you receive from young adoptees show why support is
absolutely vital for our futures because the damage that has been done by the view that
adoption is a happy ever after is harmful and destructive. When a child is adopted, placed
with kinship carers, or special guardians, it should not be a case of waiting for problems to
show up. When a child is placed into foster care, and then goes to their adoptive, kinship, or
special guardian family, therapeutic support should be immediate and automatic, remaining
consistent and uninterrupted throughout the child’s life, and not dropped when they become
an adult because problems don’t just magically disappear. Support should not be something
that adoptive parents, kinship carers, and special guardians should have to fight for; it
should be there from the start. Like how you can’t expect a flower to bloom without water,
you can’t expect an adopted child to thrive without continual therapeutic support as they
grow up. The love an adoptive family brings is like the soil the flower is planted in, but
without the water to help it grow, the love isn’t enough to help the child grow.