Gratitude has its place, but it shouldn’t be a muzzle."
— Nadiya Hussain
That quote stopped me in my tracks. It put words to something I’ve felt — and tiptoed around — my whole life.
While Nadiya Hussain, a British chef, author, and TV presenter, was speaking about her experience as a Muslim woman and daughter of immigrants, her words deeply resonated with me as an adoptee.
Because here’s the truth:
I’m not grateful for my adoption.
There. I said it.
I am grateful for many of the good things my adoptive parents gave me, such as abundant love, care and support. But I don’t believe I should be more grateful than a non-adopted child is to their parents. They were also looking to grow their family, and we generally don’t usually expect biological children to feel indebted for simply being born.
And yet, for many adoptees, gratitude feels like a script. One we’ve been expected to follow, even when it doesn’t fit.
So many of us were raised on stories that framed adoption as a second chance at life. A “better” life. A lucky break.
As I wrote in a previous blog, after the Korean Intercountry Adoption Scandal broke, we’ve seen similar patterns across almost every country that adopted out children in large numbers. Scandals have revealed forged paperwork, families misled or coerced, children taken without consent — from street kidnappings to so-called ‘baby factories’ operating on the black market.
And yet, adoptees are still often framed as the fortunate ones.
This belief erases the truth that some adoptees are harmed - even abused - by the very people who were supposed to keep them safe. Just last week, Olivia Griffin, an intercountry adoptee from China to the United States, was awarded almost 30 million USD to help her rebuild her life after surviving harrowing abuse by her adoptive parents.
When adoptees are considered “lucky” by default, it makes it even harder for survivors of abuse in adoptive families to speak up or seek help. The stigma of “biting the hand that fed you” runs deep.
For many of us, we may live our whole lives without knowing the truth; without knowing whether we were taken from a family who wanted to keep us, without access to our adoption papers, and without acknowledgement from the countries we left.
So when people call us “lucky,” they’re usually only seeing the part of the story that begins after adoption. They don’t see the loss, the grief, or the haunting possibility that we were never meant to be adopted at all.
The “lucky” narrative doesn’t account for:
Adoption isn’t just a gain. It’s also a loss. And we need space to acknowledge that.
Sometimes I’ve felt a deep sense of guilt for allowing myself to feel sad about the things that I’ve lost. Especially because my adoptive family are good people. They’ve loved me, supported me, and tried their best.
But even the best intentions can’t erase the grief of losing your first family, even if you never knew them.
They can’t make up for the sense of disconnection.
Or the internal conflict of being raised in a culture that doesn’t fully see or understand you.
So being told “you should be grateful” invalidates that grief. It makes it harder to talk honestly about what adoption costs some of us. And it can create deep shame when your inner world doesn’t match the script you’re expected to follow.
If gratitude is something we’re forced to feel, or told we should feel, it stops being gratitude at all. It becomes performance.
I’ve met adoptees who feel grateful, and I’ve met adoptees who feel the exact opposite. And all of it is valid.
There is no one way to feel. There is no single adoption experience.
But the moment we expect gratitude from adoptees, especially when it comes at the cost of their voice, their grief, or their questions, we’ve gone wrong.
Gratitude should never be the price of being loved.
One of the most damaging things adoptees can experience is the silencing of their story.
When you’re not allowed to talk about your first family.
When you’re discouraged from asking where you came from.
When you sense that your sadness makes other people uncomfortable, so you stop speaking altogether.
That silence can become internalised. You start to believe your pain is a problem. You second-guess your feelings. You try to be the version of yourself that makes everyone else feel okay.
And that’s not fair.
It’s not fair to carry that weight alone. It’s not fair to be asked to erase parts of yourself to fit someone else’s narrative. It’s not fair to be told your gratitude matters more than your grief.
And we know this affects adoptees mental health. We know that adopted people are 4x more likely to attempt to end their life than non-adopted people.
We know that adoptees, just like everyone else, need space to feel seen and heard.
If you're an adoptee and any of this resonates - the pressure to feel grateful, the silencing, the internal conflict - I want you to know you’re not alone.
You deserve space to explore those feelings without judgement.
As a fellow adoptee and a qualified therapist, I offer therapy that understands the complexity of adoption.
If you're ready to unpack some of this, I’d love to walk alongside you. Feel free to book a session below.
