The Emotional Experience of Adoption

Summary — English:

Rustin examines adoption as an emotionally complex experience for both the child and the adoptive family, with particular attention to loss, separation, identity, and belonging. She highlights that adoption may involve contradictory feelings: gratitude and love can coexist with grief, anger, confusion, and fantasies about the biological parents. For the child, awareness of having been separated from the birth family can influence attachment and the development of internal representations of parents and self. The adoptive parents may also experience anxieties about whether they are truly accepted or loved by the child, particularly when the child’s loyalty to the birth family is emotionally present. The clinical task is to create space for these conflicting feelings rather than forcing adoption into an exclusively positive narrative.