Secrets and Transparency in Adoption
Deciding how much you want to know, and then how much you want to tell others, is a really stressful process. These are decisions you make many times over, for a long time. There aren’t right decisions, and every decision has its own outcomes.
Sometimes withholding information from our children is a gift we give to them. And sometimes those secrets can create different challenges. Did you hold information back from your child to protect them from unfortunate truths only to have the secrets become a trust destroying issue later on? Once untruths are in motion, you may find it difficult to maintain them and difficult to unravel them without causing someone pain.
If you valued transparency in the adoption process, maybe your child didn’t respond to that knowledge in the way you hoped they would. Perhaps they are asking a lot of unexpected and increasingly uncomfortable questions. Maybe they’re identifying heavily with what they know about a birth parent, which feels rejecting to you.
If you find yourself feeling worried and unsettled about whether to keep secrets or be transparent, you are in good company. It’s normal for parents to experience uncertainty and sometimes conflict regarding how forthcoming to be, both with their adopted child and with others in their lives.