#12 The Existential Denial of Existential Severance
forget, conform, perform, disappear.
There is no place for us in the narratives that others tell. Adoption is framed as salvation, as a second chance, as a clean slate. It is spoken of in terms of gratitude, of rescue, of love. These are the stories that society repeats until they become truth – not for the adoptee, but for everyone else.
What is never acknowledged, never given language, is the severance itself. The existential rupture that occurs the moment a child is separated from their origin. The moment they cease to be who they were meant to be and are forced to become someone else.
But because this pain is too inconvenient, too disruptive to the preferred narrative, it is erased. Dismissed. Denied.
Adoption, we are told, is not loss but gain. Not destruction but rebirth. The severance is rewritten as an opportunity, the trauma reduced to an afterthought, if it is mentioned at all.
This is existential denial – a collective refusal to recognise what has been taken and from whom.
Erasure Disguised as Love
Adoptees are expected to adapt. We are given new names, new families, new histories, and told that this is enough. That love should be enough. That whatever existed before is no longer relevant, no longer real.
- The mother we were born to becomes a shadow, a shame, a footnote in someone else’s story.
- The original name, the first tether to self, is erased as if it were never spoken.
- The body remembers, but there is no language for what it remembers, and so we are told it does not matter.
This is not just an individual experience – it is a structural one. Adoption depends on forgetting. On severing. On pretending that the past is irrelevant, that the child can be molded into something new, something clean. And when the adoptee resists, when they begin to remember what they were never meant to, society recoils.
• “You were chosen.”
• “You were saved.”
• “You should be grateful.”
Gratitude is the demand. Silence is the expectation. To speak of the severance is to violate the illusion that everything is as it should be.
The Fear of Acknowledgment
To admit that adoption is built on loss, that it is not just about gain but about something stolen, is to confront an uncomfortable truth:
- That family is not just about love. It is about power.
- That identity is not just about nurture. It is about blood, about lineage, about an inheritance that cannot be replaced by paper and legal decrees.
That some people – mothers, adoptees – are expected to suffer so that others may benefit.
This is the fear that fuels existential denial. The fear that if adoptees are allowed to grieve, if they are allowed to name their severance, the entire structure will begin to crack.
The Cost of Denial
But denial does not erase reality. It only forces it underground.
- It appears in the adoptee’s struggle with identity, with belonging, with the persistent feeling of being untethered in their own life.
- It manifests in the body, in the nervous system, in the inexplicable panic that comes in the dark, in the sensation of falling without ever hitting the ground.
- It lingers in the silence between questions that are never asked and answers that will never come.
To deny existential severance is to demand that adoptees live in contradiction – to be both whole and fractured, both grateful and grieving, both present and absent from their own origins.
And so we are forced to split ourselves in two. The part that plays the role we were assigned, and the part that remembers.
The Reckoning
But the remembering cannot be undone.
At some point, we find language for what we were never meant to name. We gather the fragments, the stories, the truths buried beneath the narrative of gratitude. We begin to see the severance for what it is – not something that happened to us, but something that was done to us.
- We no longer accept erasure disguised as love.
- We no longer pretend that the fall never happened.
- We no longer stay silent for the comfort of those who benefit from our silence.
Existential denial cannot hold forever. Because the truth does not disappear. It waits.
And we – those who were severed, those who were told to forget –
are beginning to remember.
Hello, my name is Shane Bouel,
I’m a retired, qualified designer, lecturer & e-learning specialist seeking true connection.
I am an adoptee of forced adoption, living in Bali — a place that, like me, holds the weight of displacement and the echoes of histories rewritten. My journey is one of systematic erasure, existential severance, and, ultimately, reclamation.
Adoption is often seen as an act of love, a new beginning, a gift. But beneath that narrative lies a deeper, often unspoken truth — one of loss, identity fracture, and the struggle to exist in a world that does not recognise what has been taken.
I have spent years unravelling my own story, uncovering what was erased, and reclaiming the self that was meant to disappear. It has been a journey through grief, awakening, and profound transformation. And now, I invite you to walk that path with me.
From here, we embark on a journey together.
