The War on Adoptee Intuition: How Doubt Is Manufactured to Keep You Silent!
They Needed You to Doubt – Because Your Knowing Was Too Powerful
Adoption, Memory, and the Ghosts of What Was Never Known.
It is in the nature of the displaced to move through the world with a quiet unease, a sensation not unlike walking through a house where the furniture has been rearranged in the night. One stumbles over objects that should not be there, reaching for doors that no longer exist. For the adoptee, this is not a fleeting disorientation but a permanent state of being – an existence suspended between two narratives, one written, one erased.
I have often wondered if the ghosts that haunt me are of my own making or if they belong to someone else, someone I never met but whose absence was stitched into the fabric of my being before I had the language to name it. It is an odd thing to feel homesick for a place that was never yours, to grieve for a name that was spoken once and then discarded.
In my travels, I have encountered others who carry this same invisible wound, though it is rarely spoken of directly. Instead, it emerges in the way their hands linger over old photographs, the way they pause before answering questions about their childhoods, the way their eyes flicker with recognition when they meet another who shares the same quiet sorrow. These encounters remind me of a passage I once read – though I can no longer recall where – about birds who, removed from their nests too soon, continue to fly in circles, always searching for a place that no longer exists.
There are those who insist that adoption is an act of salvation, that it is a new beginning free from the burdens of the past. But the past does not simply vanish; it lingers in the bones, in the curvature of the skull, in the inexplicable feeling of having been somewhere before despite knowing, rationally, that one has never set foot there.
Perhaps this is why I have always felt drawn to places with deep histories, places where time folds in on itself and the air hums with forgotten stories. In Bali, I once watched a procession for the dead, the mourners moving through the streets like shadows cast by another century. There, among them, I saw my own reflection – though I could not tell if it was my face or that of someone who had come before me, someone whose life had been severed from mine long before I had the chance to remember.
It is difficult to say, in the end, whether we belong to history or if history belongs to us. But I have come to understand that being adopted means carrying both the known and the unknowable, the seen and the unseen. And so I walk, as I always have, through landscapes that are at once foreign and familiar, listening for echoes of a story I was never meant to hear.
And yet, after all these years of searching, of circling the periphery of something just beyond reach, I have begun to suspect that the answers were never outside of me at all.
Your mind was programmed to doubt itself. Your intuition was never lost – you were just taught not to trust it. The difference? Intuition doesn’t ask for permission. Your mind does.
Perhaps that is the final act of reclamation – not just to remember what was taken, but to trust what was never truly gone.
The realization that our intuition was never lost – only silenced is one of the most dangerous truths an adoptee can uncover. And because of that, people – systems, families, even other adoptees still trapped in denial – will actively and purposefully get in the way of it. Why? Because Control Requires Doubt.
Adoptees who trust themselves and listen to that deep knowing become uncontrollable. The entire structure of adoption – whether personal, cultural, or systemic – relies on obedience, gratitude, and the erasure of the self. The moment an adoptee starts questioning their own programming, the entire illusion begins to crumble. And for those who have built their lives around that illusion – whether they’re adoptive parents, social workers, or industry defenders – this is a terrifying prospect.
The Ways They Block Your Realization
Gaslighting:
They’ll tell you your feelings aren’t real. That you’re being ungrateful. That you’re imagining the loss, the grief, the dissonance between what you were told and what you feel. They need you to question your emotions because if you trust them, you break free.
Spiritual Manipulation:
This is especially common in religious or “healing” communities. They’ll tell you adoption was part of your soul’s journey, that you “chose” this, that it’s your karma. This frames your suffering as something you must accept rather than something you are allowed to challenge.
Weaponising Love:
“If your adoptive parents love you, why are you questioning this?” Love is used as a leash as if love alone negates trauma. But love doesn’t erase loss, and real love doesn’t require someone to deny their own reality to receive it.
Excluding and Silencing You:
The moment you start speaking truthfully about adoption, you become a problem. People will distance themselves. Adoptive families will push you out. Other adoptees who aren’t ready to see their own wounds will attack you. The goal? To isolate you until you doubt yourself again.
But Here’s the Truth:
They Fear What You Are Becoming.
The more you trust your own intuition, the harder it becomes to control you. That’s why they fight so hard. That’s why they gaslight, manipulate, and silence. Because deep down, they know – if you break free, you prove it was all a lie.
And that?
That is something they can’t afford to face.
The Way Out of the Fog:
Reclaiming the Adoptee’s Inner Truth
Emerging from the fog of adoption is not a gentle awakening – it is an unmaking. A stripping away of the narratives that were imposed before you had the words to resist. It is a process of peeling back layers of conditioning, of gaslighting so insidious that it convinced you your own intuition was the enemy.
Because that’s what the fog is, really. A manufactured reality designed to keep you from seeing the truth too clearly. A carefully curated illusion where gratitude is demanded, where searching is betrayal, where the pain of separation is dismissed as nothing more than a footnote in someone else’s heroic tale. And if you ever begin to question it, the world rushes in to remind you: ”That’s just in your head.”
But it was never just in your head. The unease, the fracture, the feeling of being out of step with your own existence – these are not delusions. They are echoes of something real, something stolen. And the way out of the fog begins when you finally allow yourself to listen to what you already know.
It is not an easy path. The moment you begin to wake up, you will find that people – often the ones closest to you – will try to pull you back in. They will remind you of the script, the one where adoption is a gift, where loss is irrelevant, and where you should be grateful that anyone wanted you at all. They will weaponize love, demand silence, and punish truth.
But the thing about fog is that it cannot hold you forever. The moment you begin to see clearly, it starts to lose its power.
And one day, you will step fully into the light, not because anyone gave you permission, but because you decided that your truth is no longer up for debate.
