• Adoption as a “happy ending” narrative versus adoptees’ lived realities
• Silence, shame, and the impact of being discouraged from speaking about adoption
• Media portrayals: saviourism, moral panic, and “either villain or victim” storytelling
• The expectation of gratitude, and what it obscures about safety and trauma
• Identity, belonging, class, and the specific realities of racialised/transracial experiences
• The emotional labour of researching within your own community and the need for boundaries
• How adoptees reclaim voice through social media and community connection

Care-Experienced People Mini-Series

About the Series

The Care-Experienced People Mini-Series is part of Trauma-Informed Conversations - a podcast created by Trauma-Informed Consultancy Services (TICS) to explore what it really means to build systems and relationships grounded in care, connection, and humanity.

Hosted by Carrie Wilson, this special series invites care-experienced people, researchers, and practitioners from around the world to lead open, relational conversations about trauma, healing, and change - asking what it looks like when we do it together.

Each episode brings lived experience and professional insight into dialogue, offering space for reflection, courage, and system learning.

Series Theme

Exploring trauma and healing both within the care system and the spaces that surround it - led by care-experienced voices, grounded in reflection, connection, and change.

Episode Description

Adoption is frequently presented as an endpoint: a “happy ending,” a rescue, a solution. For many adoptees, the story does not end with placement. It continues across the life course, shaped by identity, belonging, nervous system responses, loss, silence, and social expectation.

In this episode of Trauma Informed Conversations (part of the Care-Experienced People mini-series), host Carrie Wilson speaks with Annalisa Toccara-Jones, a PhD researcher, adoptee, and advocate whose work examines adoption as a lifelong experience shaped by narrative power, particularly through media and public storytelling.

The conversation draws on the Adoptee Consciousness Model, developed by adoptee scholars Branco, Kim, Newton, Cooper-Lewter, and O’Loughlin (2025). The model conceptualises adoptee awareness as a non-linear process, moving through recurring phases that include status quo, rupture, dissonance, expansiveness, and agency.

Annalisa discusses how these touchstones can be activated at different points across the life course, often in response to media portrayals, institutional encounters, relationships, or moments when dominant “happy ending” narratives no longer hold. The episode explores the pressure adoptees can feel to be “grateful,” the role of saviourism and moral panic in adoption storytelling, and how adoptees are frequently represented without complexity.

Annalisa also reflects on researching from within the adoptee community, including the emotional labour this entails and the need for boundaries when producing knowledge grounded in lived experience.

This episode invites listeners to move beyond simplified adoption stories and to recognise adoption as a lifelong condition shaped by narrative, power, and social expectation, requiring trauma-informed understanding and space for adoptees to speak without obligation to resolve their experience.

Key Quotes

• “Adoption is often framed as a ‘happy ending’ and a ‘quick fix’.”
• "In my family, the message was: ‘You’re the same as us; you’re adopted, but don’t talk about it.’”
• “That is a level of trauma in itself… treating it as a position of shame that cannot be spoken about.”
• “In the media, adoptees are often either villainized or not portrayed very deeply, but there is never any complexity.”
• “For many adoptees… there is an idea that they must be ‘grateful’ for being adopted.”
• “None of my participants spoke specifically about being ‘healed.’… I don’t think healing is built into the structure of adoption.”
• “Most of us keep it inside until we meet another adoptee to exchange stories with.”

• Trauma-Informed Research with Care-Experienced People – for researchers, practitioners and organisations who want to design research and consultation that is ethical, collaborative, and grounded in care.
• Trauma-Informed Record Keeping exploring how the words we use (in records, reports, media, and everyday practice) can either retraumatise or support healing.
• Bespoke consultancy and facilitation – supporting teams to embed trauma-informed principles into strategy, participation, and lived-experience involvement.

You can find out more about our upcoming training and bespoke support at ticservicesltd.com, or get in touch with us directly to explore a tailored package lyndsay@ticservicesltd.com