SERIES: Seven Core Issues in Adoption and Permanency – Shame & Guilt
SERIES: Seven Core Issues in Adoption and Permanency - Shame & Guilt
Published on:
Mar 30, 2026
Category
Seven Core Issues
Adoption, foster, and kinship care are often spoken about in terms of hope, permanency, and love. While those truths matter deeply, they are only part of the story. Beneath every permanency journey are complex emotional realities.
In this series, we explore The Seven Core Issues in Adoption and Permanency by Sharon Kaplan Roszia and Allison Davis Maxon, which expands on the foundational framework developed by Sharon Kaplan Roszia and Deborah Silverstein.
These seven interconnected issues of Loss, Rejection, Shame & Guilt, Grief, Identity, Intimacy, and Mastery & Control offer language for experiences that are often felt but not always named. Together, they help us better understand the impact of separation, transition, and permanency across one’s lifelong development.
Throughout this series, you will hear from a range of voices within the adoption constellation including adoptees, first/birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoption-competent professionals. Each perspective adds depth and nuance, reminding us that no single story defines adoption. By centering lived experience alongside clinical insight, we aim to deepen understanding, reduce stigma, and support all members of the constellation with honesty and compassion.
In this installment, Tony Hynes shares in a poem how he has wrestled with shame and guilt throughout his adoption journey.
What Lived Beneath My Name
By Tony Hynes, Ph.D., C.A.S.E. Training and Content Development Specialist
Shame and guilt were always part of my story.
From the moment I was removed from my mother’s arms, I felt them—
my infant body twisting, revolting against the idea of a safety it could not fully recognize.
Five years later, that same body would find itself firmly planted in the arms of different mothers,
a new home to attach itself to.
And attach it did,
to the shame hidden in other corridors of its being.
How could it betray the first home that had accepted it,
the first space it had belonged to?
Who was this new person staring back at me in the mirror—
someone living a different reality than the one his mother had dreamed for him?
The one where he rested beneath her chest,
nestled in a home that needed no explanation.
She had given me my name,
and yet I struggled to say hers in front of my new family.
A shame.
Later, I learned that people believed my life—the one I felt ashamed to participate in—
was one I should feel lucky to have.
A privilege, they said.
The life originally imagined for me was, in their eyes, the lesser.
And so when my birth sister told me I was the lucky one—
that I had the better life because I had been adopted—
many corridors of my soul believed her.
A belief carrying both shame and guilt.
Somehow I had managed to scrape together a neat escape
from the life she had remained in.
I had gotten away with something I should not have—
distancing myself from my family.
It would take another ten years before my body understood
that my mother had always been with me.
That I had not left her,
nor she me.
Together, neither of us had been free
from guilt’s cold embrace.
The chase to erase a grief that lived in both our hearts
had held us from the moment we were cast apart.
And the weight of carrying what I believed should have vanished
kept the mirror that once tortured me
from rearranging itself—
from showing me my pain without shame.
From allowing me to build love for multiple families
without guilt.
To name myself without blame.
To understand that being adopted was not my gift—
but it did not have to be my curse.
