20/10/2025
The ACP supports 2025, with the campaign encouraging future adoptive parents and raising awareness about adoption.
Many ACP members work with looked after an adopted children and their families. Simon Cregeen, a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist and member of the ACP, argues that whilst it’s important to support the adopted child, it’s also critical to consider the emotional experiences of adoptive parents too. The parents need to do their best to look after their relationship as a couple, not only for their own sake, but also because this is the most essential resource for their children.
Simon sees young adults (age 16 – 25) who are in psychological distress or suffering developmental crises in his private practice. He also sees adult couples who are struggling with a range of emotional and relationship difficulties, including couples who are adopters. For many years he was Head of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy in CAMHS serving Manchester and Salford.
He says: “A common feature in work with adoptive parents is the presence of shame and guilt, leading to blame being projected onto the other parental partner, or one or more of the couple’s adopted children. Shame is experienced in relation to the adoptive parents’ feeling that they are failing to match their internal, idealised standards of being parents, including being ‘much better ones’ than the birth parents.
"Difficulty with mourning is often a central concern for adoptive couples struggling with such issues. When couples are seeking to adopt due to childlessness, there are experiences of loss on the parental side, as well as the children’s. The cumulative traumatic loss for couples who have, for instance, lost babies or suffered multiple failed IVF attempts cannot be underestimated, nor the courage required, and difficulties encountered in mourning the loss of an imagined ordinary family experience.”
For example, one of the things which often happens is that parents can become divided in what they feel and think they should do as adoptive parents and as a couple. This can lead them to being unable to acknowledge one another’s point of view or emotional experience. So, in relation to feelings of loss and grief aroused by their adoptive child not bringing them the type of parenting experience they hoped for, one parent may feel bereft, still yearning for a birth child, and this may stir feelings of depression, while their partner may be feeling more stoical, that what’s gone is gone ("we just have to get on with the present situation and make the most of it"). Both feelings are valid.
If the couple are struggling to allow for their partner’s different experience then a conflict can arise. This is a painful couple dynamic and readily leads to blame being passed between them. However, if the couple can catch themselves, and see that this is something happening between them as a couple (ie it’s not one or the other’s fault), and observe and share what they are thinking and doing to one another, then two things can happen. Firstly, they are sharing responsibility for the conflict between them; secondly, they can become curious about their partner’s feelings, and the difference in these from their own. A bridge can be formed between their different emotional responses to the adoptive parenting experience they are having.
Visit You Can Adopt website to find out more about the campaign
https://www.youcanadopt.co.uk/naw/
To read more about how child psychotherapy can help visit our website
https://childpsychotherapy.org.uk/resources-families/how-child-and-adolescent-psychotherapy-can-help
