The Adoptee Experience
Stories of Adoption, Search, Reunion, and Identity from 250+ Adoptees
By Damon L. Davis, Host of the “Who Am I Really?” podcast
How does it feel to be adopted?
What Does It Mean to Search for Your Origins?
Adoption is a life altering experience for everyone involved. Every adoptee’s lived experience is unique, yet they all have certain themes in common.
For adoptees, the question of identity is never simple. It’s a lifelong journey shaped by mystery, longing, and sometimes, profound discoveries.
The Adoptee Experience is the culmination of eight years of intimate, first-person interviews with over 250+ adoptees who dared to search for their biological roots. Some found long-lost family. Others faced unexpected truths. Many didn’t get any answers at all. All of them shared raw, unfiltered stories of resilience, identity, and self-discovery.
“Adopted people are like the fruit of one tree, ripened on the the branches of another.”
Based on the Acclaimed Podcast
"Who Am I Really?"
In 2017, I set out to provide a platform to support adopted people’s expression and exploration of their feelings about adoption, accept their desire to try to understand their genetic history, and decide for yourself whether a search for adoption reunion is right for them. Since then, over 250+ adopted people have shared open hearted conversations revealing issues and challenges adoptees they’ve endured, described love, hope and guidance they have received, and their deepest feelings about The Adoptee Experience.
Stories from the show are heart-warming, heart-breaking, and they’re all true as told by the people who lived them. In each I hope you’ll find something that inspires you, validates your feelings about wanting to search, or motivates you to have the strength along your journey to learn, “Who Am I Really?”
Inside The Adoptee Experience, You’ll Discover:
- What adoptees experience in their adoptive family.
- Why adoptees search—and the deep emotional forces that drive them.
- How fantasies about birth parents shape expectations before reunion.
- The pivotal role of information access policies, DNA testing, and other resources impacting adoptee searches.
- Emotionally charged reunion stories— from joyous connections to unexpected heartbreak.
- What happens when the truth is more complicated than expected?
I have spent long hours analyzing cross-cutting themes of adoption, synthesizing personal and guest reflections, and extracting direct excerpts from adoptee interviews to create this unique book.
The Adoptee Experience is meant to expose the truth – for better or worse – about adoption, confirming facts and dispelling myths. My work is for the adoptee community to feel heard. My goal is to create a resource for anyone who has wondered about the experiences of adoptees, our thoughts about the families we were raised in, the family we never knew, and how adoption shaped our dentity.
