Beyond Grateful: The Real Anxiety Behind Adoption
In this candid conversation with trauma care practitioner and adoptive parent Stacy Uhrig, host Donna Pope of Voices of Adoption explores the complicated space where gratitude, loss, anxiety, and attachment all intersect. Together, they name the often-unspoken reality that every adoption begins with rupture and that these early experiences can echo through a child’s nervous system for years.
Understanding Anxiety And Attachment In Adoption
Stacy shares her family’s international adoption story from South Korea and reflects on what she wishes she had known about attachment ruptures, foster care moves, and how those early separations affect a child’s sense of safety. She and Donna discuss why so many adoptees and adoptive children receive diagnoses like anxiety, ADHD, ODD, or reactive attachment disorder, and how those labels can sometimes mask the deeper impact of early loss.
Parent Triggers, Family Rules, And Healing
From there, the conversation turns toward parents’ own unhealed stories. Stacy explains how unresolved trauma and inherited family rules about how parents and children are “supposed to†behave shape the way adults respond when kids get “big and bold†or shut down. Instead of asking “What’s wrong with you,†she invites parents to ask “What happened to you†and to do their own inner work so they can offer steady, more compassionate co-regulation at home.
Personal Responsibility And The Calm Code
Stacy also shares her three-decade journey with anxiety and what finally shifted when she began studying trauma, the nervous system, and hypnotherapy. She describes her Calm Code framework, her group work, and her podcast Flip Your Mindset, all designed to help people understand that while they did not cause their wounds, their healing is still their own.
Throughout, she emphasizes that healing should be personal but not lonely: you can take responsibility for your growth while being held in a safe, supportive relationship. Whether you are an adoptee, a birth parent, or an adoptive parent, this episode offers language for experiences that are hard to name and hope that real healing is possible.
Looking for support on your adoption journey? Visit VoicesofAdoption.org for support, resources, and community from every corner of the adoption constellation. Subscribe to the Voices of Adoption show for real stories and resources that help families across the adoption constellation find support and for expert insights on adoption wellness.
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