Paper short abstract

This paper explores the consequences of disguising information to their adopted children by the adoptive parents, the impact of the badly kept family secret on some adoptees, and the adoptees' discourses on this further trauma decades after adoption occurred.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores a case of transnacional adoption of Chilean-born children adopted by Sardinian couples approximately four decades ago. Deprived of governmental or private professional support, the new parents - often living in rural areas - had to deal with sometimes grown-up children without any psychological or pedagogical preparation. This often resulted in a reluctance to embrace their children's history, as well as their own, for fear of inflicting further pain and as an extreme measure of parental protection. This implied that they decided - in good faith - to withdraw the adoption story and pretend it never happened, never mentioning their origin to their children. However, the family secret is usually well known by others who more or less innocently informed the adoptees of their provenance and of the fact that they were not born into that family. The adoptees, now middle-aged, keep looking back at the various traumatic experiences related to their adoption, and oscillate between a firm refusal to sympathise with their adoptive parents' ingenuousness, the inability to forgive their naivety, and profound feelings of helplessness, impotence and guilt once those elderly parents pass away. Why did their parents prefer not to engage with full explanations? What was behind their silence on the matter? Why was adoption disapproved? What did it mean not being able to engender? In what ways the adult adoptees manage to process traumatic experiences and begin healing? When the adoptees become parents, those questions take different nuances.