Sarah Ward, BA (Hons) in Person Centred Counselling, working in private practice both as a counsellor and supervisor. Before my counselling training I worked in a primary school running intervention groups for self esteem, anger processing, social skills, and emotional literacy. This felt a natural progression into counselling.

I was delighted to read in Therapy Today of the changes being made to working with adult adoptees. I was adopted some 63 years ago, and growing up I became aware that I was unable to recognise similarities in facial (and other) features of relatives in myself. I was always asked at medical appointments if I knew of any heart disease or strokes in my family background. It made me feel different. In the 1960s that information was not passed on to adoptees.

The story of my being collected from a children’s home was woven into my childhood along with fairy tales.

Many years later I decided to try to trace my birth mother and had the ‘counselling’ offered by the local authority which enabled me to receive my pre- and post-adoption records. This was amazing because I was able to read letters from my birth mother enquiring about my health soon after handing me over. For the first time I knew that she had actually cared about me! I was given the chance to think about all the possible outcomes: Was she still alive, could she have a disability, would she want to see me? Unsurprisingly I had considered these questions and many more in the 40 odd years it had taken me to get to this point.

In 1999 I did make contact with my birth mother and eventually we met for a weekend. It seemed to go well and we swapped old, and took new, photos. However, a year or so later, out of the blue, she wrote saying she did not want me to make any further contact with her. I felt devastated!

Thankfully I was able to access counselling to help me work through my lifetime of questions, and the pain of this second rejection. In 2010 the law changed so that only counsellors and psychotherapists registered as an adoption support agency (ASA) with Ofsted were able to offer counselling to work with adoptees. Even when exploring self esteem or identity, once the word Adoption was mentioned, work had to end.

When I was 54 I began my counselling training. I decided my dissertation should research what impact adoption had on adoptees’ sense of identity, interviewing and transcribing interviews with other adult adoptees.  With the new changes I feel passionate about wanting to be able to work with adoptees. For too long adoptees have not been able to access the support they need because of lack of availability of training to work with them. This will also positively impact birth parents and adoptive parents accessing counselling and psychotherapy.

As Martin Bell, BACP’s Head of Policy and Public Affairs, said: “Adoption can have a life-long impact on people and it’s crucial that anyone affected by it can access the mental health support they need.”