Beyond Words: How Unspoken Moments Create the Deepest Opportunities for Healing

There is a particular kind of comfort that comes from being understood without explanation. As an adoptee and a psychologist, I’ve seen firsthand how powerful this unspoken understanding can be in the therapy room—especially when working with adoptee clients. There’s something quietly sacred about a space where your experiences don’t have to be justified, defended, or unpacked in painstaking detail before you can simply begin to feel.

For many adoptees, therapy involves navigating a landscape of complex emotions that are often invisible to those who haven’t lived them: grief wrapped in gratitude, love entwined with loss, identity shaped in the shadow of silence. Explaining the “both/and” of adoption—how something can be beautiful and painful, confusing and clarifying, all at once—can be exhausting. But when I sit across from a fellow adoptee in therapy, so much of that burden to explain softens. There’s a mutual recognition that transcends words.

So many clients have expressed that there is relief and connection when I nod slightly or shake my head over a certain phrase, when I smile or express empathy over a particular pause—they recognize that I know what it’s like to search for language that doesn’t quite exist. It’s in the shared understanding of how birthdays can carry joy and ache in the same breath, or how questions about medical history can feel like a punch to the gut. These aren’t things we always talk about openly, but they live in our bodies, our nervous systems, and our silences. And when someone else just knows? That changes everything.

Of course, no two adoptee experiences are the same. But there is a rhythm to the way we carry our stories, a resonance in the questions we ask and the ones we avoid. When adoptees work with therapists who are also adoptees, that rhythm doesn’t need to be translated. The awkward pauses, the internal debates over whether it’s “okay” to feel a certain way about a birth parent or an adoptive family dynamic—those don’t need to be narrated. The permission to simply be is already there.

This unspoken connection isn’t about assuming we’ve lived the same life—it’s about presence. It’s about being with someone who intuitively understands that adoption isn’t a single event, but a lifelong process that can show up in subtle and surprising ways. It’s about skipping over the part where you have to educate your therapist just to be seen.

There’s also a protective power in this shared identity. Many adoptees are used to being misunderstood, misdiagnosed, or minimized in traditional therapy settings. When the core dynamics of adoption are misunderstood, even well-meaning clinicians can unintentionally cause harm. But when lived experience is woven into the fabric of the therapeutic relationship, there is less fear of being pathologized for something that is, at its root, a very human response to complex relational rupture and repair.

For example, when an adoptee says, “I wish I had never been born,” a therapist with lived experience is more likely to understand this as a deep existential expression of grief and identity trauma—rather than immediately interpreting it as suicidal ideation. That distinction matters. It can be the difference between feeling safely held or being prematurely assessed, redirected, or shut down. This is one of the many reasons I named my practice Beyond Words Psychological Services—because so much of the adoptee experience lives in the spaces between language, and words are not always what leads to feeling genuinely understood.

This doesn’t mean that only adoptee therapists can support adoptees—but it does mean that lived experience offers something uniquely grounding. It creates a shorthand to trust, a fast-track to safety, and an invitation to explore the deeper layers of adoption without the fear of being met with confusion or subtle invalidation. It tells the adoptee client, without words, “You don’t have to prove anything here.”

In a world where so much of the adoptee experience goes unseen or oversimplified, that kind of unspoken understanding is not just a gift—it’s a lifeline. And for many adoptee clients, it’s the difference between surviving therapy and being transformed by it.

Are you an adoptee seeking therapy? Summer counseling openings are now available for clients in 40 states! Fill out a Request Form to learn more about working with me, or visit my National Adoptee-Therapist Directory to find providers in your area.