Kallikak and Glory by Dr Samantha Brooks
I've always known that I was adopted, placed in an established family, my adoptive parents already had three other children a decade older than me of their own. Telling me as soon as I was old enough to understand, was one of the two main things my adoptive parents got right. The second was that they chose to apply to adopt me and make my family life permanent, after first landing in their family as a five-day-old foster baby. Apparently, I needed a place of safety, the reasons for this I only learned 45 years' later - throughout my life I'd been led to believe that my biological parents, especially my mother, didn't want me and that they were really bad, or really stupid people. I have learned in my 50 years of life that the labels "good" and "bad" given to adoptive and biological families are never that black and white. I was their foster child at first, but after a while they decided they wanted to adopt me, and so I stayed with them.
I thought I had a typical childhood, in part thanks to the UK Children's Act 1975 that was amended coincidentally on my birthdate, legislating being hidden from my biological parents, my birth name changed and my whereabouts never disclosed to them while they were alive. My mother never saw me again, and I only met my biological father briefly, two weeks before he died. The experience of my two 'full' biological brothers was different, because they were born before the Children's Act amendments, and remained in contact with our biological parents for a while, until their adoptive parents moved away. Our biological parents remained married - and childless, with undoubtedly daily thoughts about the children taken from them - till death. They had 45 years - approximately 16,500 days of thinking about the children taken from them. My 'full' brothers were adopted into the same family, and were not certain whether the rumours about having a little sister were true. I, however, always knew about my biological brothers, as I grew up in a different family just 4 miles away, but was only ever half-heartedly encouraged to contact them, and never did until much later.
And so, I got on with my life, giving only occasional thought to my adoption status, perhaps using reading, studying and writing to distract me from it - to not rock the boat. I left my adoptive home aged twenty, never really returning and never really looking back, to study for a degree in psychology, in Scotland. I then moved to London when anxieties about the Millenium Bug were taking over any anxieties I might've had about being adopted, and soon attended King's College to complete a Masters, and then a PhD in Neuroscience. In retrospect, I had a desire to understand my mind and inner world, which in part was built by nature that I did not understand. The adoption notes suggested that my biological father, although troubled, was a very intelligent man. I was very different to my adoptive siblings who did not have a natural inclination towards academia like me, which placed a growing wedge of resentment between us that never improved. My academic tendency was something I learned much later, shared with one of my biological brothers, who also has a science PhD - again, the potential importance of genetics rearing its head.
After London - escaping the credit crisis in 2010 and any potential crisis of delving into what I was led to believe was my murky, dark biological past - I moved to Sweden - the first time living abroad. Migration was in my genes, I later discovered, with a lineage of academic ancestors harking back to Western Ukraine, some of whom, including my maternal grandparents, having to flee Stalin's Holodomor and settle in a brand new country. I focused my mind on learning Swedish and intense scientific study, not my adoptive status. A couple of years' later I was invited to Cape Town, South Africa - the Mother City (migrating again!). Finally, perhaps it was this implicit reminder of Mother: Earth, City, Africa, the Motherland - distanced by the fears of my biological past, on the other side of the world - that jolted me into thinking about who and where my biological mother was. It was while living in the Motherland of Africa that I started making delicate, tentative enquiries - about my birth certificate first - to the UK social services.
It was perhaps my African contact with UK social services that helped my biological family - first my PhD brother - to later find me, during the pandemic lockdown period that followed 8 years after I first landed in Africa. With lots of time to think during lockdowns, one of my brothers who lived in the UK, had made enquiries too, about his own past and the rumours of a sister, and found me on the system. It was this - only a few months after my adoptive dad passed away - that led to my suddenly gaining a blue file full of redacted and summarised notes about my adoption from social services. The brother who came looking for me was estranged from our other brother, but I got to meet them both, and other members of my extended biological family, who regaled me with many tales of our biological parents and grandparents.
The blue file of redacted notes from social services, and stories and photographs shared from these new biological family members, enabled me to piece together the story of our biological parents, and the reasons why we - their three children - were adopted, despite our mother being married at the time. It also showed other horrifying details, such as the fact that my biological mother was sterilised without consent aged just 27, straight after giving birth to me. While nobody would admit it, it occured to me that this eugenicist solution was perhaps because my biological mother was deemed to be poor, foreign (she was part-Ukrainian, with a foreign-sounding maiden name) and feeble-minded. Her recorded mental status - which would now be diagnosed as major depression, resulting from severe mental and physical abuse by her husband - branded her an unfit wife and mother in 1970s UK, the main reason for the social services' decision to take all her children away from her, and their failures to help her, while instead opting for barbaric sterilisation that prevented our young mother from ever having children again. This was not Stalin's Ukraine, or Nazi Germany, or Apartheid South Africa - this was 1970s Britain.
All this information came flooding into my life during the first pandemic lockdown, my adoptive mother unable to talk to me about it all, having just lost her husband. So I had to do something alone to make sense of all the information. I "asked" my biological mother (who I subsequently learned had died - in my childhood village no less - some people knew but kept it hidden from me) - to "speak" to me through my imaginative writing. And so my book Kallikak and Glory was born. A book that her only daughter was compelled to write, to bring what happened to her to light at last, channeling my memory and piecing together all the little bits of her story from many different sources. My mother Gloria - Glory - died without anyone ever knowing what had happened to her, or anybody helping her - so I wanted to try to change that with my book.
The reference to The Kallikak Family in the title of my book,is a fictional work by psychologist Henry H Goddard, first published in 1912, to support eugenicist beliefs at its height, and shockingly re-published in 2025. In it, Goddard proposes that there are good (Kalli) and bad (kak) genes that should not be allowed to mix in order to maintain a healthy society. Bad genes should be prevented from propagating. But if my mother - who I don't think was bad at all - had not given birth to me, I would not have become a PhD, helping to contribute to life changing therapies for society (I also pay 40% taxes!).
Nowadays, my neuroscientific work revolves around understanding how to strengthen the neural processes of impulse control. Sometimes this is referred to as will power - the ability to self-regulate difficult emotions - a useful skill for someone adopted. I started off in London, at King's College, understanding how people with chronic anorexia nervosa use their brains to control the natural bodily urge to eat (sometimes doing it to the point of near death).
I utilised the neurobiological knowledge I learned about excessive appetite control in anorexia nervosa to develop cognitive training interventions for people with addictions - people who struggle to maintain control over their behaviours. We successfully demonstrated in South Africa that regular training of the brain regions associated with will power can change brain structure and function and strengthen self-control (think of regular reading, playing chess or sudoku). And now, back in the UK, my team and I are developing ways to further improve the brain's impulse control, by lowering inflammation that pummels and weakens these networks. The take home message is that by leading an anti-inflammatory lifestyle (good sleep, exercise, healthy food, avoiding social drama), lowering inflammation that eventually arrives in the brain can enable repair and strengthen brain networks associated with self-control and will power.
And this brings me right back to my adoption story. Yes it is true that adoptees come from a background of trauma - whether it be the traumas of the birth parents forced to give up their babies, relinquishment trauma, or the enduring societal biases and stigma around adoption that repeatedly traumatise us throughout life. And trauma increases inflammation in the body and brain. But my neuroscience research has taught me that by making anti-inflammatory choices, our brains, minds and bodies can heal from adoption trauma (though it is not a linear trajectory but a lifelong commitment). And once anti-inflammatory repairs are at play, we can experience the cognitive flexibility essential for cognitive reframing of our life story narrative.
Best wishes "Jane Phillips" AKA Dr Samantha Brooks