Who am I, really? Nature, nurture and the adoptee's journey of self -discovery
By Nele | Blisss Healing in South Wales
There is a question most people answer without ever really asking it. Who am I?
They answer it through reflection. Literally. They see themselves in a parent's laugh, a grandmother's stubbornness, a sibling's way of holding a pen. They absorb their nature gradually, almost accidentally, through decades of ordinary moments with people who share their DNA.
They do not have to go looking for themselves. Themselves finds them. Slowly. Quietly. Through the people around them.
For those of us who were adopted, it is different.
Not worse. Not broken. Just different. And considerably more demanding.
The missing mirror
Nature and nurture. The two forces that shape every human being.
Nurture we understand. We know the family that raised us. We carry their habits, their values, their way of moving through the world — whether we chose to or not. We were shaped by their love, their limitations, their silences, their stories.
But nature, the other half of the equation, can feel like a room we were never given the key to.
Most people discover their nature through their history. Through family resemblances and inherited tendencies. Through someone saying you get that from your father or that stubbornness is pure grandmother. Through watching themselves reflected across a dinner table, across generations, across time.
We did not have that table.
And so the question of who we are by nature, what lives in us that was always ours, before nurture ever touched it, becomes something we must find a different way.
Not handed to us. Not reflected. But discovered. Slowly. Deliberately. From the inside out.
The longer road
This is not a small thing.
Self discovery is demanding for anyone. For us it requires something extra a willingness to turn inward when there is no outward mirror to lean on. To notice ourselves without the shortcut of comparison. To ask is this mine? without a family history to consult.
We notice we are drawn to music, to solitude, to making things with our hands. We notice our sensitivity, our specific humour, our way of reading a room that feels innate rather than learned. We notice the things that light us up that nobody in our adoptive family shares and we wonder where they came from.
We may never fully know. And learning to sit with that not knowing, without it swallowing us, is part of the work.
But here is what that longer road quietly teaches us.
We become extraordinarily good at knowing ourselves.
Not because it was easy. Because it was necessary.
The creative self
Alfred Adler believed that we are not merely the product of what we were given by nature or by nurture. He wrote that "the important thing is not what one is born with, but what use one makes of that equipment."
That idea lands differently for adoptees.
Because we have had to make use of our equipment without always knowing what it is. Without the full inventory. Without the complete set of instructions.
And yet here we are.
We built our sense of humour from scratch. We developed our sensitivities without anyone naming where they came from. We found our passions, our values, our ways of loving, not through inheritance but through attention. Through paying close notice to ourselves over years and years of quiet self observation.
That is not a deficit. That is a particular kind of authorship.
What nurture gave us and what it didn't
Our adoptive families shaped us. Of course they did. We carry them in ways we may not even fully see yet in our relationship with food, with conflict, with comfort, with belonging.
Some of that shaping was love. Some of it was limitation. Most of it was both.
And alongside that, somewhere underneath, our nature was quietly doing its own work. Insisting on itself. Showing up in unexpected places. In the things we were inexplicably drawn to. In the feelings that arose in us that nobody around us seemed to share or understand.
Both are true. Both matter. Neither tells the whole story.
We are shaped by what we were given. And we are also something that existed before any of it, something that no family, biological or adoptive, fully explains.
That something is worth knowing. Worth finding. Worth spending time with.
The invitation
The nature versus nurture question, for adoptees, is not a debate to be settled. It is an invitation.
An invitation to a longer, richer, more intentional journey of self discovery than most people ever undertake. To ask not just where did I come from but who am I, stop and really pay attention?
To find ourselves not in a family album but in the texture of our own living. In what moves us, what sustains us, what we reach for in quiet moments. In the particular shape of our courage and our tenderness and our resilience.
We did not get the mirror. We got something harder and ultimately something rarer. The necessity of truly knowing ourselves.
If you are an adult adoptee navigating identity, belonging, or the quiet questions that surface in ordinary moments, I would love to connect.
Nele | Blisss
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