Misattunement in Adoption: Growing Up Feeling Unseen

When early attunement is missing, many adoptees learn to doubt their inner world.

This post explores how misattunement shapes identity, emotional trust, and the ways adoptees learn to adapt in order to stay safe and connected.

What Is Attunement and Why Does It Matter So Much?

Our earliest sense of self develops through the way caregivers respond to us. When a parent meets a baby’s cries, expressions, and rhythms with warmth, interest, and consistency, something foundational happens:

• emotions make sense

• the child feels real

• their inner world becomes trustworthy

This doesn’t require perfect parenting, just “good enough” attunement, the kind Donald Winnicott described and attachment research continues to support. But adoption begins with a rupture that complicates this process in ways that aren’t always visible or spoken aloud.

Why Misattunement Is More Likely in Adoption

Even in loving adoptive families, emotional attunement can be harder to establish.

Adoption brings together adults and a child who are, at first, relational strangers. They are learning one another without a shared history, often while carrying very different early experiences in their bodies and nervous systems. The child may hold the imprint of early separation and disruption, shaped before language existed. The adults may be holding their own unspoken experiences, such as grief around infertility, loss, fear of getting it wrong, or the pressure to finally make things work.

Alongside this, there can be powerful, often unspoken expectations: to bond quickly, to feel grateful, to create a “happy ending”. Adoption doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it sits within a wider culture that can struggle to hold complexity, loss, and ambivalence at the same time.

In this context, attunement isn’t always straightforward. Different nervous systems are learning one another. Both sides may be carrying a fear of rupture - of overwhelming the relationship, or of things falling apart if too much is felt or expressed.

When emotional moments are missed, misread, or feel too much for the relationship to hold, a child doesn’t protest or analyse what’s happening. They adapt. They learn what feels possible to bring, and what feels safer to manage alone.

(You can read more about early trauma in adoption here.)

“I Became Who They Needed Me to Be" or "I Protected Myself First”

Adoptees often adapt in different, equally intelligent ways.

For some, the adaptation was becoming “good”:

• Easy

• Quiet

• Smiling

• Low-need

• Careful not to take up too much space

Connection felt safer when they stayed small and agreeable.

For others, the adaptation was more defensive:

• Quick to put up walls

• Strong-willed

• Guarded or cautious

• Angry when things didn’t feel fair or safe

• Pushing others away before they could be hurt

Connection felt safer when they stayed in control or at a distance.

From an IFS perspective, these are both protective parts, each finding a different way to keep you safe when things once felt uncertain.

One protects safety through closeness, by blending, pleasing, or keeping harmony.The other protects safety through distance, by staying strong, guarded, or out of reach when connection feels risky.

Different strategies.

Same purpose.

Each one formed to help you survive relationships that didn’t fully meet you.

Neither is wrong. Both grew from the need to stay safe when your inner world wasn’t fully seen or understood.

How Misattunement Echoes into Adulthood

These adaptations often continue into adult life, sometimes flipping between the two:

• Struggling to name or trust your feelings

• Feeling responsible for others’ needs

• A strong drive to be “good” or never a burden

• People-pleasing or perfectionism

• Feeling easily misunderstood or on edge

• Pushing people away when closeness feels threatening

• Anger that feels intense, confusing, or quickly becomes shame

• Feeling empty, numb, or unsure who you are underneath it all

For a long time, these strategies can live quietly inside you - familiar, automatic, unexamined. Then something shifts. Slowly or suddenly, a moment arrives when you begin to wonder why you move through the world the way you do. Sometimes the change is external. Sometimes it’s internal. Often it’s both. There is no single catalyst, only the sense of a door opening, and a question rising: where did this begin?

If this stirs questions about identity or a sense of self that feels uncertain, I explore those themes further here.

Therapy for Adult Adoptees: Why It Can Be So Healing

Therapy can offer something different: a relationship where you don’t have to perform, protect, or manage the other person’s feelings.

A space where:

• your emotional world is met, not dismissed

• your protective parts are understood, not pathologised

• your pace is respected

• you can explore your identity without pressure

• you don’t have to adapt to stay connected

In relational therapy, healing happens between two people, through consistency, curiosity, and care. Over time, being met in this way can allow long-standing protective parts to soften, making space for the parts of you that have been overlooked or hidden so they can be witnessed, tended to, and begin to heal in relationship.

You’re Allowed to Be You: Fully and Without Apology

If this resonates, please know there is nothing wrong with you.

You adapted in the ways you needed to.Those adaptations once kept you safe.But they don’t need to define your future.

Therapy can offer the space to explore who you are underneath the roles you learned to play, whether those roles were quiet, accommodating, protective, angry, or a mix of all of them. You’re allowed to bring your full complexity into connection.

If this feels familiar, you might like to read more about how I support adult adoptees here or visit Lynn Earnshaw Counselling to learn more about me and my practice.