What many adoptees may mean when they say I wish I had never been adoptedӔ.

When reading these forums and comments on other forums/blogs/articles, I do get the impression that many people misunderstand what an adoptee may mean when they say “I wish I had never been adopted”. I can’t speak for others but what I would mean if I said that above quote is" “I wish I had been born and raised in the ONE family”. This is where the misunderstanding often rises because many people assume that those who say that quoted sentence mean their specific biological family whereas they are saying exactly what they said, i.e. they wish they wish they had been born and raised in the ONE family, not any specific family but just the one family. The family we wished we had born and raised in may consist of the following: 1. our biological family 2. our adoptive family 3. a mixture of either family 4. a totally different family 5. Brangelina or other movie stars lol 6. any other family we know IRL 7. we may not have the faintest idea For those who have been born and raised in a functional family, their nature and nurture is seamlessly combined so that you can’t tell where one starts and the other finishes. For those people who have been born into one family and raised in another, the nature and nurture are separated, even open adoptions can't totally overcome that fact. Many of us adoptees became adaptees and adapt. Some of us will always treasure only our nurture side, some of us want to know more about the nature side. For those of us in closed adoption making contact with our nature side, it can be extraordinarily hard trying to figure it all out which is why reunions often go south. Many of us are trying to work out the nature/nurture dynamics and it can be hard. It is not unlike how it is for a person born in one country eg A and raised in another, eg B. They may love growing up in B but may want to know more about A and may consider themselves to be of both A&B. Most of us would (hopefully) not tell them that they shouldn’t be interested in A or that they should be grateful for growing up in B – it is not up to other people to tell them that. Whether or not a person is interested in knowing about country A is their decision – no-one else should be telling them that. However, we adoptees are told all the time what we are supposed to feel about each family and it is no-one else’s business but our own.