The Questions Adopted Kids Are Afraid to Ask

What happens when a child asks a question the adults in the room aren’t ready to answer?

In this episode of Family Twist, Corey sits down with Dr. Vicki Sanders, a psychologist who has spent decades working with adopted and foster children, and the families raising them. Her work lives in the spaces most people avoid, the pauses, the deflections, the “we don’t need to talk about that right now” moments that shape identity in ways we don’t always see.

This conversation focuses on what children carry.

Dr. Vicki shares what she has witnessed again and again in therapy rooms:

• The questions adopted and foster children want to ask but are afraid to
 • How silence, even well-intentioned silence, shapes identity
 • The difference between protecting a child and protecting adult comfort
 • What ambiguous loss looks like in children and teens
 • How shame and secrecy can quietly impact attachment
 • What it sounds like when a child tests whether it’s safe to be curious

We also talk about how adoptive and foster parents can respond differently, not perfectly, but openly. Dr. Vicki challenges the idea that love alone resolves identity tension. Instead, she offers practical ways to stay present when uncomfortable questions arise.

This is a conversation about courage, on both sides.

Catch Dr. Vicki at Untangling Our Roots

Dr. Vicki will be speaking at the upcoming Untangling Our Roots conference, where she’ll go deeper into:

• How to create emotional safety around hard conversations
 • Supporting adopted and foster youth through identity exploration
 • Recognizing trauma responses tied to secrecy and silence
 • Practical language parents can use when biological family questions surface

If you’re attending UTOR, her session will offer tools you can take home immediately, whether you’re an adoptee, parent, clinician, or advocate.

If you’ve ever sensed there were things you weren’t allowed to ask, or if you’re raising a child who is beginning to ask them now, this episode is for you.

Family secrets are the ultimate plot twist.

About Dr. Vicki

Dr. Vicki is a licensed psychologist with decades of clinical experience working with adopted and foster children, adoptive families, and youth navigating attachment disruption and trauma. Her work centers on identity development, ambiguous loss, family systems, and helping children find language for experiences that often go unspoken.

She has supported foster youth transitioning into permanency, trained parents in trauma-informed care, and helped families move from silence and defensiveness to openness and emotional safety.

Through her clinical practice and public speaking, Dr. Vicki advocates for honest conversations that allow children to explore their origins without fear, shame, or secrecy.

Transcript

Kendall 0:00

Welcome back to Family Twist. I'm Kendall. We talk a lot on this show about discovery. The moment the DNA results hit, the phone call, the secret that changes everything. But what we don't always slow down enough to talk about is what happens next. What those discoveries do to our attachment, to our identity, to the way we show up in relationships for the rest of our lives. Dr. Vicky Sanders is a licensed therapist who specializes in relational trauma, adoption, and attachment wounds. She works with children and adults, navigating foster care, adoption, and complex family disruption. And what really struck me about this conversation with Vicky and Corey is how calmly and clearly she names something that many of us feel but don't always have the language for. That discomfort we carry, it makes sense. The questions kids ask, the ones adults avoid, the fear of bringing things up because we don't want to hurt each other, she walks us through all of it. They talk about the primal wound, they talk about the fact that identity forms across a lifespan, not just at one defining moment. They talk about why being uncomfortable might actually be the doorway to healing. And honestly, there's something deeply validating about hearing a clinician say out loud that attachment wounds do not magically disappear at age 18. They stay with us, and so does the opportunity to work on them. So let's get into it.

Corey 1:34

Hi, Vicky. Welcome to the Family Twist Podcast. Thank you. So we're gearing up for untangling our roots coming up really, really soon. Very excited about it. What are your feelings about it just going into it?

SPEAKER_02 1:47

I've had the opportunity to be at quite a few different conferences that sort of focus on different things, and I'm excited about how much this particular conference encapsulates everybody that's in the sphere of family. It's not just focused on one end or the other end. It's not focused on just one population. I'm really excited about the opportunity to be involved with so many people who are in different parts of this sphere of family.

Corey 2:09

One of the things that I really appreciated by attending the last one was that you really have a great sense of like chosen family there, you know, and then everybody's kind of comes together and you don't really have to explain yourself. Like everybody kind of knows the situation that you've probably been in, and it's just like an understood kind of thing, which yeah. Which I'm looking forward to that again too. Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about why you went into the type of work that you do specifically.

SPEAKER_02 2:38

Sure. You know, uh it's funny, I have quite a few members of my family who are adopted and and from different realms, international, inner family, and and through foster care and that kind of thing. We jokingly say when I grew up, my mom said that I either had to become a therapist or a detective because I am relatively nosy. And sometimes people say, oh, you were just inquisitive. And no, I was nosy. And so I decided to become a therapist. And for a long time I wanted to work in the social work field. And what I realized was I had a hard time focusing on all of the logistics that has to be focused on by social workers. And I'm absolutely have nothing but uh I was too excited to be with families and to be helping people who maybe didn't have a traditional family or who didn't have the opportunity to just, you know, have things be easy. And so that's really when I fell into the world of like therapy and adoption. And the more work that I do here, the more I realize that yes, adoption is is definitely probably my my main area. But it's this idea of relational trauma and disruption that's actually something that I'm passionate about. And it's so much more common than we want to accept and acknowledge.

Corey 3:57

So going back just a little bit, Bethany, your comment about being nosy, like what kind of questions would you ask your relatives?

SPEAKER_02 4:02

Well, so some of it was questions, but some of it was just I always wanted to hear what other people had to say. I always wanted to know what was going on in people's lives. I always wanted to know why. I was definitely that kid who probably said why more times than I ever could. And I was very lucky in that my parents were very open and we had very open and honest conversations about our family and our extended family and how all of those things looked, even sometimes when our extended family didn't have those conversations with each other. But I do feel like my parents did a pretty good job of answering why about 15 times before I got the take a breath. I just was always fascinated by people's experiences and I wanted to know what was happening in their head and in their spirit. And I also like knowing what's happening in the world and people's business and all that kind of stuff.

Corey 4:50

Gotcha. Yeah. What are some of the common themes that pop up with your patients?

SPEAKER_02 4:55

Well, it's interesting because obviously I work with children and families and I work with adults. What I notice with kids is there is this epic desire for these children to not hurt the family that they're being raised in. And somehow that takes on this experience that they're not then allowed to talk about their other family, either whether we're calling that a first family or a genetic family or whatever we want to say, whether we're talking about even divorced parents, sometimes where a child no longer has contact with one parent. But the children that I work with spend so much time and effort and energy that unfortunately sometimes that leads to a lot of behavioral dysregulation and and they can't control themselves and manage, but they're unfortunately working so hard to try to protect. The problem is then obviously that they're harming themselves and their relationship. And with parents, I feel this, you know, desire for their children just to have a normal life. Just just be normal, whatever that means these days. But what then ends up happening is parents will say, Well, I don't want to bring anything up in case they don't want to talk about it. I want to let them bring it up to me. Everybody's just waiting for the other one to bring it up. And there's uh a a big discomfort in being uncomfortable.

Corey 6:12

Are there some tactics that you use for starting the conversation?

SPEAKER_02 6:16

I think I try to help people realize they're gonna be okay if they're uncomfortable. And that's actually true. And I feel like most struggles that people have in general has to do with our discomfort with being uncomfortable. And so what we talk about is for the adults, I tell them, like, listen, it is valuable to me how they feel and what they think. But when I'm having to notice what a child needs versus an adult's discomfort, I'm always gonna go with what a child needs. Because an adult can handle the discomfort. So what we talk about a lot first is how to be okay with being uncomfortable. Because we spend a lot of time and effort not wanting to be uncomfortable. It's how addiction shows up, it's how negative coping skills show up, it's how avoidance shows up, it's this this fear of being uncomfortable. And so we start with that conversation that it's okay to feel uncomfortable whether you're a grown-up or a kid. And then we just start with what questions would you have? What do you want to talk about? You know, so many of the young people that I work with actually have very little, if any, memory of their biological genetic first family. And so then there's this idea that we don't ever need to talk about it because they don't remember it anyways. That's the other piece, is we always need to be having a conversation. So the first thing is it's okay for us to be uncomfortable. And the second part is we always need to be having these conversations because the second we don't bring it up, the second the grownups aren't really talking about it first, is subconsciously telling kids that they don't need to talk about it and that we don't want them to talk about it.

Corey 7:49

Right. So what are some of the questions that they have?

SPEAKER_02 7:53

So it's interesting when you're talking to kids, you can almost see kids like their developmental stages throughout like their experience. I have a little one who I'm working with right now, she's seven, and we wrote out her list of questions, and it's what's what was my biological mom's favorite color and what were her favorite kind of shows to watch. And she wants to know the things that she knows about. She wants to know things like how old her biological mom was and what that was like for her and and why she couldn't keep her. As we get older, we do have kids who ask sad or more sad questions. I'm not saying that that's not a sad question, but were sad questions like why wasn't I worth enough for you to stop doing what you were doing? In the cases of either safe surrenderers or parents who made the incredibly difficult decision that they were not able to care for their child, and so they chose to engage in a system where their child was adopted. There's sometimes that question of why. But those are the biggest questions that kids want. They want to know who this person is, which are favorite food. And and for many of my kids, particularly interestingly, my kids that I work with who were transracially adopted, what did they look like? That's a big one. What did what did they look like and where did they spend their time? When kids look different from their families, that can be really, I think, surprisingly difficult to people who don't have that experience. And I'll be honest, I was raised by my biological parents, they're lovely, but I was born with blonde hair, blue-eyed, and everybody else in my family had dark brown hair, dark eyes, and I felt different. And they were my biological family, and I look very much like them. So I I have a very small understanding of that. But that is the piece of like, what did they look like? What did they sound like? What did they do in their in their time? I think it's just this idea of they would take any information, to be honest.

Corey 9:59

What percentage would you say are children that their parents, the raising parents, know that it's like a it's not a closed adoption, it's an open adoption. They know who the biological family is and maybe might be in touch.

SPEAKER_02 10:11

Because a a large portion of the children that I work with currently were adopted out of the foster care system, many of them we do actually have information about the biological family through the court system, but there's very little if any contact. And so I would say of the kids that I have right now, maybe about 5% have some form of contact with their biological or genetic family. There's a lot of fear around that contact, whether it's fear of how the child is gonna react after the visit, because we have this idea that dysregulation means bad, rather than dysregulation just means I have a lot of feelings about that. And so there's a lot of fear of, I think, loss, especially as as children grow and get older, there's this fear that they're gonna turn 18 and and flee to a biological family member rather than recognizing sometimes that that holding on is doing more harm than good. I think it is unfortunate the number of children who are not able to have contact. And sometimes I fully understand we've got, you know, here in the Central Valley, we have a large portion of our foster care population is because of substance use. And unfortunately, once biological parents have lost their children to the system, they tend to actually fall deeper into addiction because the work they were doing is gone now, right? The reason that for the work that they were doing. So it does become unsafe. And I fully understand that. But I do, I personally do advocate for any contact we can have. And if we can have contact, we can have information, we can have pictures and we can have talks and letters and emails and those kinds of things.

Corey 12:00

What does it look like when a young person is ready to be finished with therapy with you?

SPEAKER_02 12:06

So I, you know, personally, I always say when I'm the queen of the world, I'm going to require everyone to be in therapy. But for me, actually, the biggest thing is when the child and the parents can have open and honest communication and all of them feel like they have the skills to manage. There's this idea that we need to get to a place, for example, if I have a kiddo who has tantrums, because that's how they manage their dysregulation, that we need to get to zero tantrums. Well, that's just never going to happen. Let's be real. Most healthy, fully grown grown-ups have tantrums every once in a while. So we're trying to make sure that our tantrums are on the decrease, the intensity, the frequency, but really it is when does the child have the coping skills and when do the parents have the skills? And that's where a lot of my focus has become is when do the parents have the skills? Because parents are in the space with the child. I'm in the space with the child for 50 minutes once a week, if I'm lucky. Parents are with them all the time, schools are with them all the time. And so this encouragement, not that I have to get every behavior under control, but once a child feels like they are ready, we do often see returns at major life changes. So when kids go from elementary school to junior high, we usually come back. And when we go from high school to adulthood, we usually come back. But it's this idea that you don't have to actually be where you want to be yet. We just have to be where you have the skills to get there.

Corey 13:26

How often are you discussing the primal wound and how do you talk about that with your patients?

SPEAKER_02 13:33

So it all depends on the age and the stage. But the first thing that I have conversations with parents about is all of this is traumatic. Not all adopted children are abused. But when we have a separation from our from our biological or genetic family, when we have any kind of a difference in in that, we have to acknowledge that that is incredibly traumatic and creates a lot of questions for us. So we start talking about it young, that it is hard, it is sad. We start talking with parents ahead of early to like make sure that they understand that their child having wounds around this issue is not about them. It's curiosity does not mean that they don't love, it's not disloyal, doesn't mean they don't love their parents, but there is an internal wound that we experience when things are disrupted in that way, when our relationship is disrupted in that way. So we start having those conversations early and saying it's okay if that's hard for you. Because our kids need to hear that, that it's okay that they're upset, that it's okay that they're different, and it's okay that they feel different.

Corey 14:41

Absolutely. All right, let's go back to the untangling our root summit. Can you share a little bit about what you're going to be speaking about?

SPEAKER_02 14:47

Super excited. Did you be talking a lot about how attachment wounds impact our mental health and really that attachment is throughout the lifespan? So one of the things that we often talk about in my world is that often we we focus on specific moments of time rather than recognizing how identity is formed throughout the lifespan. So we talk about like the adoption moment or we talk about the you know birth moment or whatever. Those are all super important moments, but our identity forms throughout the lifespan. And so attachment wounds, especially attachment wounds in our early childhood, impact us in our mental health and in our attachment throughout our whole life. And so being able to recognize the importance of like how to work on healing those wounds early is is important, but also recognizing that the wounds are gonna be there. We can do all the work, we can do all the right things, the wounds are still there. And so being able to recognize how to address those throughout our lifespan, adolescence, adulthood, all of those things are super important. And so that's what I'm I'm most excited about talking about because I feel like too often we say, something happens on your 18th birthday where now you don't get to be upset about things that happened when you were a child. Instead, we can acknowledge that like this impacts us throughout our whole lifespan.

Corey 16:07

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_02 16:07

Yeah.

Corey 16:08

So this might be a little bit of a different uh question or might be a little bit of a different way that to answer it because typically our final question is, you know, is there a song or a musical artist that you lean on? But I'm curious on, you know, what your answer would be for yourself. And if you talk about music or songs and healing with your patients as well.

SPEAKER_02 16:29

I'm not a huge music person. I've always enjoyed music. I enjoyed singing, but I was never one of those people who really knew artists and and those kinds of things. The words always spoke more to me than anything else. But really, in the last few years, Jelly Roll has kind of become my person that I like listening to because there's particular songs he sings, but there's one where he says, like, I don't feel okay, but everything's gonna be alright. And so that's really something I lean on. And I do talk with people that I work with, especially young people that I work with about music and about artwork and about artists and about poetry and and all of those kinds of things. But I think that for me, that that music that He sings, the music that Jolly Roll in particular sings, speaks to that idea that I feel uncomfortable right now. And I'm gonna be okay. I do not feel all right, but everything's gonna be okay. And I think that's super helpful to me because even in my own moments of struggle, even in my own moments of difficulty, I can say, okay, do not feel okay. I will be okay. And I think that, you know, can help other people as well. So that's sort of my lean on, but I do talk with a lot of my young people about music. I think my younger kids, the words don't necessarily speak to them as much as they enjoy the the singing and they that makes them feel good. So I I hear a lot of like we're we're very country out here.

Corey 17:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 17:58

I hear a lot of country musicians who, you know, my kids just like to sing because when they sing they feel good.

Corey 18:05

Music is definitely healing.

SPEAKER_02 18:07

Well, absolutely it is. And there's lots of evidence of that, as well as all of our own personal, you know, connection to it.

Corey 18:15

Well, Vicky, I'm really looking forward to meeting you in person at Summit. It's gonna be a blast. It's gonna be a weekend to remember. And thank you for coming on and sharing this with us today.

SPEAKER_02 18:24

Yeah, thanks so much. I'm really excited about it.

Kendall 18:27

Awesome. I keep coming back to something Dr. Vicky said. I don't feel okay, but everything's gonna be alright. That tension, that both and situation. So many of us in this community live there. We don't always feel okay about the secrecy, about the loss, about the rejection, about the questions that don't have answers, and yet somehow we're still building lies, relationships, chosen family, community. Her reminder that attachment wounds exist across a lifetime feels important, not discouraging, not heavy, just honest. Nothing magically fixes itself at age 18, nothing magically heals because time passed. But we can build the skills, we can learn to tolerate discomfort, we can have the conversations, and maybe most importantly, we can stop waiting for someone else to bring it up first. If you're attending the Untangly Our Roots conference soon, you'll be able to hear Dr. Vicky speak more about attachment and identity across the lifespan. I have a feeling that room is gonna hold some powerful conversations. As always, thank you for being here with us. Thank you for doing your own work, thank you for leaning into the uncomfortable. And remember, family secrets are the ultimate plot twist. That excerpt is gonna stay with me because it captures something we don't always say out loud. Sometimes the first person we tell is a stranger because it feels safer than telling the people we love, or because we don't know where else to put the truth. Gail talked about being the one who receives the avalanche, the emails, the confessions, the private histories people have never been able to describe in their own living rooms. And I think that's part of why spaces like the Untangling Our Roots conference matter, and why this podcast exists. Not because every story has a neat ending, but because people deserve somewhere to be heard while they're still in the middle of it. We also talked about something else that hits hard. The way identity doesn't just shift once, it shifts again and again as you process, as you learn, as you grieve what was withheld, and as you decide what language finally fits. If you're listening and you're early in your discovery, or you're four you're years in and still trying to understand what this all means, I hope this episode reminds you that you're not the only one piecing it together. I hope this episode reminds you that you're not the only one piecing it together. And if you want to go deeper, Gail's books are white, like her, and what they never told us. We'll make sure those are linked in the show notes. Thanks for being with us and holding space for stories that are not always easy to carry alone. And remember, family secrets are the ultimate plot twist. We'll see you next time.