Insights & Reflections

Read short posts on mental health, emotional resilience, personal growth, and navigating life transitions. I also share reflections on adoption, grief, and healing based on both clinical experience and personal insight.

Finding Roots When the Tree Was Replanted
by Nele | Blisss Healing

Finding Roots When the Tree Was Replanted by Nele | Blisss Healing
The world is built on heritage.
On history. On the quiet assumption that you know where you come from and that this knowing gives you something solid to stand on.
Family trees. Resemblances passed down through generations. Inherited traits spotted across a dinner table. The casual certainty of belonging somewhere by birthright. The way someone says “you have your grandmother’s eyes”, and an entire lineage lives in that sentence.
For us, this landscape can feel quietly alienating.
Not dramatically. Not always visibly. Not in a way that is easy to name or explain to someone who has never felt it.
Just slightly outside. Watching others hold something that was never handed to us. Something the world assumes everyone has and rarely thinks to question.
And then there is the other version.
The romanticised one.
“But you were chosen. How special.”
Said with warmth. Said with the best intentions. And not entirely wrong, there is something in our story that is remarkable. But remarkable and simple are not the same thing. And somewhere between chosen and special the full complexity of what we actually carry gets quietly edited out.
Our story becomes a fairytale. Charming. Heartwarming. Something people lean into at dinner parties with genuine curiosity and something that resembles wonder.
And we smile. Because we know the fuller picture. Because we have learned to hold both things at once, the beauty and the weight of it, in a way the fairytale version never quite captures.
We were adopted. And so, we adapted. We learned to move through that world with grace. To answer questions about our family without showing the pause that lives just before the answer. To celebrate other people’s heritage while quietly navigating our own complex relationship with the word belonging.
And perhaps most exhaustingly we learned to carry questions that have no clean answers.

Where do I come from? Who do I look like? What was passed down to me and what was lost? Who would I have been?
Not questions we ask every day. But questions that surface. In ordinary moments. In the middle of unremarkable Tuesdays. In the silence after someone casually mentions their family history as though it is the most natural thing in the world.
Because it is. For them.

What does it mean to root ourselves when the original roots were rerouted?
This is the question I have sat with for most of my life.
I know the adoptee experience not only professionally through two decades of working in psychiatric care and therapeutic practice but personally. Intimately. From the inside.
I know the specific exhaustion of building an identity without a complete map. The complexity of holding gratitude and grief in the same hands. The strange loneliness of not quite belonging anywhere completely even in rooms full of people who love us.
And I know something else too.
That the absence of original roots does not mean a life without grounding.
It means learning to root differently.

Creating our own foundation is not second best.
There is a story the world tells quietly, persistently, without meaning harm that heritage is something you receive. Something passed down. Something that exists before you arrive.
But some of us arrive without that inheritance. And in the absence of it we build something arguably more intentional. More conscious. More deeply chosen.
The family we create rather than inherit. The values we arrive at through living rather than receiving. The identity we construct carefully and honestly from everything life has handed us and everything we have chosen to become despite it.
This is not a consolation prize.
This is a different kind of roots. No less real. No less nourishing.

The beauty in the unconventional tree
There is genuine beauty in our story even when it is complicated. Even when it holds loss alongside love. Even when the questions remain unanswered.
We grew. Without the conventional foundation. In conditions that were sometimes uncertain, sometimes incomplete, sometimes painful.
And we are here. Rooted in ourselves even if the rooting took longer and looked different and required more conscious tending than it did for others.
That is not something to grieve entirely.
That is something to recognise.
The world is built on heritage and history yes. But it is also built by people who created something new from incomplete beginnings. Who planted themselves in unfamiliar ground and learned to grow towards the light anyway.
We are those people.

We are not alone in this.
If something in these words sounds familiar, the quiet outside feeling, the unanswered questions, the complexity of belonging, or simply the knowing smile when someone calls your story a fairytale.
I want us to sit with something together.
There are people who get it. Not theoretically. Not clinically.
From the inside.
That is why I built Blisss Healing. Not because I have all the answers. But because I know the questions from the inside out. Because I believe that what we often need most is not advice or strategies or someone nodding professionally from across a room.
It is someone who recognises the look. The pattern. The landscape of a life built on rerouted roots.
Someone who can sit with the complexity, the love and the loss, the gratitude and the grief, the belonging and the not belonging, without rushing towards resolution.
Because some things do not resolve. They integrate. Slowly. On their own timeline. With the right company.

If you are an adult adoptee navigating identity, belonging, or the quiet questions that surface in ordinary moments, I would love to connect.

Who Am I, Really? Nature, Nurture and the Adoptee’s Journey of Self Discovery
By Nele | Blisss Healing

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.

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.