ABSTRACT
Sarah was a happy, well-adjusted seventeen-year-old girl who had been adopted as an infant. She had always known that she had been adopted and had always felt at home and loved in her adoptive family. Nevertheless, she felt an undefinable sense of loss, a feeling that we have heard voiced by many other adoptees whom we have met through our work and privately. “Sometimes I feel incomplete”, Sarah told us. “I need to know more: Why did it happen? What is she like? Who is my birth father? What is he like? The older I get, the more important it is to know. It’s pretty frustrating being an adoptee sometimes” (Brodzinsky, Schechter & Henig, 1993, p. 11).
