The Grief and Growth in Finding Family

Small’s message to fellow adoptees is rooted in experience and empathy.

Cameron Lee Small ’12, MS’16 wants you to know that he was a son before he was adopted. He wants you to know that when he left Korea for an upbringing in Wisconsin, he left behind histories, connections, and cultures whose absences he would feel throughout his life, even when he didn’t have the language to describe them. And he wants you to know that while no two adoptee stories are the same, his experiences and emotions are all too common in the adoptee community — so he wrote a book about it.

In The Adoptee’s Journey: From Loss and Trauma to Healing and Empowerment, Small creates space for adoptees to process the lifelong experience of carrying “multiple stories” by highlighting the dissonance between the overwhelmingly positive narrative around adoption and the fraught realities of those affected by it.

“From the moment we are ‘adopted into a loving family,’ to when we embrace our own meanings and relationships as adults, adoptees might be objectified, scrutinized, infantilized, and later criticized for asking questions and forming thoughts that don’t conform to the traditional pattern of ‘adoption is love,’ ” Small writes in the book’s prologue. “To be an adoptee is to be separated from someone and something. Our journey includes the process of learning how to sit with that discomfort.”

He draws heavily upon his own life, including his search for and reunion with his birth mother in Korea, along with testimonies from his work as a therapist, camp counselor, and advocate in the adoptee community. He presented his concept of “adoption literacy,” a way for communities to better support adoptees, in a 2024 TEDx talk titled “Why Adoptees Need a New Kind of Village.” Small is the founder of Therapy Redeemed in Minneapolis.

Published in the Summer 2025 issue