https://drbarbarasumner.substack.com/p/you-must-have-had-a-bad-experience?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwY2xjawQL-1lleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEewXqohP1N95ODcxzJZqQBusdEA-Nzg33uLJ-W6kmES7i0C3ds-q--XxpmW-A_aem_biMfMprs5zwvLcp6GQMvUg&triedRedirect=trueYou must have had a bad experience...
...it's time you got over it, it could have been worse, you should be grateful and other negations.
Dr Barbara Sumner
Feb 24, 2026
These phrases follow adopted people around like shadows.
Last week alone, on my public Facebook page, people threw this at me, and other adopted people at least five or six times.
Mostly, this phrase is delivered as a correction. As if the only legitimate reason to question adoption is personal damage.
These words act as a containment strategy.
Imagine saying this to someone describing the long-term impact of growing up in poverty, evacuated from their homeland as a child, speaking up against institutional racism, domestic violence, or any ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience).
We just don’t. Because we understand, instinctively, that one person’s survival story does not cancel an alternative story.
No one tells me that because I walked away from one fatal car crash and barely survived another, I am not entitled to be critical of driver standards. My survival did not erase the impact.
Yet in adoption discourse, we all live inside a range of social beliefs designed to minimise the impacts of human adoption.
Adoption is inherently good
If you are critical, something must have gone wrong
If nothing visibly went wrong, you have no standing
If others report happiness, your analysis collapses
This way, the focus is shifted from structure to sentiment.
When an adopted adult speaks about falsified birth records, legal erasure, severed kinship, identity confusion, and genealogical dislocation, the response is not to examine the system. It is to examine the speaker.
And we become anecdotes, we become a story, one of those ‘if it bleeds it leads’ headlines that serve as entertainment.
What happened to you?
Were your adopters unkind?
Did something go wrong?
The implication is that only mistreatment counts. Only overt abuse or visible dysfunction qualifies as injury or legitimate grief.
We saw this in the NZ Royal Commission on Abuse in Care’s late inclusion of adoption in its remit.
The flaw at the heart of this inclusion was that there had to be a prerequisite of abuse in an adoptive home. This reduced adoption discourse to good or bad adoption, bad-apple adopters, and/or disgruntled, non-compliant, reactive adoptees.
It silenced those who experienced a reasonable or happy childhood but who still sought to end the inequalities embedded in their adoptive status.
This flaw could only have been by design. While apologies and reparations were part of the Royal Commission's mandate for those abused in state care, none of this was available to adopted people abused in the home that the state allocated to them. This sifted the focus (for adopted people only) to a listening service alone, as though being heard were a sufficient remedy.
I cover this and other flaws in the Royal Commissions in On Human Adoption.
Really, why do we need to have been abused inside our adoptive home to be justified in asking questions about the structures, functions and purpose of human adoption?
Adoption causes the loss of genetic mirroring and alienation from family and identity; it causes a lifetime inside a false identity and a state-mandated fiction that you were born to someone else.
Even in the most loving adoptive household, those elements sit like stones in the centre of a domestic life built on lies.
To tell an adopted person “you must have had a bad experience” is to refuse to see that structural trauma exists independently of individual goodwill.
Is there any other state-authorised social arrangement where structural rupture is reframed as rescue, and where the people who question it are branded as bitter?
If adoption can be traumatising even when there was no overt abuse, then what happens to the moral simplicity of ‘you must have had a bad experience’?
Easy answer - it is turned back onto the adopted person to avoid causing moral complexity.
In other trauma areas, society is careful not to rank one person's suffering against another’s happiness.
Only in adoption do we expect the person most affected to defend their right to feel what they feel.
Until all the negative issues inherent in human adoption are taken seriously, all adopted people who question the system will continue to be pathologised for recognising what and what was done to them.
There is a whole lexicon of repetitive minimisation that circles all adopted people. So much so, you could be forgiven for thinking it is ritualistic.
You should be grateful:
Gratitude is weaponised to override grief. No other trauma survivor is told that material provision cancels emotional rupture. If you’ve survived a famine, does anyone say you can’t speak of hunger because you now have food?
It could have been worse:
Comparative silencing shifts the conversation from what happened to a ranking exercise. Trauma does not disappear because a hypothetical alternative might have been harsher.
At least you were chosen:
Acquisition as flattery. It ignores the fact that no infant consents to being selected. We do not tell abducted children that they were lucky to be chosen carefully.
Your real mother gave you up because she loved you.
Not only does recasting love as rejection often damage future adult relationships, it also blocks inquiry into the social conditions that made separation inevitable.
Love is enough.
If that were true, there would be no need to falsify birth records.
You are lucky you were not aborted.
My favourite hate messaging. This is existential blackmail. It frames survival as debt and implies that the adopted person must remain silent as the price to pay for being alive.
But all families are messy.
True. But not all families begin with legal erasure and state-mandated identity substitution. This phrase flattens a specific structural rupture into ordinary relational difficulty.
That was a long time ago.
Time does not dissolve identity alteration. New legislation is always springing up to expand the wall of control around adopted people.
You are focusing on the negative.
Naming loss is reframed as negativity. while in any other trauma context, we call it processing.
Plenty of adoptees are happy.
Happiness elsewhere does not invalidate pain here.
You are hurting your adoptive parents by talking like this.
Another of my favourites. It shifts the focus from the affected person to others' comfort. Adopted people are conditioned to manage everyone else’s feelings.
You were saved.
Saved from what? Poverty. Stigma. Geography. The language of rescue conceals the fact that someone had to be separated so that someone else could parent.
Why can’t you just move on?
Identity theft is not an event you “get over.” It is an ongoing condition.
Notice the one thing all these statements do?
They relocate the problem from the system to the speaker.
They convert structural critique into personal complaint.
They protect the moral narrative of adoption.
Once you accept that adoption can contain trauma even in the presence of a form of love, the simplicity collapses.
And complexity is harder to live with than denial.
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