It's pretty widely accepted among professionals that adoption is connected to loss, that the experience of being adopted is about gradually coming to understand that loss. And it's pretty extensive, loss is pretty extensive in adoption. There's not only the loss of birth parents, but the loss of extended birth family, the grandparents, the siblings. There is the loss sometimes of other non-biological caregivers, previous foster parents, and other important people in their past lives. Therapists perhaps, coaches, teachers, previous foster siblings, previous friends. As they get older, they begin to also experience that they've lost a connection to people who look like them in transracial adoptions, so there's a loss of their sense of a racial and cultural heritage. Sometimes they lose their mother tongue, the language they used to speak. And as they get older into the adolescent years, there's a sense sometimes of a loss of a part of themselves. And adoptees often talk about it using spacial metaphors. Something's missing, they might say. It's as if part of me isn't there. It may not be a big part, but a part of them that sometime is nagging and they want to know about.