Trauma Informed Conversations
Hosted by the team behind Trauma Informed Consultancy Services, led by Jessica Parker, Director at TICS. This podcast explores how trauma-informed principles can transform the way we live, work, lead, and support others. Each episode dives into real-world conversations with experts, educators, and practitioners who are driving positive change through compassion, understanding, and awareness.
Whether you’re a leader, educator, clinician, or simply someone who wants to build safer and more supportive environments, Trauma Informed Conversations offers practical insights, reflective dialogue, and inspiring stories to help you embed trauma-informed approaches in every aspect of life and work.
Join us as we create space for empathy, learning, and meaningful connection — one conversation at a time.
Trauma Informed Conversations
Care-Experienced People (Mini-Series) - Episode 4: Adoption Beyond the Happy Ending: Trauma and the Stories that Shape Us
Adoption is frequently presented as an endpoint: a “happy ending,” a rescue, a solution. For many adoptees, the story does not end with placement. It continues across the life course, shaped by identity, belonging, nervous system responses, loss, silence, and social expectation.
In this episode of Trauma Informed Conversations (part of the Care-Experienced People mini-series), host Carrie Wilson speaks with Annalisa Toccara-Jones, a PhD researcher, adoptee, and advocate whose work examines adoption as a lifelong experience shaped by narrative power, particularly through media and public storytelling.
The conversation draws on the Adoptee Consciousness Model, developed by adoptee scholars Branco, Kim, Newton, Cooper-Lewter, and O’Loughlin (2025). The model conceptualises adoptee awareness as a non-linear process, moving through recurring phases that include status quo, rupture, dissonance, expansiveness, and agency.
Annalisa discusses how these touchstones can be activated at different points across the life course, often in response to media portrayals, institutional encounters, relationships, or moments when dominant “happy ending” narratives no longer hold. The episode explores the pressure adoptees can feel to be “grateful,” the role of saviourism and moral panic in adoption storytelling, and how adoptees are frequently represented without complexity.
Annalisa also reflects on researching from within the adoptee community, including the emotional labour this entails and the need for boundaries when producing knowledge grounded in lived experience.
This episode invites listeners to move beyond simplified adoption stories and to recognise adoption as a lifelong condition shaped by narrative, power, and social expectation, requiring trauma-informed understanding and space for adoptees to speak without obligation to resolve their experience.
Guest
Annalisa Toccara-Jones is a PhD researcher, adoptee, and advocate whose work explores the lifelong legacies of adoption and the ways adoption is portrayed and understood through media and public narratives. Working through a trauma-informed lens, Annalisa’s research centres adoptee voices and examines how dominant “happy ending” framings can erase complexity, shape identity, and silence lived experience.
Episode Key Themes
- Adoption as a “happy ending” narrative versus adoptees’ lived realities
- Silence, shame, and the impact of being discouraged from speaking about adoption
- Media portrayals: saviourism, moral panic, and “either villain or victim” storytelling
- The expectation of gratitude, and what it obscures about safety and trauma
- Identity, belonging, class, and the specific realities of racialised/transracial experiences
- The emotional labour of researching within your own community and the need for boundaries
- How adoptees reclaim voice through social media and community connection
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