From Brokenness to Boldness: How Sharing My Story and Testimony Changed Everything

May 1, 2025

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Adoption is often framed as a beautiful new beginning, but for many adoptees, the journey includes unseen wounds. In this blog post, I share my adoptee healing journey—from hidden trauma and identity struggles to finding hope, healing, and faith. If you’ve ever wondered how to begin processing adoption trauma or how sharing your adoptee story can bring healing, you’re not alone.

“My biggest fear wasn’t that people weren’t going to like what I had to share, but that no one would care.”

Contradiction was a constant feature of my childhood. What the outer world saw and what I experienced on the inside never seemed to match, and I couldn’t understand why. So I kept it to myself, feeling like something must be wrong with me. But I did a good job telling myself and others that I was fine. I think I convinced them. I know I convinced myself. But here’s the thing with trauma, loss, and grief: no matter how much you plaster on a smile and say you’re fine, sooner or later those experiences or emotions need to be worked through. Try as you might to push them down, one way or another, they will come to the surface.

For me, that happened at age 32. I started falling apart from the inside. I was confused, felt lost, and didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t recognize myself and knew I had to figure out what was going on. If not for myself, then for the people I loved the most—the ones most often caught in the crossfire of my anger outbursts, anxiety attacks, and fight-or-flight responses.

The Breaking Point

I was married with two kids, living in a good neighborhood, sending them to school and daycare while my husband ran his business. I stayed home trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Life looked good from the outside. But things were starting to boil up from underneath.

Seemingly out of nowhere, I started having anger outbursts. Not only was this a new kind of (dark and heavy) anger, but I couldn’t control it at the moment. It would turn me into someone I didn’t recognize. I had brain fog that caused me to forget what I had done minutes before. I felt under attack when asked to explain. I would misinterpret people’s (my husband’s) tone and lash out in fight-or-flight mode (more fight than flight in this case).

I remember one day in particular—I felt so restless, my skin was crawling. I wanted to either punch something or get in the car, turn the music up as loud as it would go, and scream. That was the first time I experienced anxiety. I didn’t know it at the time, and I didn’t want to accept it. I didn’t see it as a weakness in others, but for myself it felt like admitting defeat.

Eventually, I had to be honest with myself. I self-diagnosed with PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder) and decided to spend time self-reflecting to get to the bottom of what was really going on.

The Hidden Cost of Silence

That inward journey led me back to my childhood and the relationships within my family. Ultimately, it led me to my adoption. I had never had any interest in exploring that. I would have told you, “I’m fine, adoption hasn’t affected me at all. In fact, I’m an example of a success story of adoption.”

I said this in contrast to my adopted brother, who was struggling more openly with things like belonging, identity, and self-worth. I, on the other hand, had hidden my own need for attention, support, and guidance. Because remember, I was fine. Everything was fine. Until one day it wasn’t.

See, when we don’t allow ourselves to experience it all, how can we possibly heal from any of it?

One of the things that caused the lid of Pandora’s box to fly open for me was connecting with fellow adoptees. I didn’t even know that was a thing until I searched on Facebook and found a group of hundreds of adoptees from Colombia, just like me. For the first time, I heard about others struggling with similar things. For the first time, I didn’t feel alone. And for the first time, I learned about the dark side of adoption.

From there, I went down a rabbit hole of reflection, unpacking and processing my own experience, sitting with the new information, analyzing the stories I heard, and slowly picking apart my own story. I was becoming undone. The person who had said she was fine all those years was now standing face to face with a whole new reality. It felt like I was being gutted out from the inside, and what was left was a shell I didn’t know how to fill.

The Power of Connection

During this time, I started writing. And I decided to share. I was scared. My biggest fear wasn’t that people wouldn’t like what I had to share, but that no one would care. That I would write a blog post and no one would read it. That I would post something on social media, and no one would notice.

But what fueled me was the idea that if what I shared could help even just one fellow adoptee not feel alone—like I had felt alone my whole life—then it would be worth pushing through the fear.

So I started a blog. I wrote my first post. I created a social media account. I shared my first post. And something unexpected happened. Not only did people read it, not only did people notice—people reached out. They started following. They even thanked me.

My sharing became a way for me to process my own experience while helping others find words and voice for theirs. A beautiful mutual relationship formed, where I gave others validation, and they gave me support. All because I was willing to share my story.

God Met Me on the Kitchen Floor

But even though I loved what was happening, I came to a point where I had to be honest with myself again. I had uncovered a lot. I had gained a lot of understanding. I had even helped a lot of people. But I still wasn’t healing the way I wanted to—the way my loved ones deserved for me to. The way I deserved to. The way God would want me to.

So I stepped back. I sought out people to learn from. Conversations that were close enough to my experience, without perpetuating the bubble I had been in. I broadened my horizons, and sure enough, healing started happening. And that healing made room for something new.

And then came the big shocker.

After two years of working through what felt like every bit and piece of my life, myself, and my story, I felt a new presence. They say God doesn’t always meet you in church. That became true for me. He met me one night, on the kitchen floor, as I sat there leaning on the cabinet, having every tear there was in my body, and wondering who I was and feeling like I would never be able to get up from the floor, let alone be able to build myself back up.

The best way I can describe it is that I felt like I was at the bottom of a deep well with no rope to climb back up. And that’s where God met me. Being an atheist at the time, I didn’t understand it at the time, but something told me to hold on, to not give up, and to keep hope. And I did.

Even though my life felt like it was in ruins, even though I was on autopilot, even though I had so much more work and healing to go through, this was the moment things started to turn. God had reached out and let me know, through a tiny thought, that things would be okay.

Since then, He has worked in my heart and blessed me with deeper understanding and a wider perspective.

Rooted in Christ, Rebuilt in Truth

It took time to understand that God had been with me that night—that in fact, He had been with me all along. No matter what had happened or been done to me, God was able to infuse purpose into it and turn it into something that could be used for a greater good.

I didn’t need to deny the struggle, the hurt, or the pain. I needed to let God in so He could work through it.

Knowing I have a perfect Father who loves me unconditionally and will never leave me brought a freedom I’d never known. The resentment I had felt toward my adoptive parents turned into grace. The anger I had felt for their shortcomings turned into forgiveness. And, I felt a peace I had never felt before.

(I still have clear and strong boundaries that came from the healing work I did, but my heart is free of heaviness toward them.)

Today, I am a new person. Not only because I have been saved and baptized, but because I now know my identity:

I am a child of God.

You Matter, Too

If you take nothing else from reading my story, please take this:

Your story matters.

It matters to you.

It matters to others.

I know how painful it can be to process it all, and how terrifying it can be to share it. But one of the most important things I’ve learned through all of this is that your story holds the power to help someone else as much as it holds the power to help you.

I’m happy to help you figure out what your story is. How to share it. And with whom. Faith-based or not, your story holds power to help someone else feel less alone.

For me, what started as sharing my story has turned into sharing my testimony.

Stay Connected

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Courage, Love & Blessings, Always!

Amanda Medina
Founder, This Adoptee Life™

Resources That Helped Me on My Healing Journey

If you’re beginning your own journey of healing, faith, or reflection, here are a few resources that encouraged me along the way:

The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Besser Van der Kolk

Amanda Medina

I was adopted from Medellin, Colombia to Sweden in 1985. I was about a year and a half when I started my life as an adoptee, and it would take 32 years until I was ready to face what that means, what that has always meant, and what that will always mean.