The Adoptee Lifespan Framework
A theoretical framework for understanding adult adoptee experience.
Developed by Renée M. Murphy, with collaborators Angela Christianson and Dr. Jamie Bower.
Antioch University New England.
About the Framework
Most frameworks treat adoption as an event, something that happened to a person that they then have to process or recover from. The Adoptee Lifespan Framework starts somewhere different. It proposes that adoption is not primarily a disruption to normal development. It is the developmental context itself. The conditions of adoption, including genealogical discontinuity, information closure, the relational environment of the adoptive family, and the circumstances of relinquishment, are the conditions within which identity forms, from the beginning.
This distinction matters because it changes what we are looking at. Adoptees are not people who were developing typically until adoption intervened. They are people whose identity, relational patterns, and self-understanding formed within adoption-structured conditions. The questions that organize identity for adoptees, questions like who do I look like, where did I come from, do I truly belong here, are not symptoms of disruption. They are the questions identity organized itself around during development.
Framework Architecture
The Adoptee Lifespan Framework is organized across three layers. The primary layer describes the adoption conditions that shaped the person from the beginning, the conditions within which identity formed. The middle layer describes the settled arrangement that adoptees establish with those conditions over time, a provisional equilibrium in which adoption is present but not acute. The engaged layer comprises the operational components through which meaning-making becomes active: three interdependent dimensions of identity, belonging, and narrative, a foundational core of loss, activation events, and response pathways.
The Engaged Layer
The framework describes how adoptees make meaning of adoption across adulthood through three interdependent dimensions: identity, connection and belonging, and narrative. At the center of all three is loss. Not as a universal psychological wound, but as a structural feature of adoption conditions. The absence is built in. What varies is what relationship each adoptee develops with that loss across a lifetime.
Meaning-making becomes active when activation events disrupt what the Adoptee Lifespan Framework calls the settled arrangement, the provisional equilibrium most adoptees reach where adoption is present but not acute. Activation events include symbolic markers like birthdays and adoption anniversaries, life transitions like becoming a parent, relational events like reunion or DNA discovery, and encounters that raise consciousness about adoption itself.
When activation occurs, the framework identifies four possible response pathways: cyclical integration, where the adoptee moves through the dimensions with increasing depth and flexibility; arrested processing, where the cycle stalls within one dimension; avoidance or suppression, where the activation is redirected before it fully engages; and narrative collapse, where what surfaces overwhelms the existing story entirely.
The Adoptee Lifespan Framework is a framework for understanding how adoption-related meaning-making unfolds across a life. Not how it should unfold, but how it does, in all its variation.