Megan Pleva

When parents understand this, the question shifts. Instead of asking why a child keeps feeling unwell, they begin to ask what the body has learned to expect. For many families, that shift changes everything. It replaces frustration with curiosity, and urgency with patience. The body is not broken. It's doing exactly what it learned to do.

Intergenerational trauma is often spoken about as something emotional or symbolic, as though it's carried through stories, attitudes, or family dynamics alone. In reality, trauma travels far more quietly and far more deeply than that. It moves through the body, through stress-response systems, and through patterns of connection formed before language, memory, or conscious thought.

Today we are sharing a fictional first-person story written from the perspective of an adopted person. While the details are imagined, the experiences it reflects are drawn from themes that many adoptees recognise and describe in their own words.