Identity
Counselling for adult adoptees, donor-conceived individuals, and those who grew up across cultures – in Hong Kong and online across Southeast Asia and Australia/NZ.
Identity counselling supports adults and adolescents whose sense of self was shaped early – by adoption, donor conception, or growing up across cultures, countries, or family structures – and it's offered here by an adult adoptee and adult third culture kid (ATCK). I hold a Master of Counselling and an ICF Associate Certified Coach (ACC) credential, and I work with clients in person in Hong Kong and online across Southeast Asia and Australia/New Zealand.
If you're an adoptee
Some people arrive at questions of belonging in midlife. For adoptees, those questions were often there from the beginning – even if it took years to have language for them. Who am I really, underneath the family I was raised in? Where do I come from? What parts of me are nature, and what parts are nurture? These aren't signs that something is wrong with you or with your adoption. They're normal, well-documented parts of adoptee identity – and you're allowed to keep asking them even if your childhood was happy.
Adoptees can be, and most are, glad to be adopted – and still carry real, unresolved identity questions at the same time. One doesn't cancel out the other. Researchers Sharon Kaplan Roszia and Deborah Silverstein, who developed one of the most widely used frameworks in adoption-competent counselling, describe seven core issues that tend to run through the adoptee experience: loss, rejection, shame and guilt, grief, identity, intimacy, and mastery/control. Identity is named as one of the seven because it's so common – not because it means something has gone wrong.
It's also common for adoptees to notice patterns in relationships – a wariness around trust, a fear of abandonment, or a pull toward either over-independence or over-attachment – that trace back to that early experience of separation from a birth family. Naming this isn't about pathologising it; it's about understanding where a pattern came from so you have more choice about it going forward. And if you feel disconnected from your adoptive family despite genuine love on both sides, that's a normal and survivable tension too, not a private failure.
I understand a good deal of this from the inside. I'm an adult adoptee, raised in Hong Kong's international community, and I have personal experience with roots tracing – so if that's part of what you're navigating,
it's familiar territory to me.
If you're donor-conceived
Donor conception raises a related but distinct set of questions – about genetic identity, medical or family health history you may not have access to, half-siblings you may or may not know about, and a story about where you come from that can feel incomplete or different from the one people around you assume you have. How donor-conceived people feel about this varies widely – from curious, to unaffected, to unsettled – and there's no single "right" way to feel about your own origin story. This work makes room for whatever that is for you, without needing you to resolve it into one tidy feeling.
If you're working through the practical side of this – whether you may be donor-conceived and how to find out, or what rights you have to information about a donor or half-siblings — see the Common Questions below; those are logistics worth answering rather than folding into the emotional work.
If you grew up across cultures
Maybe "where are you from" has never had a short answer for you. Maybe you feel most at home in a place that isn't the one on your passport, or you've moved enough times that no single country, school, or friend group ever became the fixed backdrop everyone else seems to have. This is common in international, expat, and "third culture kid" communities – a term coined by sociologist Ruth Hill Useem in the 1950s to describe children who spend a significant part of their developmental years outside their parents' home culture. If you've come across the phrase "third culture kid syndrome" in your own searching, it's worth naming that once here – but I'd rather work with you from a normalising frame than a clinical one, so I'll use it once and then leave it behind.
A more useful concept, and one with research behind it, is reverse culture shock: the disorientation that can come from returning "home" and finding it feels just as foreign – sometimes more foreign – than the places you left. Researchers John and Jeanne Gullahorn described this in 1963 as a W-curve of cultural adjustment, building on Sverre Lysgaard's earlier U-curve model of adapting to a new culture – the idea being that re-entry can be its own, separate adjustment, not simply the reverse of arriving somewhere new. If you've ever felt foreign in your own passport country, that framework may explain more than it might seem to at first.
Family plays a role in this too – parents and family culture shape identity development from early childhood, and growing up in a household whose culture doesn't match the culture immediately outside your door adds a layer most identity-development research doesn't fully account for. None of this means something has gone wrong with your sense of self. It means your sense of self had more material to work with than most models assume, and it's reasonable to want support making sense of it.
I bring my own experience of growing up in Hong Kong's international expat community, then living and working across Hong Kong, Australia, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and China, to this part of the work – alongside over 15 years in international education, most of it inside these communities.
How I work
Sessions follow the same counselling-led approach described on the About page – paying particular attention, on this page's topics, to the stories about family, origin, and belonging you may have carried for so long they stopped feeling like stories at all.
Session details, confidentiality, and reach
Sessions run in person in Hong Kong and online for clients across Southeast Asia and Australia/New Zealand. For adolescent clients, online sessions are subject to a conversation with parents about time zones and appropriate setup. See the FAQs page for how confidentiality with minors is handled, the Fees page for session details, or book a session directly.
Common questions
Do you have personal experience with adoption, or is this just a specialty area?
Personal experience – I'm an adult adoptee, raised in Hong Kong's international community, and I've done my own roots-tracing work.
I'm donor-conceived, not adopted – is this still relevant to me?
Yes. Adoption and donor conception raise related but distinct questions about origin and identity, and both are within scope here.
I think I may be donor-conceived – how do I find out?
This usually starts with a direct conversation with family, a review of any medical or fertility records you can access, or a consumer DNA test, depending on what's available to you. This is worth talking through in a session if you're not sure where to start.
Do I have a right to information about my donor or my half-siblings?
This depends heavily on the jurisdiction where the donation took place and the clinic's own policies at the time – there's no single global answer. I can help you think through what you know and where to look, though for anything involving formal records, you may also need to speak with the relevant clinic or a legal adviser in that jurisdiction.
How long does it take to get over reverse culture shock?
It varies a lot from person to person, and depends on things like how long you were away and how different "home" feels on return – anywhere from a few weeks to several months is common. If it's been longer than that and it's still disrupting your day-to-day life, that's worth exploring directly in a session rather than waiting for it to resolve on its own.
What are some common challenges third culture kids face?
Difficulty answering "where are you from," a sense of not fully belonging in any one culture, reverse culture shock when returning to a "home" country, and relationship or attachment patterns shaped by a mobile upbringing all come up often. These are normal responses to a genuinely complex upbringing, not a sign that anything went wrong.
Do you work with clients outside Hong Kong?
Yes – sessions run online for clients across Southeast Asia and Australia/New Zealand.