Generations of secrecy, shame, negative stereotypes, and noxious stigmas have inflicted considerable damage on adoption itself and, more important, on too many of the people whose lives are touched, altered, or shaped by this essential, wondrous institution.  Our society created and still reinforces the undermining notion that adoption, because it most often is a second choice, must therefore be a lesser way of forming a family, even though we all know that second choice isn’t necessarily second best in virtually any other aspect of life.   We have frequently turned birth parents into lesser beings (“What kind of woman would give up her own flesh and blood?”); transformed adoptive parents into pitiable creatures (“I’m sorry you couldn’t have any real children.”); and, worst of all, branded innocent children as bastards and as illegitimate, while using the very words that describe them as an insult (“You’re adopted!”).  Add to this artificially unhealthy climate the very real issues of separation, loss, compromised identity formation, and other concerns that truly are parts of adoption, and it becomes easy to understand why members of the “triad” -particularly adopted people of all ages, but also adoptive and birth parents-seem to be overrepresented in clinical care.