Adoption is frequently presented as an endpoint: a “happy ending,” a rescue, a solution. For many adoptees, the story does not end with placement. It continues across the life course, shaped by identity, belonging, nervous system responses, loss, silence, and social expectation.

In this episode of Trauma Informed Conversations (part of the Care-Experienced People mini-series), host Carrie Wilson speaks with Annalisa Toccara-Jones, a PhD researcher, adoptee, and advocate whose work examines adoption as a lifelong experience shaped by narrative power, particularly through media and public storytelling.

The conversation draws on the Adoptee Consciousness Model, developed by adoptee scholars Branco, Kim, Newton, Cooper-Lewter, and O’Loughlin (2025). The model conceptualises adoptee awareness as a non-linear process, moving through recurring phases that include status quo, rupture, dissonance, expansiveness, and agency.

Annalisa discusses how these touchstones can be activated at different points across the life course, often in response to media portrayals, institutional encounters, relationships, or moments when dominant “happy ending” narratives no longer hold. The episode explores the pressure adoptees can feel to be “grateful,” the role of saviourism and moral panic in adoption storytelling, and how adoptees are frequently represented without complexity.

Annalisa also reflects on researching from within the adoptee community, including the emotional labour this entails and the need for boundaries when producing knowledge grounded in lived experience.

This episode invites listeners to move beyond simplified adoption stories and to recognise adoption as a lifelong condition shaped by narrative, power, and social expectation, requiring trauma-informed understanding and space for adoptees to speak without obligation to resolve their experience.

Guest

Annalisa Toccara-Jones is a PhD researcher, adoptee, and advocate whose work explores the lifelong legacies of adoption and the ways adoption is portrayed and understood through media and public narratives. Working through a trauma-informed lens, Annalisa’s research centres adoptee voices and examines how dominant “happy ending” framings can erase complexity, shape identity, and silence lived experience.

Episode Key Themes

• Adoption as a “happy ending” narrative versus adoptees’ lived realities
• Silence, shame, and the impact of being discouraged from speaking about adoption
• Media portrayals: saviourism, moral panic, and “either villain or victim” storytelling
• The expectation of gratitude, and what it obscures about safety and trauma
• Identity, belonging, class, and the specific realities of racialised/transracial experiences
• The emotional labour of researching within your own community and the need for boundaries
• How adoptees reclaim voice through social media and community connection

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Sibling kinship care is far more common than most people realise, yet it remains one of the least understood forms of care. In this powerful episode of Trauma Informed Conversations, part of the Care-Experienced People mini-series, host Carrie Wilson sits down with Dr Lorna Stabler from Cardiff University to explore what really happens when a young person becomes the primary carer for their own brother or sister.

Drawing on lived experience and ground-breaking research, Lorna shares the hidden realities of sibling kinship care: stepping into parenting roles while still traumatised, navigating systems that don’t recognise sibling carers, and carrying emotional and financial pressures that professionals often overlook. Together, Carrie and Lorna unpack the myths, misunderstandings and invisible labour that shape these family stories, while highlighting the deep love, commitment and resilience that hold them together.

Listeners will gain insight into why sibling kinship care sits at the intersection of multiple forms of invisibility, how language and policy fail to reflect real family life, and what needs to change to build trauma-informed systems that actually support carers rather than overwhelm them. From shared-care models to financial recognition, from the importance of narrative work to the complexity of sibling bonds, this episode offers a compassionate and honest exploration of a rarely heard care experience.

Whether you work in social care, policy, education, or simply want to understand kinship care more deeply, this conversation invites you to rethink assumptions and recognise sibling carers as experts in connection, not exceptions to the rule.

Key topics include:

• The emotional and practical realities of becoming a sibling kinship carer
• Why existing systems expect carers to “do 100% or nothing”
• Trauma-informed approaches to supporting kinship families
• The power of narrative and lived experience in reshaping practice
• Financial barriers, identity, and the hidden costs of care
• How language like “placement” and “contact” distorts real family relationships

About our Guest

Dr Lorna Stabler is a researcher at the CASCADE Research Centre at Cardiff University, focusing on care experience, kinship care and family support. She grew up in and out of foster care and kinship care and later became a kinship foster carer for her younger brother. That lived experience runs through her work, including her PhD on sibling kinship care, which asks not whether kinship care is “good or bad” but how it really feels to live it.

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In this episode of Trauma Informed Conversations, Jessica Parker, Director at Trauma Informed Consultancy Services (TICS), speaks with Carrie Wilson, TICS Collaboration and Innovation Lead, following Carrie’s powerful appearance on BBC Breakfast discussing care-experienced people, accommodation, and the systemic issues that urgently need to change. Their conversation builds on the brilliant coverage of Terry Galloway’s work to create spaces where care-experienced young people can develop the key life skills our systems too often fail to provide.

Together, Jessica and Carrie reflect in more depth on the themes raised during the broadcast, exploring the emotional, practical and structural realities that sit behind public narratives. This discussion also connects closely to Carrie’s PhD research, which examines the lived experiences of care-experienced young people and the systemic conditions that shape their journeys.

Carrie offers an honest exploration of family privilege—the invisible safety nets and everyday advantages many young people inherit without ever naming them—and how the absence of those supports profoundly shapes the experiences and outcomes of care-experienced people. Drawing on Sieta’s research, they discuss how evidence exposes persistent structural inequalities and illustrates how current systems can retraumatise rather than support young people.

They examine the reality of forced independence, where care-experienced young people are expected to take on adult responsibilities prematurely, often while navigating extremely restrictive budgets that limit choice, dignity and developmental opportunity.

The conversation also includes a discussion about the importance of trauma-informed understanding and responses, with reference to the work of organisations such as Madlug. Jessica and Carrie reflect on how Madlug recognises the trauma created by the undignified and dehumanising use of bin bags to move children and young people and their belongings while in the care system, and how dignity-centred approaches are essential for systemic change.

Finally, they explore their shared passion for research, education and lived-experience-led practice, and how these commitments have shaped the development of the Researcher & Educator Suite—a growing collection of trauma-informed, evidence-driven learning tools designed to support practitioners, educators and leaders.

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In this episode of Trauma Informed Conversations, Carrie speaks with journalist, Churchill Fellow and TEDx speaker Sophia Alexandra Hall about what it means to tell stories with care-experienced people rather than about them.

Drawing on her own journey from care into journalism, Sophia explains the three roles the media often forces under-represented communities into: tragic victim, dangerous threat, or inspirational exception. She describes how these narrow narratives can dehumanise and retraumatise people, and how her experiences as both an interviewee and Deputy Digital Editor at The Big Issue inspired her to create a trauma-informed storytelling toolkit.

Carrie and Sophia explore how journalism, research, education and practice can shift towards safer and more collaborative storytelling that gives people greater control over their narratives. This episode forms part of our mini-series on trauma and healing in the care system, led by care-experienced voices.

In This Episode, We Explore

• How Sophia moved into journalism through campaigning against SI 445 and the importance of making complex information accessible.
• The impact of seeing limiting statistics about care leavers.
• The three restrictive media boxes: tragic victim, dangerous threat and inspirational exception.
• Highlights from Sophia’s Churchill Fellowship, including meeting care-experienced people in LA and learning from trauma specialists.
• The idea of the disempowered interviewee and how power and choice can quietly be removed.
• Practical trauma-informed approaches, including choosing when to share your story, and ways journalists and practitioners can work more collaboratively, such as commissioning lived-experience writing.
• A hopeful look at the online care-experienced community and how we can all support stories told in people’s own words.

About Our Guest

Sophia Alexandra Hall is a care-experienced journalist and Deputy Digital Editor at The Big Issue. She reviews papers for Sky News, studied at the University of Oxford, is a TEDx speaker and is a Churchill Fellow focused on trauma-informed storytelling. She works to challenge harmful media narratives and promote ethical, consent-led storytelling. She is online as @SophiasSocials.

Content Note

This episode discusses childhood trauma, care experience, media portrayals and retraumatisation. Please listen in a way that feels safe for you.

Learn More with TICS

This conversation reflects the work we do at Trauma Informed Consultancy Services, supporting organisations and communities to move from trauma-aware to trauma-responsive practice.

You may be interested in:

• Trauma-Informed Research with Care-Experienced People
• Trauma-Informed Record Keeping
• Bespoke consultancy to embed trauma-informed principles into strategy and participation

Find details at ticservicesltd.com or contact [email protected]

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What happens when research is designed and carried out with people it's about, and not just on them? Carrie Wilson is joined by Dr Nikki Luke from the Rees Centre, University of Oxford, to explore practical ways to blend admin data, mixed methods, and lived experience, without losing the human story.

We dig into examples of good co-production in research such as the Oxford research project led by Nikki measuring success as defined by care leavers, design choices that reduce harm, and how commissioners can fund inclusion well.

Listen in for concrete steps you can take this month to make your research more relational, inclusive, and trauma-informed.

What we cover

• Why trauma-informed and co-produced research reduces harm and increases impact.
• How to blend data, mixed methods, and lived experience without losing the human story.
• Practical design approaches — co-analysis, reflective supervision, consent as a process, and wellbeing budgets.
• Learning from major studies such as “Measuring Success for Care Leavers.”
• Building a healthy and ethical data culture through the co-produced collection and analysis. 

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About the Series

The Care-Experienced People Mini-Series is part of Trauma-Informed Conversations - a podcast created by Trauma-Informed Consultancy Services (TICS) to explore what it really means to build systems and relationships grounded in care, connection, and humanity.

Hosted by Carrie Wilson, this special series invites care-experienced people, researchers, and practitioners from around the world to lead open, relational conversations about trauma, healing, and change - asking what it looks like when we do it together.

Each episode brings lived experience and professional insight into dialogue, offering space for reflection, courage, and system learning.

Series Theme

Exploring trauma and healing both within the care system and the spaces that surround it - led by care-experienced voices, grounded in reflection, connection, and change.

Why It Matters

Care-experienced people have lived at the heart of the systems professionals are trying to make trauma-informed. Their insights, research, and leadership are not just valuable - they are essential to understanding what trauma-informed practice truly looks like. These conversations highlight the power of language, relationship, and collective healing - showing that change begins not with policy, but with how we connect, listen, and build together

Episode 1: The Trauma of the Care System – Healing Within Traumatised Institutions

In this opening episode, Carrie Wilson is joined by Dr Lisa Cherry and Ian Thomas to explore what it really means to do trauma-informed work when the system itself is traumatised.

Together they unpack how institutional harm becomes embedded in culture - through silence, language, and power - and the human cost of working and living inside systems that were never designed for healing.

This honest, hopeful conversation invites listeners to reflect on what happens when trauma in the system goes unnamed, how professionals can care for themselves and others without becoming numb, and what it might look like to build care rooted in belonging, authenticity, and compassion.

Guests

Dr Lisa Cherry
Founder of Trauma-Informed Consultancy Services (TICS), author, researcher, and international speaker specialising in trauma, resilience, and recovery. Having stepped down as Director in July 2025, Lisa continues to influence practice and system-level change through writing, research, and training focused on relational leadership and cultures of safety.

Ian Thomas
A social-work leader and practitioner-scholar completing a PhD on healing and trauma. Ian brings decades of frontline and leadership experience across children’s services and the justice system, exploring how authentic, relational approaches can transform traumatised systems from within.

Host
Carrie Wilson – Collaboration & Innovation Lead at TICS, and well as a care-experienced researcher and practitioner whose work focuses on building trauma-informed systems rooted in care, connection, and humanity. Carrie’s work sits where practice, research, and lived experience meet, creating spaces for honest reflection on how we understand trauma and build systems that can truly heal.

Key Themes

• What “trauma-informed” means when the system itself is traumatised
• Institutional trauma: silence, control, and the erosion of safety
• The impact on professionals and those receiving care
• Authenticity, vulnerability, and the power of relational leadership
• Re-imagining care systems built on belonging rather than compliance

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In this opening episode, Jessica Parker — Director of Trauma Informed Consultancy Services (TICS) is joined by her colleague Carrie Wilson to share the story behind the new podcast and the TICS model of practice.

Following the energy and emotion of the recent TICS Conference, delegates told us they wanted more: more time to pause, to process, and to stay connected. Trauma Informed Conversations was created as a space to do exactly that.

Jessica and Carrie reflect on what makes the TICS model unique — its roots in compassion, connection, and sustainable systems change — and why ongoing reflection is vital to truly embody trauma-informed practice. Together they explore how this podcast will continue the dialogue that began at the conference, offering an honest, human space for learning that feels calm, grounded, and real.

If you’ve ever left training or an event thinking, “I need time to keep thinking about this,” this episode is for you. Welcome to the conversation.

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