When Identity Becomes Visible: A Story of Recovery, Leadership, and Performance

Written by Zoë Hansen-DiBello with insights from Greg Antonelli

“I was performing at 60%, and no one knew.”

Greg said this looking back on years when something important about himself remained unnamed, and that absence quietly cost him.

What finally surfaced in therapy wasn’t surprising in hindsight: Greg’s adoption wasn’t a footnote in his story. It was the foundation. And like many adoptees, he had been carrying that weight for decades without ever having language for it.

This is not an unusual story. According to the National Institutes of Health, adoptees face twice the risk of substance use disorders and are significantly overrepresented across mental health services. The common adoption narrative includes gratitude, blank slates, fresh starts and often obscures something true: every adoption begins with a loss. That loss registers in the body before there are words for it. Without space to name it, it finds other ways out.

For Greg, years of unexamined grief translated into numbing behaviors that dampened his presence at work and in life. When he finally did the deeper work, things began to shift. Within a year of getting sober, he was promoted into a leadership role. Today he leads an office that ranks among the top five performing offices nationally at Insperity, a company that helps businesses optimize their people and performance.

He works in a field built around unlocking human potential. It turned out the most important unlock was his own.

What companies support — and what they miss

Many organizations have begun investing in adoption support, such as financial assistance, parental leave, flexible scheduling. These are meaningful signals. But adoption support, as most companies have designed it, is oriented around a transaction: the moment a child joins a family.

What it rarely accounts for is everything that comes after.

For adoptive parents, the journey evolves through attachment challenges, identity conversations, and the particular kind of parenting adoption requires at every stage. For birth parents, grief doesn’t resolve on a timeline. For adoptees, the ripple effect can span a lifetime. According to the Donaldson Adoption Institute, six in ten people have a direct connection to adoption. That means the majority of any workforce carries some version of this story. Most of them are carrying it quietly.

The question for employers isn’t just ‘do we support adoption?’ It’s ‘do we support what adoption actually is?’ — not a single event, but a lifelong experience shared across an entire constellation of people?

What organizations don’t see

Greg’s story points to something hiding in plain sight: employees carry unexamined identity experiences — adoption, loss, displacement, belonging — that quietly shape how they work. And yet adoption has almost no presence in workplace culture. No ERGs. No language for it. No recognition that the questions it raises stay with employees when they walk through the office door.

“Once I understood that part of myself, everything started to shift — not just in my personal life, but in how I showed up at work.” — Greg

That shift is concrete. He leads differently now. Steadier in hard conversations, more attuned to what might sit underneath a performance problem. His team feels it. His numbers reflect it. And yet the work of understanding identity continues, because it’s a lifelong journey. We are always unfolding.

The case for going deeper

Organizations invest heavily in mental health benefits, DEI programs, and engagement initiatives. Most of this work targets symptoms. Less of it reaches the underlying experiences driving those symptoms, such as identity, belonging, grief, and the long residue of early loss.

This is the work that Adoptee Identity focuses on: helping individuals explore and integrate their adoption stories, and helping organizations create conditions where that kind of self-understanding is supported rather than overlooked. Identity and performance are not separate tracks. When people understand themselves more fully, they show up more fully. That has measurable consequences for the teams around them.

What’s already there

“I think there are a lot of people out there who don’t realize how much their story is impacting them. I was one of them.” — Greg

Most high-performing organizations have people like Greg — capable, committed professionals carrying something unexamined. Something that, if named and understood, could unlock a different level of contribution entirely.

Those in HR, benefits, and culture should consider how the adoption community is seen, not just at placement, but across a lifetime. The expertise to help shape that conversation is likely already in the room.

That’s the work happening at Adoptee Identity.

If you’d like to learn more, personally or professionally, send us an email: info@adoptee-identity.com