Object arrangement reverses in Adobe Acrobat

Hello. I've encountered a dilemma that no amount of Googling has solved. I have arranged an object in Adobe Illustrator (text) so that it has a shadow behind the original text. When I save these two layers (one behind the other, much like the "drop shadow" fx) on an artboard as an ai file, then open it in Adobe Acrobat, it originally looks fine (in a separate file with only those words); however, when I copy and past that textbox into my graphic file it reverses the order of the objects (the text that was in front, is now at the back). It does this every time, regardless of whether I group the objects or not, and incidentally, it also does this to text using the "drop shadow" function.

The image in the Acrobat file I'm placing it on is a single image. I can move the imported text either behind or in front of it, but I can't change the order of the objects moved into Acrobat. Also, if I use the edit function to alter the imported text, it deletes only one of the layers of text.

Anyone have any ideas what's going on here?