Adoption & Attachment Therapy

Understanding the Adoption Constellation

Adoption is a lifelong relational experience, not a singular past event. Because relinquishment is a profound attachment rupture often occurring before a child has the language to process it, the impact is frequently pre-verbal and stored in the nervous system.

This is exactly why standard talk therapy often falls short. Insight alone cannot regulate the nervous system or heal early attachment wounds. To move beyond simply talking about the past, I utilize experiential therapy to help adult adoptees and families safely process what is held in the body.

For Adult Adoptees

For many adult adoptees, standard talk therapy can feel ineffective or invalidating. You may have spent a lifetime intellectualizing your experience, managing the comfort of your adoptive parents, or pushing down ambiguous grief, only to find that your nervous system is still stuck in a state of high alert.

In this space, your experience will not be minimized, pathologized, or reframed as a "gift." We integrate somatic and trauma-focused modalities, including EMDR Therapy, to target the root of the distress. Together, we can navigate:

  • The "Fog": Processing the shift in perspective as you unpack the realities of your adoption story.

  • Identity and Belonging: Exploring who you are outside of the expectations of your adoptive or biological families.

  • Ambiguous Grief: Holding space for the profound losses of genetic mirroring, medical history, and original family.

  • Relational Anxiety: Addressing the fear of abandonment and updating the core, long-standing scripts that often accompany relinquishment trauma.

For Children & Adoptive Families

I work collaboratively with adoptive families to decode trauma-driven behaviors, foster secure attachment, and build lasting, felt safety in the home. Utilizing the Attachment, Regulation, and Competency Framework (ARC), Theraplay, and Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI), we focus on:

  • Nervous System Regulation: Helping children build affect tolerance and process complex emotions safely through developmentally attuned, play-based methods.

  • Parent Coaching: Equipping parents with connection-based tools to respond to dysregulation and strengthen the parent-child bond.

  • Processing Early Trauma: Providing a safe, nonverbal space for children to externalize internal conflicts when words are not enough.