ADOPTION (WORKING WITH MICHELLE)

Like you, I was adopted.

Each adoption experience is unique.  You may have positive feelings about your adoption story.  You may have negative feelings about your adoption story. Or you may have both.  What is the same for each adoptee, however, is the primal wound that happens at the moment a child experiences separation from a biological mother and her heartbeat.  Whether we can remember the experience of separation, or the experience of joining with the adoptive family, it happened to us.

Adoptees often feel a part of and at the same time, a part from (different than) their adoptive families.  I have the personal experience of being adopted, and am passionate about working with others who have been adopted, or have adopted a child.  Adopted individuals experience relationships and attachment differently.  They live with ambiguous loss.  They often feel something related to their safety with others, based on an event they can't remember, and it plays out in their current relationships.  Parents of an adopted child often experience anxiety, hope, and grief as well.  They may feel anxious about attaching when they bring the child they love home, or hope about the family they are creating with their adopted child, and grief when difficulties in attachment arise no matter how much they try to provide for their adopted child.    

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I am compassionately invested and knowledgeable in working with others, who like me, have experienced foster care or adoption.  I also work with adopted parents to better understand how adoption events can impact their child's behaviors and close relationships.