Therapy for Adoptees
You were told you were chosen. You were told you were loved. And underneath all of that — perhaps for as long as you can remember — something else has been quietly present. A question. A loss. A shape you’ve never quite been able to name.
Adoption is one of the most complex human experiences there is. It begins with a loss — the loss of the first family, the first body, the first belonging — and it asks the person who carries that loss to do something extraordinarily difficult: to grieve something they may have no conscious memory of, in a culture that often doesn’t recognize it as grief at all.
If you were adopted as an infant — domestically or internationally — you may have been told that you were too young to remember. That there was nothing to grieve. That you should feel lucky, grateful, whole. And you may have spent years wondering why, despite everything, something still feels missing. Why belonging feels elusive. Why questions of identity run deeper than they seem to for other people.
The answer is not that something is wrong with you. It’s that the body remembers what the mind was never old enough to hold. Early loss — including the loss of the birth mother’s voice, scent, and presence in the first hours, days, and weeks of life — is stored as implicit memory. It doesn’t arrive as a recollection. It arrives as a feeling of absence, a particular shape of longing, a nervous system that has always been braced for loss even when nothing is wrong.
That is real. It matters. And it deserves to be taken seriously.
What Adoptees Often Carry
The themes that bring adult adoptees to therapy are as individual as the people who carry them. But certain experiences arise with enough consistency to name.
There is the question of identity — who am I, really, when the story of my origins is incomplete or absent? For internationally adopted women in particular, this question can carry the additional complexity of racial and cultural identity, of belonging to a family that does not share your heritage, of having been raised in a culture that is not the one you were born into.
There is the weight of gratitude — the pressure to feel lucky, to be the grateful adoptee, to not want what you’re not supposed to want. Many adoptees carry a grief they have never felt entitled to feel, because the narrative around their adoption was one of rescue and blessing. That suppressed grief doesn’t disappear. It goes underground, and it shapes the way a person moves through the world.
There is the primal wound — the term coined by Nancy Verrier for the profound loss of the birth mother that is registered in the body even when it is not remembered by the mind. This loss can show up as a pervasive sense of not quite belonging, a hypervigilance in attachment, a fear of abandonment that seems disproportionate to present circumstances but makes complete sense in light of the earliest one.
And there is the intergenerational dimension — the way adoption trauma doesn’t end with the adoptee, but moves through families across generations, shaping attachment patterns and emotional landscapes in ways that are rarely recognized for what they are.
My Connection To This Work
I come to this work from more than one direction. I am a second generation adoptee — which means I understand adoption's intergenerational reach not only clinically, but from growing up alongside a parent's unprocessed loss. I know how that transmission moves through a family: not through words or stories, but through attachment, through atmosphere, through grief that was never given permission to be named.
My clinical training in adoption-competent therapy includes an internship at Boston Post Adoption Resources, where I worked directly with adoptees and their families and developed a practice grounded in adoption-specific approaches. When you bring this into the room, I won't be learning about it for the first time.
What Our Work Together Looks Like
Therapy with adoptees is depth-oriented and relational — which means we move slowly, with care, and in a relationship that is itself part of the healing. Many of the wounds adoption leaves are attachment wounds, and they heal through consistent, safe, attuned relationship. That’s not incidental to this work. It’s central to it.
We’ll work with IFS to get curious about the parts that have been protecting the grief, managing the questions of identity, performing the gratitude. Somatic work allows us to attend to what the body has been carrying — the implicit memory of early loss that lives below the level of conscious recollection. And expressive arts can open a different kind of door into experiences that were never encoded in language to begin with.
This is not work that rushes toward answers. Identity is not something to be resolved in a neat conclusion. What becomes possible, over time, is a different relationship with the questions themselves — one where they feel less like wounds and more like threads worth following. A deepening trust in your own experience, your own sense of self, your own inner north — however complex and layered that north may be.
Frequently Asked Questions about Therapy for Adoptees
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Yes. This is perhaps the most important thing to understand about early adoption — and one of the most commonly misunderstood. Trauma doesn’t require conscious memory. The loss of the birth mother is experienced by the infant nervous system as a profound rupture, regardless of how young the child is at the time of adoption. This is stored as implicit memory — felt in the body, present in attachment patterns, alive in the nervous system — even when there is no conscious recollection of it. The fact that you don’t remember it does not mean it didn’t happen, or that your body doesn’t know.
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Yes. Completely and without qualification. The goodness of your adoptive family does not cancel the loss of your first one. These two things can be entirely true at the same time — you can be genuinely grateful for the family you were raised in and genuinely grieving the one you were separated from. The pressure to choose between those two truths, or to let one cancel the other, is one of the most painful things adoptees carry. In this work, there is room for all of it.
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Adoption trauma doesn’t only affect the adoptee — it moves through families. The adoptee who becomes a parent brings their attachment wounds, their grief, their questions of identity into the family system they create. Children raised by adoptees may grow up in the emotional atmosphere of an unprocessed loss, without ever knowing that’s what it is. As a second generation adoptee myself, I understand this not only clinically but from the inside. If you are an adoptee, or were raised by one, this work may be relevant to you.
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I work with both domestically and internationally adopted adults, and I hold the particular complexity of international adoption with care — the questions of racial and cultural identity, of transracial family dynamics, of belonging to a heritage that was not passed down to you. I approach this work with humility, and I’m always learning. If you’d like to talk about whether my understanding of your specific experience is a good fit, the consultation call is the right place for that conversation.
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Yes. I offer online therapy to adult adoptees across Washington State, Kansas, and Missouri via a secure, HIPAA-compliant video platform. I also welcome adult children of adoptees who are navigating the intergenerational effects of adoption in their own lives and relationships.
Begin Therapy for Adoptees
If something here has named something you’ve carried quietly for a long time — something that has been hard to bring into a room because you weren’t sure it would be understood — I’d be glad to hear from you. I offer a free 20-minute consultation, a quiet and unhurried conversation about what you’re navigating and whether working together feels right.
Your loss was real. Your grief is valid. And you have never needed to earn the right to feel it.
