Adult Adoptee Counseling
Adoption-Competent Therapy for Adult Adoptees
Have you spent years telling yourself adoption “shouldn’t” affect you—yet you keep running into the same feelings and patterns? Maybe you carry a low-grade grief you can’t name. Maybe you feel too much (or nothing at all). Maybe relationships are hard in ways that feel bigger than the present moment. Or maybe you’ve been told—directly or indirectly—that you should feel grateful, and that message has made it harder to trust your own emotional reality.
Adoption impacts adoptees throughout the lifespan. In adoption-competent therapy, we make space for the complexity: love and loss, loyalty and anger, curiosity and fear, attachment and autonomy—without forcing a “happy adoption story” or minimizing what you’ve lived through.
Or maybe you’re dealing with something specific right now.
Adoption-competent therapy can be especially helpful if you’re navigating:
A birth family search, contact, reunion, or the aftermath of reunion
Late discovery adoption (finding out later in life)
Sealed records, missing history, or identity confusion
Family dynamics with adoptive parents, siblings, or extended family
Feelings of abandonment, grief, anger, shame, or “I don’t know what I feel”
Relationship patterns that repeat (people-pleasing, hyper-independence, fear of rejection, difficulty trusting)
Complex trauma responses that don’t feel tied to a single event
Our cultural story about adoption is often incomplete
Many adoptees are raised inside a dominant narrative: adoption is “good,” therefore your feelings should be good; you were “chosen,” therefore you should feel grateful; you were “saved,” therefore you should be fine.
But adoptees often carry experiences that don’t fit that script—loss, separation, identity fragmentation, loyalty binds, and the pressure to protect others from discomfort by staying quiet. Adoption-competent therapy helps you reclaim permission to be honest.
Adoption-competent therapy helps you integrate your story—without collapsing it
Therapy isn’t about blaming your adoptive family or vilifying anyone. It’s about understanding your nervous system, attachment patterns, relationships, and sense of self in the context of adoption—and giving you tools to live with more agency and less shame.
In our work together, you can expect:
A trauma-informed, adoptee-centered space that welcomes complexity
Help naming what you feel (and what you’ve never had language for)
Support working with grief, anger, loyalty conflict, and identity questions
Practical tools for boundaries, relationships, and emotional regulation
A pace that respects how tender adoption material can be
You might still be wondering…
“Is therapy really about adoption if my current issue is anxiety, depression, or relationships?”
Often, yes—because adoption can shape attachment patterns, nervous system responses, self-worth, and how safe it feels to need other people. An adoption-competent therapist helps you connect the dots without oversimplifying.
“I’m afraid I’ll sound ungrateful.”
That fear is common—and it’s part of what therapy gently untangles. You can appreciate parts of your story and still grieve what you lost.
“Do you work with transracial, transcultural, LGBTQ+ adoptees?
Yes. Your identities matter here, and we make room for the ways race, culture, sexuality, gender, class, and religion shape adoptee experience.
“Will you push me to search or reunite?”
No. Therapy supports your choices—whether you’re searching, not searching, in contact, no contact, or still deciding.
Get started
If you’re ready for adoptee-centered, adoption-competent therapy, we’re here.
We offer sessions in person in our Kentlands, Gaithersburg office and virtually via telehealth in multiple states.
Schedule a free consult here.
Prefer to start with education and reading pathways? Visit the Adoptee Reading Room.
If Joanne isn’t taking new clients, here are other resources: