Counseling Center for the Adoption Family

What is Adoption Coaching?

The birth of a family through adoption is a creative and constructive process, healthy in nature and life enhancing in purpose. Though different in origination, the adoption family, like all families, represents mankind's greatest achievement. Unique to the family created by adoption are increased relationship complexities and emotional vulnerabilities which makes the universal challenge for health and success more daunting. Specifically is the reality that adoption families evolve out of loss- by the birth mother, the parents and the child- and such primal loss brings in its wake basic insecurity and feelings of inadequacy which have to be sensitively worked through for healthy, loving relationships to develop.

The adoption counselor helps those involved in the family of adoption work through this sometime painful process while reducing potential injuries to reach their goals more effectively than one may achieve on their own.

Although all methods of psychological and emotional help utilize interpersonal communication as it's main means of work, adoption counseling adds to and makes more effective the standard psychotherapeutic approach resulting in deeper and more far reaching results. Adoption counseling is sensitive to and considers the uniqueness of the past of those involved in the adoption process. It is designed to help with those issues particular to the adoption process as well as more general psychological concerns.  By recognizing and understanding the current individual actions and relationship patterns created in reaction to basic loss and insecurity and their influence on future developments, we are better able to regulate our lives while creating a more satisfying future. When my newly arrived son surrounded his room with action figures and burst into tears lest they were moved, I understood his symbolically expressed need for security and control in a new and overwhelming situation and gave that my priority. Counseling focuses on easing the stresses of loss and transition and enhancing the quality of your life and increasing the satisfaction you get from it. When my son had his first meal with us and wanted to eat everyone's food with his own inviolate, the recognition and understanding of his need to feel nurtured, in control and at one in his new surroundings made it possible to be all the more loving and accepting. Counseling is about increasing your constructive output with clarity, understanding, control and skillfulness, reducing the impact of destructive tendencies with negative resistance resolution and working through unresolved issues with insight. Understanding that my son's aggressive behaviors were a means of communication and contact provided me with the objectivity necessary for making the right judgments. When my wife momentarily distracted me while my son was showing me a video game and he withdrew into angry sullenness, I recognized that his overwhelming fears of abandonment were reactivated and I could focus my efforts on helping him recover.

My goal is to therapeutically use my many years of training and experience as a Mental Health Professional and Adoptive Parent & Adoptee to help you with remediating the upsetting affects of the past, avoiding current developmental pitfalls and constructively building for your future