Adoptee Counseling

Adoption is complex, and you deserve to work with a professional who understands its impact across a lifetime.

I bring a literal lifetime of experience to my work with adoptees, as an international and transracial adoptee from India, an adoptive parent to a child from Ethiopia, and a psychologist who has worked in the adoption community since 2002. 

I work with adult adoptees (18+) from international, domestic, kinship, and foster care adoptions. Whether adoption has been something you have thought about every day or something that has recently come to the forefront, therapy can provide space to explore your experiences with someone who understands that adoption is not simply an event that happened in childhood, but an ongoing influence that shapes your identity, relationships, and sense of belonging in the world. 

As an adoptee, I want you to know that you do not need to minimize your experiences or fit your story into someone else's narrative of adoption – my intention is to create a safe space for your whole story and entire self, a place to help you better understand where you've been, recognize the strengths and strategies that have helped you survive and adapt, and decide what you want to carry forward and what you’re ready to let rest. 

Every adoptee's life is unique, but we often carry common themes that can be explored in therapy:

  • Relationships, parenting, intimacy, and boundaries
  • Self-confidence, self-worth, and self-esteem
  • Anxiety, depression, and emotional filtering
  • Perfectionism, overachievement, and masking
  • Trauma and confusing early-life experiences
  • Grief, loss, rejection, and abandonment
  • Self-preservation, self-protection, and dissociation
  • Racial and cultural identity
  • Life transitions and shifting values or priorities
  • Authenticity and belonging
  • First/biological and adoptive family relationships 
  • Reunion and birth country travel

My work is informed by The Seven Core Issues in Adoption (loss/abandonment, rejection, grief, guilt/shame, identity, intimacy, and control) and decades of experience working alongside adoptees and the adoption community. Through the lens of Liberation Psychology, an approach that considers the impacts of the people and systems around you, we can explore how adoption has influenced the way you see yourself, connect with others, and respond to the world around you. We’ll make space for feelings and beliefs that can seem contradictory and have been difficult to put into words by building self-compassion, strengthening boundaries, and processing grief and trauma to develop a stronger foundation of self-trust around your own narrative of experiences.

With some clients, I also incorporate EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and Brainspotting into our talk therapy work. These specialized trauma therapies can be helpful when experiences from earlier in life (including pre-birth) continue to affect you in the present.

I offer telehealth sessions for clients in participating PSYPACT states and Outdoor Therapy sessions in the Denver area for clients seeking in-person services. Learn more about service rates on my Fees and Insurance page.

If my approach sounds like it may be a good fit for you, please submit a Request for Individual Counseling. When your availability aligns with an opening in my schedule, I’ll email you intake paperwork and we’ll schedule a complimentary 25-minute initial telehealth consultation. This gives us an opportunity to discuss what you’d like to explore in therapy and consider how our work together could best support you.