Beyond Words Psychological Services

Workshop: Launching: Supporting Your Teen Through Early Adulthood
2025-08-01 16:15 - 17:45 (America/Denver) | PACT Family Camp, Riverhouse Lodge, Bend, OR, United States
PACT Family Camp Breakout Presentation.

Adoption is a lifelong journey, and adopted individuals face different challenges during each stage of life. The late adolescent and early adult years offer unique opportunities for growth, independence, and identity formation, but also create new obstacles as life experiences expand beyond the shelter of the familiar. Build your knowledge of the common developmental struggles of adoptees in this age group through the lens of the seven core issues in adoption and learn the best ways to offer support and guidance as a parent, caregiver, or professional. Warning signs of more serious issues requiring professional intervention will also be described.

The mission of Pact Family Camp is to provide a safe, honest, child-centered, anti-racist space where adopted children and youth of color can connect with peers and mentors who share their identities and experiences, and where their parents can dig deeply into not only the joys but also the challenges of adoption, race, and family. Through a week-long immersive program, we set in motion a transformative experience that continues to impact families long after camp is over. Children and parents come away with a deeper understanding of the complexities of adoption, new language they can use to talk about it, and the knowledge that they are not alone on the lifelong journey of adoption.

Keynote: From Struggles to Superpowers: Reframing the Seven Core Issues in Adoption
2025-08-01 10:00 - 11:30 | PACT Family Camp, Riverhouse Lodge, Bend, OR, United States
PACT Family Camp Keynote Presentation.
The seven core issues in adoption are often perceived as barriers to an adoptee’s ability to be healthy and successful. But what if we viewed these issues – loss, rejection, guilt/shame, grief, identity, intimacy, and control – on a spectrum that ranges from struggle to strength? Join Dr. Chaitra Wirta-Leiker as she guides you into the extraordinary and often overlooked world of adoptee strengths and superpowers. Learn to support your adoptee’s natural tendencies, embrace their unique methods for problem-solving and navigating relationships, and empower them to feel proud of the remarkable ways in which they contribute to the world.
The mission of Pact Family Camp is to provide a safe, honest, child-centered, anti-racist space where adopted children and youth of color can connect with peers and mentors who share their identities and experiences, and where their parents can dig deeply into not only the joys but also the challenges of adoption, race, and family. Through a week-long immersive program, we set in motion a transformative experience that continues to impact families long after camp is over. Children and parents come away with a deeper understanding of the complexities of adoption, new language they can use to talk about it, and the knowledge that they are not alone on the lifelong journey of adoption.

Colorado Department of Labor & Employment: Lunch & Learn Panel Member
2025-07-10 12:00 - 13:00 | Colorado Department of Labor & Education
Dr. Chaitra Wirta-Leiker will be featured as a panel member during the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment’s Employee Lunch and Learn event. The discussion will focus on the topic of anger with questions addressing stereotypes, impacts, and healthy ways to manage anger in BIPOC populations.

From Blow-Up to Bonding: Finding the Balance of Attachment-Focused Discipline in Adoption
2025-06-12 10:00 - 17:00 | Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, 909 W. 33rd Street, Sioux Falls, SD, 57105, United States
Keynote speaker for conference hosted by Lutheran Social Services of South Dakota. How can you turn moments of struggle into moments of connection? Discover how brain development, implicit memories, and the “6 F’s” (Fight, Flight, Freeze, Friend, Fidget, Flop) can influence your adoptive or foster child’s reactions to traditional methods of discipline, and develop compassionate, creative, and effective strategies for limit-setting and consequences that simultaneously enhance healthy attachment patterns in the child-caregiver relationship. Tools to cope with common struggles will be addressed, including separation anxiety, transitions, homework, aggression, lying, stealing, hoarding, argumentativeness, and sleep anxiety.

PESI 2025 Play Therapy Summit: Play Therapy for Adoptive Children and Families: Navigating the Seven Core Issues in Adoption to Create Healthy Self-Expression, Attachment &Trauma Healing
2025-06-05 14:00 - 16:30 | Virtual Webinar
Adoption introduces unique emotional and behavioral complexities that significantly shape a child’s needs and experiences. For clinicians working with adopted children, understanding the Seven Core Issues in Adoption—loss, rejection, guilt/shame, grief, identity, intimacy, and mastery/control—is essential for effective intervention.
Join Dr. Chaitra Wirta-Leiker, PsyD, a licensed psychologist, international/transracial adoptee, and adoptive parent, alongside Sabra Starnes, LCSW, a transracial adoptee and adoptive mother with over 24 years of experience as an adoption therapist, as they bring unique perspectives and extensive expertise in adoption-related issues. They’ll offer vital insights and practical tools to address these seven core issues within the context of play therapy.
You’ll learn how various adoption types—foster, domestic, kinship, and international; same-race and transracial; open, semi-open, and closed—can shape the content and dynamics of your play therapy sessions and influence how children express themselves and navigate their relationships.
Attendees will leave with actionable insights, enriched therapeutic techniques such as bibliotherapy, backstory exploration, Theraplay and more, and discover a deeper empathy for the unique experiences of adopted children.
Don’t miss this session to enhance your clinical skills and support the well-being of adopted youth and their caregivers in meaningful ways. Register through my affiliate link at the PESI website.

Supporting Racial Attachment Needs with Transracially Adoptive Families
2025-05-09 08:00 - 10:00 | Virtual Webinar
Virtual training hosted by Hudson Valley Professional Development for New York Psychologists seeking continuing education credits. Join Dr. Chaitra Wirta-Leiker for an insightful and enlightening discussion addressing the complex dynamics of transracial adoption. Through the lens of the seven core issues in adoption combined with her groundbreaking model of the racial and cultural identity needs of transracial adoptees, she will provide compassionate and comprehensive support to professionals who work with transracially adoptive families. Grow your awareness of the internal and external experiences of adoptees of color as they strive to build a positive racial and cultural identity, enhance your understanding of the role race plays in parent-child attachment patterns, learn to discuss race and racism using developmentally appropriate language, identify strategies to guide adoptive caregivers’ understanding of their own racial biases, and build the confidence to bring race into the room in a manner that promotes safety, empowerment, and connection.

Gross Global Happiness Summit 2025: Embrace All Parts: From Struggles to Strengths
2025-03-09 | University for Peace, San Jose, Costa Rica
“Embrace All Parts: From Struggles to Strengths” is a dynamic motivational talk aimed at recognizing the adaptive, resilient, and self-protective nature inherent in all behaviors. Our world has developed binary categories of “good” and “bad” and “right” and “wrong” that are not sufficient for reflecting the complexity of human experience, and their simplicity limits our ability to understand and appreciate all aspects of ourselves. Emotions such as guilt, anger, and fear…thoughts that promote anxiety, insecurity, and struggle…body cues that cause us discomfort, avoidance, and suppression…what would happen if, instead of expending our energy battling these parts of ourselves, we viewed them as opportunities to develop greater self-awareness and self-compassion, on a spectrum from struggle to strength? In this workshop, I will guide attendees in the conscious effort to reframe the parts of ourselves we perceive as most difficult into assets that empower a sense of pride for the remarkable ways we engage with the world.
