ADOPTION

Adoption is psychologically complicated for children and for adoptive parents. Sometimes people go into an adoption with high expectations for the new version of their family. Sometimes there are serious struggles that can bring pain, disappointment, and chaos. The mental and emotional issues around adoption are too numerous to summarize, but they frequently have to do with struggles over love, loss, identity, and attachment.

Children adopted from outside the U.S. frequently have mental and emotional crises when they reach adolescence. The advent of romantic interest brings up complicated feelings having to do with family, ethnic differences, and deeply felt (and not necessarily remembered) losses from their family of origin. Dynamic therapy is suited to working with these issues since it focuses on how the client experiences relationships, attachment, and loss. Adoptive parents often struggle with painful rejections from children they adopt. Sometimes the rejections, or destructive behavior, seem to come out of nowhere. One day the child seemed happy and attached and the next day they're in serious pain, and/or inflicting serious pain. Parents are usually focused on improvements in their children's behavior. They just want everyone to feel better and to act appropriately. Often the matter is more complicated than people simply learning to treat each other better. I have helped numerous adoptees and adoptive parents to grow in ways that calm their internal struggles and greatly improve their relationships. Dynamic therapists are trained in sticking with their clients through major attachment and relational restructuring, which sometimes calls for long-term work.