Online Adoption Therapy in California

Your seven-year-old tells you she loves you, then five minutes later screams that she wishes you weren’t her mom and throws a shoe at your head. You know intellectually that she’s testing whether you’ll leave like everyone else did, but understanding the theory doesn’t stop your hands from shaking after the shoe hits the wall.

Or maybe the problem is quieter: you look at your adopted son and feel guilt instead of love, and you haven’t told a single person because admitting it feels like proving everyone right who questioned your decision to adopt.

You’ve probably tried to get help. Maybe your last therapist suggested a sticker chart for behavior that’s rooted in early trauma, or recommended consequences that made things worse. The approaches that work for other families don’t work for yours, because the problem isn’t discipline. The problem is that your child’s history is activating your nervous system, and nobody taught you what to do with that.

What changes during our work together:

Your daughter throws the shoe and screams that she hates you, and your heart rate goes up but your voice stays level. You stay in the doorway. She cries herself out, and twenty minutes later she’s in your lap and you’re reading a book together, and you can feel the warmth of her against you. You’re not bracing. You’re just there with your kid, and it feels good.

You walk into the IEP meeting and your voice holds. The team suggests “one more year in general ed,” and you push back, not because you’re angry, but because you know your child. You say what she needs and why, and whether they agree or not, you trust yourself to be her advocate. That’s new. You used to leave those meetings second-guessing everything you said. Now you leave knowing you showed up for your kid the way she needs you to.

You call your friend back and say yes to the dinner you’ve been declining for months. You tell her parenting has been brutal, and she tells you about her disaster of a kitchen renovation, and you laugh so hard you almost choke on your wine. On the drive home you realize you had fun, real fun, for the first time in months.

You start thinking about the career you put on hold, or the hobby you dropped, or the trip you stopped planning. Not because the hard parts of parenting are gone, but because they’re not consuming every hour of every day anymore. You have energy for your own life again, and you start using it.

More about therapy for adoptive parents →

Maybe it surfaces every Mother’s Day, when you’re sitting at brunch and someone wishes you a happy Mother’s Day and you don’t know what to do with your face, because you are a mother but nobody at this table talks about that. You excuse yourself to the bathroom, lock the door, and do the math: she’d be seven now. You scroll the adoptive mother’s Instagram from the bathroom floor, looking at a child who has your chin but someone else’s last name. Then you wash your face, go back to the table, and say you’re fine.

Whether you placed your child through a California agency, a private attorney, or a process that crossed state lines, the grief of relinquishment doesn’t follow a timeline. It can surface years or decades later, triggered by a birthday, a pregnancy announcement, or a toddler in a grocery store who has her eyes.

What changes during our work together:

Mother’s Day comes and you stay at the table for the whole brunch. It’s heavy, and you feel it, but you stay. You drive home and spend the afternoon in the garden or on the couch with a book, and the day has room for other things in it besides grief. You had a full day. A sad one, but a full one.

You sleep through the night. The “what if I’d kept her” thought still crosses your mind sometimes, but it passes through instead of waking you up at 2 a.m. and keeping you there until dawn. You wake up rested, and you can feel the difference in everything, your patience, your focus, your ability to enjoy a Saturday.

You tell your partner the full story, the one you’ve been carrying alone for years, and the conversation is hard, but he’s still sitting across from you when it’s over. The next morning is easier because the secret isn’t taking up space between you anymore. You feel closer to him than you have in years, because he finally knows you.

You sign up for the training program you’ve been putting off, or you start running again, or you make plans with the friend you’ve been avoiding. The grief didn’t go away, but it stopped being the thing that uses up all your energy. You have a life again, and you’re starting to like it.

I provide birth parent therapy to California residents statewide through secure telehealth, so you can do this work from a private space without anyone at work or in your family knowing where you’re going.

Learn more about therapy for birth parents →

Maybe you took a DNA test last year and discovered half-siblings you didn’t know existed, or a biological parent who lives forty minutes from your apartment. Now you’re sitting with information that changes everything about your story, and you don’t know what to do with it.

Or maybe you’re at a dinner party and someone asks, “where are you really from,” and your throat tightens because they’re looking at your face, your skin, asking about biology you can’t fully answer. Later in the car, you replay the conversation and feel furious at yourself for still not having a better response after thirty years of being asked.

What changes during our work together:

You write that email to your biological mother, hit send, and go make dinner. When the reply comes the next day, you read it at your kitchen table with coffee, and you take your time deciding what to say back. The exchange doesn’t consume your week. You’re curious about where this goes instead of terrified of it.

Your adoptive dad makes a comment about your search and you say “I love you, and I also need to know where I come from.” He’s quiet for a minute, and then he asks you a question about it. You stay for dessert. Something has opened up between you that wasn’t there before.

You stop curating yourself for everyone else’s comfort. You say what you think at dinner, you stop over-explaining your feelings, you let people sit with their own discomfort when the conversation gets real. The energy you used to spend managing everyone else’s reactions is yours now, and you start putting it toward the things you care about, your work, your friendships, the version of your life that belongs to you instead of to your adoption story.

Learn more about therapy for adult adoptees →