Therapy for Adoptive Parents in Bethesda, MD
Therapy for adoptive parents carrying the weight of parenting that no one prepared you for. Serving Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Potomac, Rockville, Silver Spring, and throughout Montgomery County.
Adoption therapy for adoptive parents in Bethesda, MD
You adopted because you wanted to be a parent. Maybe you spent years trying to conceive before choosing adoption. Maybe you always planned to adopt. Either way, you went through the home study, the background checks, the wait. You read the books, took the training, and told yourself you were prepared for whatever came.
Now your child is home, and some days you're managing behaviors that nobody prepared you for. Your eight-year-old punches holes in the wall during homework. Your teenager steals from you while looking you directly in the eye. Your five-year-old hoards food in their bedroom even though meals happen like clockwork and the pantry is never locked. The behaviors don't match any parenting framework you've encountered, and the strategies that work for other families don't work for yours.
You've done your homework. You can probably explain your child's behaviors better than most professionals you've consulted, and that's part of the frustration. You understand why your child acts this way, you know the early experiences that shaped their responses, and you still can't get through a Tuesday evening without someone in your house ending up in tears. The knowledge hasn't protected you from the toll of living in it day after day.
Meanwhile, the version of your life that other people see looks nothing like what happens behind your front door. At school pickup you're composed. At work you're performing. At dinner with friends you edit the story down to the parts that won't make people uncomfortable. And then you drive home and walk back into the reality that nobody else fully understands, and the loneliness of that gap is almost as exhausting as the parenting itself.
More about how I work with adoptive parents here.
How I work with adoptive parents
When your child melts down and your heart starts pounding and your thinking brain goes offline, your body is reacting to months or years of absorbing crisis after crisis. You've been carrying your child's distress day after day, and your brain has started treating every escalation as an emergency, responding before you have a chance to choose how you want to show up.
That's where my work focuses. The approaches I use work directly with how your body responds to stress, so the parenting tools you already have can function the way they're supposed to.
You won't need to spend weeks retelling your story or narrating every hard moment from the beginning, and much of this work happens at the level of the physical stress response, the racing heart, the tight jaw, the urge to shut down or yell or walk away, and helps it shift so you can stay present when things get hard at home.
I spent nine years working in child welfare and adoption before becoming a therapist. I sat in placement meetings, reviewed case files, and worked alongside families from the very first day a child came home.
That means I already understand what food hoarding means, why the anniversary of a placement can bring everything rushing back, and how exhausting it is to love a child who tests your relationship every day because testing is the only way they've ever learned to figure out if someone will stay.
So when you describe what's happening in your house, you can go straight to what you need help with.
What changes with specialized, adoption-competent therapy
You'll stay in the room when your child is falling apart. Right now when the screaming starts, your body takes over before your brain catches up, your heart races, your jaw locks, and you either match their intensity or shut down completely. After doing this work, you'll feel the activation start and be able to stay with it instead of being hijacked by it. Your child will melt down at dinner and you'll keep your voice steady, not because you're performing calm, but because your body has genuinely learned that their distress isn't an emergency you have to fix in the next thirty seconds. The meltdown will still be hard, but it won't ruin the whole evening, and your child will learn something about what it looks like when someone stays.
You'll feel things again, including the good ones. The numbness that settled in somewhere along the way, the one that makes you go through the motions of family life without feeling much of anything, will start to lift. Your child will say something funny at breakfast and you'll laugh before you've decided whether it's a good day or a bad day. You'll feel genuine warmth when they climb into your lap instead of just relief that they're not in crisis. You'll look at your partner across the room and feel something other than exhaustion and logistics.
You'll stop carrying the shame of struggling with something you chose. You wanted this child. You fought for this child. And some days you wonder what you were thinking, and the guilt of that thought is worse than the hard day that produced it. When the shame loosens, you'll be able to tell your partner you need a break without it feeling like a confession. You'll be honest with your close friends about the hard days instead of performing the grateful, happy adoption story everyone wants to hear. You'll advocate for your child at school without the fear that asking for help means admitting you can't handle this.
You'll grieve what you lost without the grief swallowing your whole week. Whether the grief is about infertility, a failed match, the biological connection you'll never have with your child, or the version of family life you pictured before reality set in, it won’t eclipse the joy. You’ll be able to attend a baby shower without needing to leave early. You'll fill out the school medical history form with its blank spaces and move on with your afternoon instead of carrying it into the next day.
You'll sleep through the night and have energy left for your own life. The 3am anxiety spirals, the ones where you replay every mistake and plan for every catastrophe, will lose their frequency and their intensity. You'll fall asleep without running through tomorrow's potential disasters, wake up without the dread already sitting on your chest, and have enough energy left after the kids are in bed to read something that has nothing to do with adoption or parenting or trauma.
You'll remember that you're a person outside of being this child's parent. Somewhere in the crisis management and the appointments and the IEP meetings and the constant vigilance, you lost track of the parts of yourself that existed before all of this. You'll pick up a hobby you abandoned three years ago, make plans with a friend and keep them, have a conversation about something other than your child's progress, and make a decision about your own career or your own life without the guilt telling you that wanting something for yourself means you're taking something from your family.
You'll have more of yourself to bring home at the end of the day. When your body stops running on high alert all the time, when the depression isn't draining your reserves before noon, when the shame stops taking up so much space, you simply have more to give. Not because you've tried harder or pushed through, but because the weight you've been carrying has gotten lighter. You'll return a friend's text, sit on the floor and play with your child without watching the clock, have a real conversation with your partner after the kids go to bed, and feel like a person who's living their life instead of just surviving it.
Serving Adoptive Parents in Bethesda and Surrounding Maryland Areas
Meet Summer
I worked in child welfare and with adoptive families for nine years before starting my private practice.
I've sat across from foster parents who just lost a placement to reunification, walked adoptive parents through the aftermath of a failed match, and supported families through the slow grind of parenting a child who doesn't feel safe enough to let you love them yet.
I'm C.A.S.E. trained (Center for Adoption Support and Education), which means I have specialized certification in adoption-competent therapy. That training shapes how I understand what's happening in your home, the difference between a child who's being defiant and a child who's terrified, the grief that hits after finalization when everyone else expects you to be celebrating, the exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix because your body has been running on high alert for months or years.
I hold an active Maryland LCSW-C license (#34104). If you're an adoptive parent in Maryland, I'd like to talk with you.
You can schedule a session or reach out through the contact form below.
Therapy Services Offered
Individual Weekly Therapy
Weekly therapy with me is a steady, collaborative space where you don’t have to perform, explain everything perfectly, or rush toward solutions. We’ll move at a pace that respects your nervous system, blending thoughtful conversation with evidence-based trauma approaches when helpful, so insight and relief can happen together. Some weeks may feel reflective and grounding, others more active and processing-focused—but always intentional and contained. Over time, clients often notice they feel more regulated, more confident in their responses, and less controlled by patterns that once felt automatic.
Intensives
Therapy intensives are longer, focused sessions designed to help you go deeper without the stop-and-start feeling of weekly therapy. In a 2- or 4-hour intensive, we create a carefully paced container that allows time for assessment, preparation, processing, and grounding—without rushing your system. These sessions often incorporate trauma-focused modalities such as EMDR, Brainspotting, IFS, or somatic work, with built-in breaks and regulation throughout. Clients often choose intensives when they want meaningful movement around a specific issue or feel ready for concentrated, intentional healing work.
Logistics
50-minute Sessions are $250.
I also offer 90-minute sessions for $375 and intensive sessions (2-4 hours) ranging from $500 to $1000 for people who want to work intensively.
I don't take insurance directly, but I can provide superbills for out-of-network reimbursement if your plan covers that.
I am available early mornings, evenings, and weekends. I provide services online only.
Self-Schedule or Contact Me Below
For the quickest and most confidential option, you’re encouraged to book directly into my calendar by clicking the Self-Schedule Here button below. That button will take you to my HIPAA-compliant calendar where you may request an appointment. Once I confirm your appointment request (typically within 24 hours), I will email you the new client forms to digitally sign. Then, we will meet on your scheduled day.
If you have questions prior to scheduling, you can also use the contact form below, and I’ll reply within 48 business hours. If you don’t see a reply, please check your junk/spam folder.
I look forward to hearing from you!
— Summer Verhines, LCSW
Contact Summer
Frequently Asked Questions
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All sessions are conducted online through secure telehealth. You can meet with me from anywhere in Maryland - your home, office, or even your car if that's your only private space. For Bethesda parents juggling work, therapy appointments for your child, school meetings, and everything else, virtual sessions eliminate commute time and maximize scheduling flexibility.
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Absolutely. I work with adoptive parents at every stage: waiting to be matched, supporting a birth mother through pregnancy, recovering from a failed placement, navigating foster-to-adopt uncertainty, newly home with your child, or years into parenting. You don't need to wait for finalization to get support.
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This is therapy for you, not your child. Most of the interventions families try are aimed at changing the child's behavior. What often gets overlooked is that you've been absorbing your child's distress for years, and your body has started treating everyday family life as a threat. When your stress response calms down, you show up differently at home, and that often shifts the family dynamic in ways that direct work with your child alone couldn't.
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Absolutely. Some adopted children often fly under the radar because their struggles don't look like what people expect, especially when they are doing well academically and staying out of trouble. But the effort required to maintain that is enormous, and it often comes out sideways at home or in close relationships. And for you as the parent, the disconnect between "my child looks fine to everyone else" and "something is clearly wrong" can be incredibly isolating. That’s what I’m here for.
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Adoption-competent therapy means I've completed specialized training through C.A.S.E. (the Center for Adoption Support and Education) on top of my clinical licensure, and I spent nine years working in child welfare before becoming a therapist.
In practical terms, that means I understand why your child hoards food even though your pantry is always full, why bedtime is a battlefield, why the anniversary of a placement can bring everything rushing back, and why you can love your child fiercely and still grieve the family life you imagined. You won't spend sessions bringing me up to speed on any of that.