Online Therapy for Adoptive Parents in Fremont, CA
Therapy for adoptive parents carrying the weight of parenting that no one prepared you for. Serving Fremont, Newark, Union City, Milpitas, and throughout the East Bay.
Trauma Therapy for Adoptive Parents Who Are Struggling
Everyone keeps telling you how lucky your child is, how amazing it is that you're doing this, how grateful you must feel. Nobody asks how you're actually doing.
Because if they did, you'd have to tell them about the panic attacks in the Safeway parking lot, the way you can't sleep through the night because your body won't stop waiting for the next crisis, the depression that settled in after your child came home and never lifted, the grief that still surfaces when you think about the adoption that fell through even though that was months or years ago, the way your child's meltdowns send your own nervous system into complete meltdown mode because you're absorbing their trauma into your body.
You're holding it together on the outside while falling apart on the inside. Your chest stays perpetually tight, your jaw aches from clenching, and you're so tired that no amount of sleep makes a difference. You're avoiding playdates and school events because you can't explain your reality without either lying or saying way too much, and the isolation is making everything worse.
The worst part isn't even the struggles themselves - it's the shame of struggling when you "chose this," when you're supposed to be grateful, when admitting you need help feels like admitting you're failing as a parent.
More about my approach to working with adoptive parents here.
How therapy works for adoptive parents
You've probably read every book, taken every training, and tried every parenting strategy the adoption community recommends.
You understand why your child hides food in her pillowcase, why he flinches when you raise your voice even though you've never given him a reason to, why bedtime turns into a battle every single night. You have the knowledge, and you're still losing it at 7pm when nothing you've learned seems to work on a child who's screaming that you're not their real parent.
The gap between what you know and what you can do in those moments isn't about effort or education. 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 living in crisis mode. You've been absorbing 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 therapeutic 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. 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.
Specialized adoption therapy for adoptive & foster parents in Fremont and the Bay Area
I work with adoptive parents in Newark, Union City, Milpitas, Hayward, Castro Valley, and communities throughout the East Bay, and in San Jose and Sacramento.
Virtual adoption therapy throughout California.
Meet Summer
I work with adoptive parents throughout Fremont and the Bay Area because I understand that adoption doesn't just affect your child, it profoundly impacts you too.
I've been licensed to independently practice in California since 2015 (CA LCSW #68507). I have 9 years of experience in child welfare and adoption and I am C.A.S.E. registered (Center for Adoption Support and Education) through completing training with the National Adoption Competency Mental Health Training Initiative (NTI).
I specialize in supporting adoptive parents through their own mental health challenges: post-adoption depression, secondary trauma, and the grief and burnout that comes with this journey.
Using specialized trauma approaches, I help you heal from failed adoptions, process your own trauma responses, and find sustainable ways to manage the ongoing stress without losing yourself completely in the process.
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, HIPAA-compliant telehealth platforms. You can meet with me from anywhere in California - your home, your office, even your car in a parking lot if that's the only private space available to you. For Fremont parents already juggling demanding work schedules, multiple therapy appointments for your child, school meetings, and everything else, virtual therapy eliminates commute time completely and gives you maximum flexibility with scheduling.
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Traditional talk therapy helps you understand your thoughts, process your feelings, and gain valuable insight into your patterns - which has real value but often isn't enough when trauma is stored in your physical body and nervous system. The specialized trauma approaches I use - EMDR, Brainspotting, Accelerated Resolution Therapy, Internal Family Systems, and Somatic therapy - work directly with your nervous system to release trauma at a much deeper level than talk alone can reach. These aren't just new coping strategies to manage your symptoms; they actually help your brain and body process and resolve traumatic experiences so they genuinely stop controlling and hijacking your present life. Many adoptive parents describe years of traditional therapy helping them understand their struggles without actually relieving them - body-based trauma work is what finally creates real, lasting change they can feel.
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It depends on what you're working on and which therapeutic approaches we use together in your treatment. Accelerated Resolution Therapy is specifically designed for focused short-term work - many parents experience significant noticeable relief within just 3-5 sessions when addressing specific discrete traumatic memories like a failed adoption, an unexpected placement disruption, or a particular crisis that's haunting them. Other parents work with me for several months to methodically process multiple accumulated layers of adoption-related trauma: the years of infertility grief, the failed placements that broke their hearts, the post-adoption depression that won't lift, the secondary trauma from absorbing their child's constant dysregulation. Traditional cognitive-behavioral talk therapy often requires years to see meaningful lasting change - these body-based trauma methods are significantly more efficient and effective at creating real transformation. We'll discuss your specific goals and situation in our very first session together and create a realistic timeline based on what you're actually dealing with.
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Absolutely, you don't need to wait for finalization. I work with adoptive parents at every single stage of this complex journey: waiting anxiously to be matched with a birth mother, supporting a birth mother through her pregnancy while wondering if she'll change her mind, recovering from a failed placement that fell through and broke your heart, navigating the constant uncertainty and emotional rollercoaster of foster-to-adopt, newly home with your child and struggling with the reality versus expectations, or many years into parenting and finally realizing you need professional help. Your struggles and pain are completely valid and deserving of support regardless of exactly where you are in the legal adoption process - you don't have to wait until everything is "official" to get help for what you're going through right now.
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I'm a private-pay provider because it allows me to focus exclusively on what actually helps you heal rather than being constrained by what insurance companies will reimburse, which is often limited to approaches that don't work well for complex adoption trauma. However, I can provide detailed documentation called Superbills for out-of-network reimbursement if your particular insurance plan offers that benefit - many plans do provide partial reimbursement. Many adoptive parents discover that investing directly in specialized trauma therapy with someone who genuinely understands adoption saves them literal years of ineffective but insurance-covered talk therapy that doesn't address the root issues and leaves them still struggling with the same problems.