Online Therapy for Adult Adoptees in Los Angeles, CA
For adult adoptees sorting through identity, relationships, reunion, and grief. Serving Los Angeles, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Torrance, Long Beach, and throughout LA County.
Adoption-Competent Therapy in Los Angeles
You’re at a dinner in Silver Lake, surrounded by people talking about their parents, their childhood, their family traditions, and you’re participating, saying the right things, laughing in the right places. But underneath, there’s a layer of calculation that never turns off, figuring out how much to share, how to answer when someone asks about your “real” parents, whether to mention that you’re adopted at all or just let them assume. You’ve been doing this math your whole life, in Pasadena classrooms, at networking events in Burbank, at holiday dinners in Encino, and you’re tired of it.
Maybe you’ve been in Los Angeles long enough that reinvention feels normal. People come here to become someone new, and in some ways, that’s what adoption asked you to do before you were old enough to consent to it. You became someone else’s child, took someone else’s name, grew up in someone else’s story. And Los Angeles, with its emphasis on image and performance, can make it even harder to figure out what’s authentically yours underneath all the roles you’ve learned to play.
Or maybe adoption feels like old news to you, something that happened, something you’ve dealt with, until a DNA test pulled up a biological relative in Torrance, or you had your first child at Cedars-Sinai and found yourself staring at a face that looks like yours for the first time. Now the questions you thought you’d put away are louder than they’ve ever been.
How body-based, adoption-competent therapy works
You can probably already explain your own reactions better than most people in your life could.
You know you pull away when someone gets close, you know you scan for signs that people are about to leave, and you know you've spent most of your life adjusting who you are to make sure you belong.
Understanding all of that hasn't changed the reactions, because they started before you had language for any of it, some of them before you had memory.
The therapeutic approaches I use are designed to reach the places where those early experiences are still running the show. You won't need to narrate every painful detail or relive your worst moments to make progress, and much of this work happens with reactions and feelings that don't translate neatly into words, the kind that live in your body's responses rather than in your conscious thoughts.
What clients describe after this work isn't that the memories are gone, because the adoption is still part of your story and always will be. What changes is that the old reactions lose their grip. The memory is still there, but it stops driving your decisions.
You can ask questions about your origins without the guilt telling you it means you're ungrateful for the family who raised you, you can let someone get close without your whole body bracing for the moment they leave, and you can sit with complicated feelings about your story without needing to shut them down or let them take over your entire week.
I've spent nine years inside the child welfare and adoption system and completed specialized training in adoption competency through C.A.S.E. (the Center for Adoption Support and Education) and the National Adoption Competency Mental Health Training Initiative.
That means I already understand the competing loyalties, the grief that sits right next to the gratitude, and the particular exhaustion of performing "fine" for people who need you to be okay with your story. So when you walk into a session, you can go straight to the thing that's keeping you up at night.
How therapy for adoptees can help
You’re at a friend’s birthday party in Los Feliz, and someone asks about your background. Instead of the rehearsed deflection or the tight smile, you answer truthfully, in whatever way feels right to you in that moment, and your chest stays open instead of clamping shut.
You tell your partner that you need reassurance without feeling pathetic for asking, and when they come home late from the studio in Glendale, you don’t spend the next hour constructing an abandonment narrative. You have the conversation instead of the spiral.
You meet your half-sibling for coffee in Long Beach, and you’re nervous but grounded. You can be curious without being desperate. You can say “I need to think about this” instead of flooding with emotion or going completely numb.
You sit with your baby in your apartment in Sherman Oaks at 3am, and instead of spiraling into thoughts about your own birth mother, what she was thinking, whether she misses you, you stay present with your child. The thoughts come, but they don’t hijack you.
You drive from Manhattan Beach to Brentwood for a family gathering with your adoptive parents and you bring up your birth family search without apologizing for it. The conversation is uncomfortable, and you stay in it anyway, because you’ve stopped believing that asking questions means you’re ungrateful.
You fill out the family medical history form at your doctor’s office in Westwood and check “adopted” without the wave of frustration that used to follow you out of the building.
You’re on the phone with your sister, your adoptive sister, and she says something dismissive about your interest in finding your birth family, something about how “we’re your real family,” and instead of swallowing it or exploding, you say “I know you are. And I also need this.” The call doesn’t end in a fight. She doesn’t love you less for saying it.
You make a decision about reunion, whether to reach out to the biological relative your DNA test surfaced, or whether to wait, or whether to decide that you don’t want contact right now, and the decision comes from a clear place instead of being driven by panic or guilt or the desperate need to fill a gap that’s been open your whole life.
Online therapy for adult adoptees in Los Angeles County
Who this works well for:
All sessions are conducted through secure telehealth, which means you can work with me from anywhere in Los Angeles County without adding another drive across LA traffic to your week. Whether you’re in Pasadena, Santa Monica, Long Beach, Torrance, Burbank, Glendale, West Hollywood, Studio City, Calabasas, Encino, Sherman Oaks, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, or anywhere in the greater Los Angeles area, you can access adoption-competent therapy from a private space in your home or office.
I also work with adult adoptees in Irvine, San Diego, and all of California.
I work with adult adoptees in Los Angeles from every type of adoption: domestic infant, international, transracial, foster care, kinship, and late-discovery (people who found out they were adopted later in life or through DNA testing). You don’t need to have had a traumatic adoption to benefit from this work. Many of my clients had loving adoptive families and still carry questions, patterns, or grief they can’t resolve alone.
This is a good fit if you’re weighing a search for birth family, processing a DNA discovery, navigating a reunion (or the aftermath of one that didn’t go well), noticing adoption-related patterns in your relationships or parenting, or carrying identity questions that have intensified over time.
This may not be the right fit if you’re looking for help locating birth family members (I can refer you to search specialists), need medication management, or are in active crisis requiring immediate stabilization.
About Summer
I worked in child welfare and adoptions for nine years before becoming a therapist. I sat with hundreds of families navigating the adoption system: birth families, adoptive families, and the children at the center of it all.
I'm C.A.S.E. trained (Center for Adoption Support and Education) and completed extensive training through the National Adoption Competency Mental Health Training Initiative.
I understand that you can love your adoptive family deeply and still grieve what you lost. That your adoption story isn't something to "get over" but something that keeps showing up at different stages of your life, and that's worth having support for. Integration looks different at 25 than it does at 40, and different again when you become a parent yourself.
I also understand that not all adoptees feel traumatized, and I won't assume that's your experience. Some people come to therapy wanting to explore adoption's impact on their life in a broader way. Others just need help with a specific decision like search or reunion.
Wherever you are, we start there.
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
Your Questions, Answered
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Most likely, your previous therapists were good at what they do but weren’t trained in adoption. Adoption-competent therapy means I’m not starting from scratch on what adoption is or why it affects you. We skip the education and go straight to the work. And because I use body-based approaches like EMDR and Brainspotting rather than talk therapy alone, we can address the nervous system responses that talking about adoption hasn’t changed.
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Yes. Infant adoption involves separation from a biological parent during the developmental period when your nervous system was forming its baseline understanding of safety and attachment. Even in the most loving adoptive home, that early separation can create patterns, hypervigilance, people-pleasing, difficulty trusting that relationships will last, that show up in adulthood. Having a good childhood and carrying adoption-related effects at the same time is one of the most common experiences my clients describe.
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Absolutely. DNA discoveries are one of the most frequent reasons adult adoptees in Los Angeles contact me. Whether you’re deciding whether to reach out, processing the shock of unexpected results, navigating a new relationship with a biological family member, or dealing with a reunion that didn’t go the way you hoped, this is a core part of my practice.
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The first session is a conversation. You tell me what’s going on, what brought you here, and what you want to change. I ask questions to understand your adoption history, your current patterns, and what feels most urgent right now. We don’t jump into EMDR or Brainspotting on day one. Most clients start body-based work in sessions two, three, or four, once we have a clear picture of what we’re working on and you feel ready. The first session is also a chance for you to see whether working together feels like a good fit.
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Sessions are $250 and I’m a private pay practice, which means I don’t bill insurance directly. After each session, I provide a detailed receipt called a superbill that you can submit to your insurance company, and depending on your plan, they may reimburse you for a significant portion of the cost. You can call the number on the back of your insurance card and ask “do I have out-of-network mental health benefits?” to find out before we start.
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We meet through a secure video platform designed for therapy sessions that meets healthcare privacy standards. You’ll need a private space, a stable internet connection, and a device with a camera. Most clients use a laptop or tablet. The therapeutic process, including EMDR and Brainspotting, translates well to telehealth, and many clients prefer the convenience and privacy of working from home.