Adoption Therapy for Adult Adoptees in Pleasanton and the Tri-Valley, CA
Online therapy for adult adoptees working through identity, relationships, reunion, and the questions adoption left behind. For adults in Pleasanton, Dublin, San Ramon, Danville, and surrounding East Bay communities.
Therapy for Adult Adoptees in the Bay Area
You’ve spent most of your life making sure nobody worries about you. You learned early that being low maintenance was the easiest way to belong, and you got good at it. You’re the one who smooths things over at family dinners, who doesn’t make a fuss, who says “I’m fine” so convincingly that people stopped asking follow-up questions a long time ago.
But lately the questions you’ve been holding are getting louder.
Maybe you found a DNA match you weren’t expecting, and now you’re staring at a profile photo of someone who has your chin and you can’t stop looking at it. Maybe your adoptive parent is sick and you’re realizing the window for asking certain questions is closing. Maybe you had a baby, and looking at her face, the first person you’ve ever met who shares your biology, cracked something open you don’t know how to close.
Or maybe nothing dramatic happened at all.
You just hit a point where the effort of holding it all together started costing more than you could afford. You’re tired of being the easy one. You’re tired of scanning every room for signs that someone might leave. You’re tired of the quick, rehearsed answer when someone asks about your family, because the real answer would take an hour and you’re not sure anyone wants to hear it.
Some adult adoptees reach out after decades of pushing adoption to the background, when it suddenly moves to the foreground and they don’t know what to do with it. Some reach out because they’re in the middle of a reunion that’s going sideways, or because they’re thinking about searching and the decision feels paralyzing. Some come because they’ve noticed a pattern in their relationships, always editing themselves down, always anticipating, never quite trusting that they can be difficult and still be wanted, and they want to stop living that way.
More about my approach to working with adult adoptees here.
When Talking About Adoption Doesn’t Change How You Feel
You may have already tried therapy. If adoption came up and it was treated as background information rather than something that shaped how you move through the world, that makes sense why it didn’t help. Adoption-competent therapy starts from an understanding that adoption affects identity, relationships, trust, and your sense of belonging in specific, predictable ways, and it works from there instead of starting from scratch.
Those patterns, the people-pleasing, the constant watching for signs that someone might leave, the way you freeze when someone gets too close or pull away before they can leave first, aren’t just habits you can decide to stop. They’re responses your body learned before you had words, and they live deeper than your thoughts can reach. That’s why understanding why you do these things doesn’t make you stop doing them.
The approaches I use, EMDR, Brainspotting, and Accelerated Resolution Therapy (I explain what these feel like in the FAQ below), work directly with those stored responses in your body. The goal is to loosen the grip these patterns have on your daily life so you can make choices based on what’s happening now instead of reacting from old fear.
What Changes After Adoption Therapy for Adult Adoptees
The DNA match you’ve been sitting on for three months, you write the email. Your hands shake while you type it, but you send it, close the laptop, and go for a run instead of refreshing your inbox all night. You sleep through the night while you wait for a response, and the guilt and anxiety you expected about reaching out doesn’t take hold the way it would have a year ago.
Your partner tells you something that hurts your feelings, and instead of pretending it didn’t bother you or pulling away for two days, you say so and move on with your evening. You start bringing things up when they’re small instead of swallowing them until they become big, and it costs you less energy than the old way ever did.
You’re at Thanksgiving and your adoptive aunt makes the comment she always makes, the one about how lucky you are, and instead of smiling through it or going quiet for the rest of the meal, you say something honest. You drive home lighter than you have after a family dinner in years, and the next week you call your sister just to catch up, something you’d been avoiding because family contact used to leave you drained for days.
You realize you turned down a promotion last year because being noticed made you anxious. You apply for the next one, and you realize the anxiety doesn’t drive your decisions anymore. Six months later, you’re leading a team and discovering you’re good at it.
You stop saying yes to things you don’t want to do, and you feel peace about it instead of dread or guilt. Your friend still calls the next week and invitations still come.
You sign up for a ceramics class or start writing again or book a trip by yourself, things you never would have done when all your energy was going toward keeping everyone comfortable, and you realize how much of yourself you’d been editing down to fit what you thought other people needed from you.
Online Adoption Therapy for Adult Adoptees Across the Tri-Valley and East Bay
All sessions are conducted through secure, HIPAA-compliant telehealth. You can meet with me from a private room in your home, your car during lunch, or any quiet space with a stable internet connection. For adult adoptees who haven’t told family or coworkers that they’re in therapy, or that they’re exploring adoption-related questions at all, the privacy of online sessions can make it easier to start.
I work with adult adoptees throughout the Tri-Valley, including Pleasanton, Dublin, San Ramon, and Danville. I also serve clients in Livermore, Walnut Creek, Fremont, Castro Valley, Lafayette, Orinda, and surrounding East Bay communities. I also see clients in San Jose.
Because sessions are online, I work with California residents statewide.
About Summer
I spent nine years working in child welfare and adoption before becoming a therapist. I’ve completed home studies, facilitated placements, supported birth parents through placing their child, and walked alongside adoptive families through the years after finalization. That background gives me a firsthand understanding of how the adoption system works and how it affects everyone involved, including the adoptees who are often the last ones anyone checks on.
I am C.A.S.E. certified in adoption competency, which is a post-graduate training program that prepares clinicians to work with the lifelong effects of adoption on adoptive parents, birth parents, and adult adoptees. You won’t need to spend our sessions educating me on what adoption is, why reunion is complicated, or why the “chosen child” story stopped being enough.
I use EMDR, Brainspotting, and Accelerated Resolution Therapy because the patterns adoption creates are stored in the body, not just in your thoughts. These approaches work directly with those responses so that they stop controlling how you live your daily life.
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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Most talk therapy helps you understand why you react the way you do, and that understanding matters. But knowing why the reaction is there doesn’t always stop the reaction. Body-based approaches like EMDR, Brainspotting, and ART work with the part of your brain that drives those automatic reactions, the part that talk alone often can't reach. And because you've already done the work of understanding your responses, you're coming in with a head start.
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All three involve focusing on a specific memory or experience while your brain works through it in a new way. In EMDR, I guide your eyes back and forth while you hold a memory in mind. Brainspotting uses a fixed eye position to find where stress is stuck in your body. Accelerated Resolution Therapy uses guided imagery and eye movements and is designed to work in fewer sessions. None of these require you to describe painful experiences in detail out loud. Most clients say the experience is intense but manageable, and many notice a shift after just a few sessions. The memory is still there, but it doesn’t set you off the way it used to.
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Yes. Race and adoption are deeply intertwined for transracial adoptees, and separating them rarely helps. Growing up in a family that didn’t share your racial background creates specific experiences around belonging, cultural identity, and navigating microaggressions that are directly connected to the adoption. I work with transracial adoptees regularly and understand how these layers interact.
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Absolutely. DNA discoveries are one of the most common reasons adult adoptees reach out to me. Whether you’re deciding whether to make contact, managing the emotional weight of new information, navigating an active relationship with your biological family, or processing a reunion that didn’t go the way you hoped, this is a core part of my practice.
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Sessions are $250. 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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No. You need to be physically located anywhere in California during our sessions because my license (LCSW #68507) covers the entire state. I’m also licensed in Maryland and Idaho.
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That ambivalence is one of the most common reasons adoptees reach out. You don’t need to have made a decision before starting therapy. Part of the work is helping you sort through the competing feelings, the curiosity, the guilt, the fear of what you’ll find or won’t find, so you can make a decision from clarity rather than anxiety.