Online Therapy for Adult Adoptees in San Diego, CA
For adult adoptees sorting through identity, relationships, reunion, and grief. Serving San Diego, La Jolla, Del Mar, Carlsbad, Encinitas, and throughout San Diego County.
Adoption-Competent Therapist in San Diego
You’ve spent years answering everyone else’s questions about your adoption, and you’ve barely had space to sit with your own.
You’re at a barbecue in Scripps Ranch or a neighborhood event in Carmel Valley, and someone makes a comment about your child looking “just like you.” Your friends laugh. You smile. But the comment lands differently when you don’t know who you look like, when you’ve never seen your own features reflected in another person’s face, or when the one photo you have of your birth mother is a blurry snapshot from the early 90s that you keep in a drawer you rarely open.
Maybe you got good at adapting, at fitting into new schools in Carlsbad and new neighborhoods in Poway, because that was survival. Now you’re an adult with roots in San Diego and a life that works, and the adaptability that served you then is showing up as an inability to commit, to stay close, to let anyone really know you.
Or maybe adoption has never been something you thought about much until recently. You did a 23andMe test on a whim at a friend’s house in Encinitas, and three weeks later, you’re looking at a list of biological relatives you didn’t know existed. One of them lives in North Park. You haven’t reached out. You haven’t told your adoptive parents. You’re not sure what you’re supposed to feel, and you don’t have anyone in your life who can help you figure that out.
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 tell your partner the truth about something you’ve been holding back, maybe that you’re thinking about searching for your birth mother, or that their comment about your “real family” hurt more than you let on, and the conversation doesn’t blow up the way you expected. You stay at the dinner table in your Rancho Bernardo kitchen instead of retreating to the garage.
You’re hiking Torrey Pines with your best friend, and she asks about your birth family, and for the first time, you answer without performing, without giving the sanitized version or the joke you use to deflect. You tell her what you’re actually going through, and the friendship deepens instead of cracking.
You meet a biological relative for the first time at a coffee shop in Hillcrest, and you can be present for it. You feel the nerves, the hope, the grief, all of it, and you stay grounded through the conversation instead of going numb or flooding with emotion so intense you can’t think straight.
Your adoptive mother calls from Poway and brings up something that has always triggered a guilt response in you, a comment about how she “chose” you, and you respond from a calm place instead of either capitulating or snapping. The call ends differently than it used to.
You attend your child’s school event in Encinitas and make it through the “where is your family from?” conversation with another parent without your stomach knotting. You answer on your own terms.
You stop volunteering for every committee and saying yes to every request at work in Mission Hills because you’ve untangled the compulsion to earn your place from the genuine desire to contribute. Your evenings free up. You sleep better.
You make a decision about a biological family member your DNA test surfaced, someone in Carlsbad you’ve been thinking about contacting for months, and you make it from a grounded place. You reach out, or you decide not to, and either way, you don’t spend the next six months second-guessing yourself.
You notice that the constant low-grade scanning, watching for signs that your partner is pulling away, reading into a delayed text, bracing when they seem quiet, has loosened. You come home to your house in Del Mar, your partner is in a bad mood from work, and you don’t immediately assume it has something to do with you. That shift alone gives you back hours of your week.
Why online therapy works for adult adoptees in San Diego:
Who this works well for:
You can work with me from your home in Scripps Ranch, La Jolla, Del Mar, Encinitas, Carlsbad, Poway, Rancho Bernardo, Carmel Valley, Mission Hills, North Park, Hillcrest, Chula Vista, or anywhere in San Diego County without adding another drive to your week.
For adoption work specifically, telehealth offers a kind of privacy that in-person sessions sometimes can’t. Being able to do this work from your own space, without walking through a waiting room or sitting in a parking lot afterward, makes the process more accessible.
I see adult adoptees in all of California.
I work with adult adoptees in San Diego from every adoption background: domestic infant, international, transracial, foster care, kinship, military-connected adoptions, and late-discovery (people who found out through DNA testing or late family disclosure). You don’t need to have had a difficult adoption to benefit from this work. Many of my clients had loving families and still carry unresolved questions, grief, or relationship patterns that trace back to adoption.
This is a good fit if you’re processing a DNA discovery, weighing a search for birth family, navigating a reunion or dealing with its aftermath, noticing patterns in your relationships that connect to adoption, or finding that identity questions have gotten louder instead of quieter.
This may not be the right fit if you need help locating birth family members (I can refer you to search resources), require medication management, or need immediate crisis 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
Frequently Asked Questions
Still have questions? Take a look at the FAQ or reach out anytime. If you’re feeling ready, go ahead and schedule your first session with me here.
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Often, yes. Military families experience frequent relocations that can compound the instability adoption already introduces. If you were adopted into a military family, you may have experienced multiple disruptions to community and peer relationships on top of the original separation from your birth family. That layered experience creates specific patterns around attachment and belonging that adoption-competent therapy can address directly.
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That concern is one of the most common things I hear from adult adoptees. The fear of hurting your adoptive parents, or of being seen as ungrateful, can keep you in a holding pattern for years. Therapy can help you get clear on what you want from a search, separate from what everyone else wants or fears, so you can make the decision from a grounded place and navigate the conversations with your family from there.
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It varies. Some clients come in with a specific focus, like a DNA discovery or a reunion, and find 10 to 15 sessions is enough. Others are working through lifelong patterns and stay six months to a year. We check in regularly about how things are going and when you’re ready to wrap up.
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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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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.