Online Therapy for Adult Adoptees in San Jose, CA
For adult adoptees sorting through identity, relationships, reunion, and grief. Serving San Jose, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Cupertino, and surrounding Silicon Valley communities.
Adoption Competent Therapy in San Jose & Silicon Valley, CA
Maybe the DNA test was the trigger. You took it like everyone else on your team in Mountain View or Sunnyvale, expecting ancestry percentages, conversation material for lunch. Instead, you’re staring at a list of biological relatives with match scores and shared centimorgans, and you have more data about your genetic family than you’ve ever had in your life, but no idea what to do with it. One of them lives in Fremont. You’ve driven past their zip code. You haven’t reached out.
Or maybe becoming a parent was the shift. San Jose has one of the highest rates of married couples with children in California, and plenty of families here delayed having kids while building careers. When your child arrived, something cracked open. You look at your daughter’s face and think about the woman who looked at yours the same way, and the questions that felt manageable for twenty years now feel urgent.
You’re up at 2am in your Saratoga house, feeding your son, and instead of thinking about the morning stand-up meeting, you’re thinking about whether your birth mother held you like this, and whether she wonders about you now.
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 adult adoptees helps
You open an email from a DNA match, a possible biological aunt in Santa Clara, and you read it without your hands shaking. You take a day to think about how to respond instead of either firing off a reply in fifteen minutes or ignoring it for three months. You craft a response that reflects what you actually want, not what fear or desperate hope is dictating.
You’re at a dinner party in Los Altos and someone asks where your family is from, and you answer on your own terms instead of cycling through the internal calculation of how much to share, how to handle the follow-up questions, whether to mention you’re adopted at all. The conversation moves on, and you move on with it.
You tell your partner in your Campbell kitchen that you want to search for your birth mother, and you say it clearly instead of hinting or testing. They ask questions, some of which are clumsy, and you don’t interpret their clumsiness as rejection. You have a conversation instead of an argument.
You take your kids to Happy Hollow Park in San Jose and another parent asks about your daughter’s hair texture or eye color, and instead of the old jolt of anxiety, you answer naturally. You don’t replay the interaction for the next two hours.
You stop volunteering for every project at work in Sunnyvale because you’ve untangled the compulsion to earn your place from your genuine ambition. You say no to the thing that doesn’t interest you, and nobody discards you for it. Your weekends open up. You have energy for the things that matter.
You sit with your aging adoptive father in Milpitas and bring up questions about your adoption that you’ve been holding for fifteen years, and the conversation is hard, but you stay present through it instead of backing off the second his face changes.
You notice that the chronic low-level anxiety you’ve carried for years, the one that made you check your phone constantly, replay conversations, and brace for bad news, has loosened. You drive home to Santa Clara after work and you’re just driving, not running scenarios in your head about what could go wrong. That quiet is new.
You make a decision about a biological family member, whether to meet, whether to write back, whether to wait, and the decision is yours. You don’t outsource it to your partner or to an online forum. You sit with it, you talk it through in therapy, and you choose from a grounded place.
Why online therapy works for adult adoptees in Silicon Valley:
Who this works well for:
Online therapy means you can access adoption-competent care from your home in Cupertino, your office in Mountain View, or a private room anywhere in Silicon Valley.
All sessions are through secure telehealth. You can work with me from your home in San Jose, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Los Altos, Campbell, Saratoga, Milpitas, Fremont, or anywhere else in California.
I work with adult adoptees in San Jose and throughout the Bay Area from all adoption backgrounds: domestic infant, international, transracial, foster care, kinship, and late-discovery adoptees who found out through DNA testing or family disclosure. You don’t need a dramatic adoption story to benefit from this work. Many of my clients had stable, loving families and still carry unresolved questions, grief, or relationship patterns connected to adoption.
This is a good fit if you’re processing DNA results, considering a search for birth family, navigating a reunion or its aftermath, noticing adoption-shaped patterns in your relationships or parenting, or finding that identity questions have grown louder as you’ve gotten older.
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’m Summer Verhines, Licensed Clinical Social Worker (California LCSW #68507) with C.A.S.E. certification in adoption competency. C.A.S.E. (the Center for Adoption Support and Education) provides the leading training program for therapists working with adopted individuals and families, covering how adoption affects development, identity, attachment, and family dynamics across the lifespan. I spent nine years in child welfare before becoming a therapist, facilitating placements, completing home studies, supporting birth parents through the decision to place their child for adoption, and working with adoptive families in the years after finalization. I’ve seen adoption from every angle, and that experience shapes how I work with adult adoptees now.
I use EMDR, Brainspotting, and Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) because adoption-related responses are stored in the body, not just the mind. These approaches help your nervous system update, so you can change how you move through your daily life rather than just understanding why you react the way you do.
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 therapy you’ve tried was likely talk-based, which means you understood the patterns but couldn’t change the reactions. Body-based approaches like EMDR, Brainspotting, and ART work with the nervous system directly, which is where adoption-related responses are stored. Many clients describe previous therapy as helpful for understanding but not for changing, and that’s the gap this work fills.
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Yes. DNA discoveries are one of the most common reasons adult adoptees contact me, particularly in this area where DNA testing is widespread. Whether you’re deciding whether to reach out, processing unexpected results, navigating a new relationship with your biological family, or dealing with a reunion that went sideways, this is core to what I do.
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It depends on the scope. Some clients come in with a focused question, like processing a DNA discovery or deciding about a search, and find 10 to 15 sessions gives them clarity. Others are working through patterns that have shaped their relationships and identity for decades and stay six months to a year. We’ll check in regularly about progress and when you’re ready to wrap up.
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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 be different. I ask questions to understand your adoption history, your current patterns, and what feels most pressing. We don’t jump into EMDR or Brainspotting right away. Most clients start body-based work in sessions two or three, once we have a clear picture of what we’re working on and you feel ready. The first session is also your chance to see whether this feels like the right fit.
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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.