Online Therapy for Birth Parents
Grief counseling for birth parents who placed a child for adoption, whether it happened recently or decades ago
Throughout all of California, Idaho, & Maryland via Secure Telehealth
The grief you were never allowed to have…
You placed a child for adoption, maybe last year, maybe decades ago, and somewhere along the way you got the message that you were supposed to move on, be grateful, and feel at peace with your decision.
But that’s not what happened.
Instead, you carry something that doesn't have a name, a loss that doesn't fit into any category people understand.
Your child is alive somewhere, maybe even in contact with you, and yet you grieve them. You might have other children now, a whole life built around this absence, and still the ache is there, on birthdays, on holidays, on ordinary Tuesdays when something small cracks you open without warning.
You may have never told anyone the full explanation of what this experience has been like for you. Maybe you've never told anyone at all.
Why this grief doesn’t fade the way people expect
Research on birth parents confirms what you already know in your body: this loss doesn't diminish with time the way everyone assumes it will.
Studies show that approximately 75% of birth mothers still experience significant grief 12 to 20 years after placement, and even more striking, nearly half report that their grief actually intensified over the years rather than faded.
One study found birth mothers grieved more intensely than parents whose children had died.
Why would grief over a living child be harder than grief over death? Because death provides something adoption doesn’t: finality, permission to mourn openly, social rituals, condolences, and social support.
What you got instead was silence, or worse, congratulations on your “selfless choice.”
Grieving someone who is still alive
Researchers call it "disenfranchised grief," meaning grief that society doesn't recognize as legitimate.
You made a "choice," the logic goes, so you don't get to grieve it. You're supposed to feel good about giving your child a better life; you’re supposed to be proud, not devastated.
So you learned to carry the emotions quietly, to say you're fine when you're not, and to compartmentalize so thoroughly that sometimes you wonder if the feelings are still there… until something breaks through and you realize they never left.
How birth parent grief shows up, even years or decades later
Birth parent grief doesn't stay neatly contained. It bleeds into everything.
You might struggle with sleep, either unable to fall asleep because your mind won't stop or waking in the early hours with that familiar weight on your chest. You might have a hard time with intimacy because sex and pregnancy and loss got tangled together somewhere along the way. Your relationships might suffer, either because you've kept this secret, or because the grief has built walls you didn't consciously choose.
If you have other children, you might find yourself parenting from a place of anxiety, overprotecting them in ways you can't fully explain, or struggling with guilt that you're raising these children when you didn't raise that one.
Some birth parents experience secondary infertility at rates far higher than the general population, their bodies holding what their minds tried to move past.
And then there are the triggers: the birthday that arrives every year whether you're ready or not, the holidays when you're supposed to be happy, running into someone who knew you "before," seeing a child who's the age yours would be now, a pregnancy announcement from a friend that shouldn't hurt this much, but it does.
You may have already tried to address this. Maybe you saw a therapist who was kind but didn't really understand, who treated this like any other grief.
Maybe you tried a support group but felt like an outsider, or read books that helped you feel less alone but didn't change anything in your body. Maybe you've tried journaling, or staying busy, or just white-knuckling through the hard days and hoping time would eventually do its job.
The problem is that birth parent grief doesn’t respond to the usual approaches…
Birth parent grief doesn't respond to the usual approaches because it isn't stored as thoughts or memories you can reason with.
It lives in your body, in the way you flinch when someone asks how many children you have, in the tightness that arrives every year around the birthday, in the way your chest closes when you see a pregnancy announcement.
Understanding why you grieve hasn't made the grief softer, because the part of you that carries it doesn't speak the same language as the part of you that can explain it.
How therapy helps birth parents
Many birth parents describe feeling frozen in time, like part of them is still the person they were at the moment of relinquishment, stuck in that hospital room or that adoption agency office.
The years pass but something inside of you hasn't moved forward. Therapy helps you unstick from that moment so you can finally live in the present instead of being pulled back into the past.
You can stop the mental loop that replays the events leading up to placement, the "what ifs" and "if onlys" that run on repeat at 3am, so you can sleep through the night and wake up without that familiar dread already waiting for you.
You can let go of the self-punishment patterns that have followed you for years, the way you've unconsciously made yourself pay for a decision that was never as simple as other people made it sound. You can stop sabotaging your own happiness and actually let good things stay.
You can tell your partner, your other children, or your family what you've been carrying and have the conversation go differently than you've always feared it would. The secret can stop taking up so much space in your life, and your relationships can finally have room to deepen.
You can start trusting yourself in relationships again. Right now the grief may be showing up as jealousy or difficulty with commitment or walls you didn't consciously build, and those patterns can begin to shift so you can actually let people in.
You can parent your other children without the guilt and anxiety bleeding through, without overprotecting them in ways you can't fully explain or holding back because somewhere in your body you're afraid of losing them too.
You can get through your child's birthday, the anniversary of the placement, the holidays, without losing a week to depression afterward. These dates can become sad but manageable, something you move through rather than something that flattens you.
If you have open adoption contact, you can navigate it from a grounded place, so visits or updates nourish you instead of sending you into a spiral that takes days to recover from.
And if reunion is on the table, or your placed child reaches out, you can make clear-headed decisions instead of reacting from panic or desperation or the fear of losing them again.
This loss will always be part of your story, but it can stop running your life.
Hi, I’m Summer
I spent nine years working in child welfare and adoptions before becoming a therapist, which means I understand what you may have experienced within that system.
Whether your placement felt like a clear decision you made with full support, or something that happened to you under circumstances you'd never choose again, I've worked with birth parents across that entire spectrum. You won't have to convince me that your experience was complicated.
The therapeutic approaches I use are designed to work with the grief your body is carrying. You won’t have to narrate every detail of what happened to make progress, and you won’t need to have the right words or a perfectly organized timeline of your experience. Some of the most important shifts happen with grief and memories that you can't fully put into language, the kind that live in your body's reactions rather than in your conscious thoughts.
The goal is to help those reactions catch up to what part of you already knows: that you survived the placement, that you're allowed to grieve, and that the grief doesn't have to run your life anymore.
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
FAQs about adoption therapy for birth parents
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Yes. Many birth parents don't seek support until years or even decades after placement, and sometimes the grief gets buried under the demands of daily life and only surfaces later in life, like reaching menopause, having grandchildren, or a reunion possibility emerging. There's no expiration date on getting support.
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Therapy is confidential, and what you share with me stays between us. Within our sessions, you control what we talk about and when. Some clients eventually decide they want to disclose to family members or partners, and I can help you think through how to do that if you choose, but that's your decision, not a requirement.
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Open adoption contact brings its own challenges. You might feel grateful for the connection and gutted by it at the same time, or struggle with boundaries, or feel like you're walking on eggshells with the adoptive family, or find that every visit sends you into an emotional spiral for days afterward. Therapy can help you navigate these relationships from a more grounded place so that contact feels fulfilling instead of emotionally depleting.
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That's very common. Numbness is a protective response. When feelings are too overwhelming for too long, the nervous system learns to shut them down. That doesn't mean the feelings are gone, just that they're buried. Part of our work together can be helping you feel those emotions again without getting emotionally overwhelmed.
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For many birth parents, it's both. Grief is the natural response to loss, and trauma is what happens when an experience overwhelms your nervous system's ability to process it. Relinquishment often involves both, especially if the circumstances around placement were coercive, rushed, or involved pressure from others. The body-based therapies I use address both grief and trauma, so we don't have to separate them out neatly.
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I work with adoptive parents, adult adoptees, birth parents, and people grieving infertility and pregnancy loss. Each of these experiences creates specific kinds of grief and stress that general therapy often misses, so I've built my practice around them. All sessions are individual, not couples or family.
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I’m licensed in California, Maryland, and Idaho, and all sessions are online.