Adoption Issues Help for Adoption Issues at Lukin Center Expert Adoption Counseling in Northern New Jersey Adoption is more than a life-altering family event. It’s an ongoing experience that affects birth families, adoptees, and adoptive families forever. Even the most successful adoption experiences are complex and nuanced, filled with joy, love, pain, loss, and questions. If adoption is part of your story, it’s important to recognize that your journey is a lifelong one. Understanding the ways that adoption influences your feelings and behaviors can help you live a healthy life and maintain healthy relationships. Adoption Issues at a Glance Adoption is a life-altering event with lifelong effects Adoption Issues affect parents, adoptees, and birth parents Adoption is a complex experience Working through Adoption Issues can improve relationships, behavior, and self-esteem With quality therapy, Adoption Issues can be opportunities for healing and strengthening families Treatment for Adoption Issues may include individual and family therapy Adoption is a complex, lifelong experience. Tough issues can be opportunities for healing and strengthening family bonds. Adoption Issues can surface at any time for birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees—even decades after the event, or into adulthood. Learning that you’ve been adopted can stir intense feelings of grief and loss and create issues with identity and independence. Parenting an adopted child can be a complex experience. And processing your own decisions as a birth parent can bring up deep feelings and questions. Your highly trained Lukin Center therapist can guide you through proven methods and therapies to help you process both positive and negative emotions. Therapy for Adoption Issues can help you learn to strengthen bonds, deepen trust, and heal personally. What are Adoption Issues? Adoption Issues affect every area of life for adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth parents, regardless of the circumstances or adoption story. You might not even realize that a feeling or behavior is connected to your adoption experience. Clinicians separate common Adoption Issues into seven categories, though the feelings overlap and combine (Silverstein and Kaplan 1982). Exploring these feelings with a trained professional can help you use them to strengthen relationships and process your own experiences: Loss Rejection Guilt and Shame Grief Identity Intimacy Mastery/Control Lukin Center therapists have helped hundreds of individuals and families in the northern New Jersey community process, accept, understand, and cope with adoption Issues. How can Lukin Center Help Me with Adoption Issues? At Lukin Center, our specially trained therapists help families and individuals process Adoption Issues at all stages and situations, including: Families in the process of adoption or adjusting to adoption Transitioning relationships from foster care to adoption Teens understanding their adoptive status Closed, open, and semi-open adoption arrangements Adults dealing with lifelong issues around belonging, identity, and self-esteem Birth parents dealing with feelings of loss and guilt Adoptive parents coping with family issues, behaviors, and parent-child connection Lukin Center therapists use a combination of proven methods and techniques to address Adoption Issues in individuals and families. Your therapist will likely build your Adoption Issues Therapy around specific Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) techniques based in problem-solving. CBT has been proven to be very effective in helping people who struggle with Adoption Issues recognize their own patterns and change their thinking and behaviors. CBT is an effective method for treating Adoption Issues in both individual and family settings.
