About Course
An adoption-competent counseling training grounded in a study of adult adoptees (interpretative phenomenological analysis, or IPA) and the Adoptee Lifespan Framework. The course reorganizes eight chapters of material into short, video-first lessons that help clinicians feel the adoptee experience and notice their own reactions, not just learn terms.
Learning objectives
After completing this course, participants will be able to:
- Describe adoption as a lifelong developmental context using the Adoptee Lifespan Framework, and identify the events that move it from the background to the foreground of a client's life.
- Identify adoption-related grief, including disenfranchised grief and the gratitude bind, and describe responses that stay with the loss rather than trying to fix it.
- Apply differential reasoning to distinguish presentations connected to a client's adoption from those that are not, avoiding both over-attribution and adoption-avoidance.
- Demonstrate adoption-aware language and intake practices, including following a client's own language and repairing ruptures in the therapeutic relationship.
- Differentiate the clinical considerations of transracial, intercountry, kinship, and late-discovery adoptees, and adjacent donor-conceived and NPE clients; treat the record and policy systems around adoption as clinical material; and identify when to seek consultation, referral, or co-treatment.
Course Content
Orientation
-
Before we begin