Benefits of Adoption Search and Reunion Counseling
Adoption searches and reunions are often very emotional experiences for adoptees and birth relatives. Contact with lost relatives is often overwhelming, confusing, and unlike any other relationship adoptees and birth families have. Adoption search and reunion counseling can be key to helping adoptees and birth relatives to have a satisfying long-term reunion relationship. Counseling can help relatives new to reunions with understanding what they are experiencing, what their relative is experiencing and, help to unravel adoption reunion complexities.
Working with an adoption counselor can provide adoption reunion help with support, guidance, and insight on issues of:
- How to talk to the rest of your family about wanting to find your relative
- A safe place to express feelings of guilt, loss, loyalty, fears of rejection, and other intense feelings so you do not overwhelm your relative
- Sorting through expectations of what you thought your reunion relationship would be and adjusting to the realities of who your relative is and the new relationship
- Deciding if you should keep your secrets to yourself or if your relative has a right to the information
- How to phrase things for difficult conversations that you need to have
- Deciding if you are ready for a visit with your newly found relative and how to structure the visit so it meets your needs
- Processing identity issues
- Help with establishing boundaries in relationships
- Understanding yours and your relative’s relinquishment trauma
- Integration of your newly found relative into preexisting relationships with family members
- Education on the keys to successful reunion relationships
- Learning about what causes adoption reunion obsession and genetic sexual attraction
- Understanding of adoption reunion stages
- How and when to open a closed adoption for youth
- What to do when your child is contacted by a relative through social media
- The complexities of direct to consumer DNA testing and social media
Working with an adoption counselor can support and guide you in establishing a relationship that works for you with your newly found relative(s). Adoption reunion counseling formats -individual and family counseling, and support groups – can all be helpful during these complex search and reunion experiences. Family therapy appointments can be with established family relationships or with new reunion relationships. If out of town relatives cannot attend a session, teletherapy can be a helpful option.
Adoption Search and Reunion Training
Organizations interested in learning more about the Adoption Search and Reunion should visit the Adoption Search and Reunion: A Clinical Perspective training webpage for training description and learning objectives.
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