Homing in on Adoption: Dreaming, Drawing, and Telling Stories in Relational Psychotherapy

ABSTRACT Adoptees and their families long for a relational home in which they can feel safe and accepted. Parents’ and children’s divergent histories, experiences, and visions of the future can make that vision a challenging one to achieve. As an adoptive mother and a clinical psychologist, the author is deeply familiar with seldom considered aspects of the adoption experience, including mismatched rhythms, struggles for recognition, loss aversion, and uncertainty borne of absences in family stories. This article presents a relational model for treating adoptees and their families that highlights parent engagement and employs both nonverbal and narrative modalities so that a joint vocabulary can develop, leading to new stories that are co-created, coherent, and sustaining despite the gaps they inevitably contain. Adoption thus construed becomes not just a loss, but also an opportunity for growth for all three of the parties to the adoption triangle. The article outlines key developmental dilemmas, presents a repertoire of techniques for drawing out nascent self-experience, and employs illustrative clinical vignettes to assist clinicians in encountering the often overwhelming affects and impasses common in working with these families.