Therapy For Adoption

Planning for Adoption Raises Important Emotional Questions: Therapy Can Help You Decide

Sometimes adoption is what you imagined for your family and other times, it’s not. No matter how you come to your decision to adopt, there is often a complexity of emotions that an individual or couple experiences: excitement, uncertainty, anxiety, and sometimes grief. 

Adoption raises important questions not only about planning for your family, but also about the logistics of the adoption system (for example, do you want a closed or open adoption?). At Tribeca Maternity, we help individuals and couples decide what they want for their family, and how to approach the emotional and practical path to making those wants real.

The Adoption Process Can Be Excruciating

Bureaucracy is filled with uncertainty and can bring families under scrutiny. Adoption is complicated and often completely out of your control. You are likely faced with mountains of paperwork and days, months, or years waiting for your child. At our Lower Manhattan offices, as well as in our online therapy offerings, we won’t let you be alone in the agony of this process and its disruptions. 

After the Adoption, Leading Your New Family 

When the long wait and all the heavy scrambling are over, you take your child home. In a way that may feel sudden: you have a new family. It can be challenging to balance the responsibilities of caring for a new child while also incorporating them into your existing family system. At Tribeca Maternity, we work with adoptive parents on a variety of issues that may surface during this adjustment, including:

• The emotional experience for each family member of bringing the new child home
• Getting to know and caring for your child
• Practical baby care
• The transition to parenting
• Developing and deepening a new family culture
• Connecting with your new child and what that means to you
• Sharing your adoption story with family and friends

Couples Are in This Unique Experience Together

When adopting with a partner, adoption, like many life changes, can be all-consuming and leave couples with little space to focus on other aspects of their relationship. Couples therapy presents an opportunity to focus on how each partner is working through this unique experience individually, as well as how it is affecting the couple as a unit. In couples therapy, we’ll look together at how much space the adoption process is taking up within a relationship to find the right balance, and help couples meet each other’s needs emotionally during the often grueling logistics of adoption.