Coaching for Adoption Reunion and Adoption-Trauma Competent Support

Coaching for Adoptees and their Adoptive Parents

With over 13 years of experience, I’ve served over 1,500 students (ages 10-23) and many of their families. Most of my coaching practice has been dedicated to helping older kids, teens, and young adults find success in the classroom. Many of my clients have been diagnosed with learning, attention, emotional, or behavior disorders. While I do not offer any medical or clinical advice, nor do I offer any diagnostic services, I’ve helped countless students and their support networks develop systems that help struggling students be successful. As a result, many of my clients have not only discovered their path to success in academics and beyond, but they’ve developed a sense of confidence, higher self-worth, and happiness.

I’ve expanded my coaching services to meet the needs of adoptees and adoptive parents. Babies and young children are biologically wired to stay with their biological mother – their gestational carrier. The first social bond any of us ever formed, was in-utero. When our biological mother was pregnant with each of us, we grew under her heartbeat. We heard her voice. We knew how her body moved, the unique way she walked.

When babies and young children are separated from their biological mothers – even when it’s truly a safer option and in the best interest of the child – their brains experience trauma and loss. Many adoptees experience adoption trauma across their lifetime, regardless of why they were relinquished for adoption and regardless of how amazing their adoptive families might be. Adoptees are many times more likely to struggle with mental health problems, substance use disorders, relationships and friendships, fear of abandonment, and more. Adoptees frequently struggle in school. They may have identity crises as they struggle to understand who they are and where they come from. This problem can be even more pronounced when an adoptee is raised in a closed adoption and has no communication with their biological families.

Every adoptive family should prioritize working with adoption trauma competent health care providers, from pediatricians to therapists. When adopted children receive treatment from professionals who recognize the many ways adoption impacts adoptees across their entire lifetimes, these adoptees can receive the support they need to heal and thrive.

So how can Liberated Bloom coaching support adoptees and their families? Here are a few scenarios:

Adoptive Parent Coaching: Parents who have already adopted a child may find themselves overwhelmed by the reality of adoption trauma. Adoption trauma can present itself as intense temper tantrums, self-harm, attachment problems, relationship struggles, eating disorders, and more. While medical help and specialized therapy is a must for these children and their adoptive parents, coaching with Liberated Bloom can help adoptive parents:

-Feel heard and validated in their experiences.

-Understand key differences between parenting kept children and adopted children.

-Collaborate and problem solve with an adult adoptee.

-Receive support for respectful parenting of an adoptee.

-Develop confidence in their parenting skills.

-Provide the adoption trauma competent support their adoptees need to flourish.

Adoption Reunion Coaching: Adoptees who were raised in a closed adoption often consider finding their biological families, which includes biological parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, and more. Not unlike people who are raised by their biological parents, adoptees often have a real need and desire to know who they came from and who their ancestors are. Adoptees should always consult with their doctor and licensed mental health professionals for medical advice, especially for the mental health repercussions of adoption reunion. In addition, adoption reunion coaching can help provide specialized support for adoptees that might look like:

-Understanding the pro’s and con’s of reunion

-Learning about the stages of adoption reunion

-Navigating the feelings and experiences associated with the stages of adoption reunion

-Healthy relationship building after reunion

-Addressing the shame and guilt many adoptees, biological parents, and adoptive parents may experience during reunion

-Learning how to use commercial DNA testing kits and how to understand your results

-Uploading your results to other DNA testing platforms

While my focus and lifelong dedication is to serving my fellow adoptees, I also provide these coaching services to biological parents searching for children they’ve relinquished and to other families members impacted by adoption (biological siblings, adoptive siblings, grandparents, children of adoptees, and so on.)

Therapist and Clinician Consulting Services: It is vital that adoptees and their caregivers seek out adoption trauma competent health care providers. Sadly, in the United States, these health care providers can be hard to find. Liberated Bloom provides consulting services for health care providers and other professionals who serve adoptees. Health care providers can learn firsthand from adult adoptees what our unique experiences look, feel, and sound like. Health care providers can learn vocabulary that they can use to not only validate adoptee experiences, but also teach adoptees so that they can finally have words to explain their unique experiences.

Adoptees who are still children absolutely need specialized mental and physical health care from adoption trauma competent providers. But it’s not only children who need this support. Adoption trauma is real, and it impacts adoptees across their entire lives. It is very common for adoptees to really begin struggling with their adoption when they’re adults, often after having kids of their own. Adoption trauma can also be identified as a core source of pain when struggling individuals seek out mental health support for other issues. Liberated Bloom provides high-quality education and coaching services for providers who want to better serve their adoptee clients.

No content on this page is intended as medical advice. Always consult with your doctor and licensed mental health professionals.

Please note that I do not offer coaching for people currently seeking to adopt children.

Welcome to my blossoming life

My name is Elizabeth, and my vision is that every person has the opportunity to bloom into a better, brighter, and more beautiful life every day. My mission in life is to continue blossoming into my realest, best life while helping others blossom into their realest, best life, too!

I use they/she pronouns, and I live in Illinois. I’m raising my two kids with their dad (who is also my business partner, ally, and soulfriend). I’m genderqueer and lesbian. I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD, anxiety, and OCD, and I've been designing my life to accommodate these challenges and opportunities. I love art, and I draw with color pencil and chalk pastel.I love cooking – my kitchen inspirations come from Pennsylvania Dutch, Eastern European, and Mediterranean cuisines. I also write, dream, and create all kinds of things!

I was adopted through a closed, domestic adoption when I was 4 months old. My adoption and reunion with biological family have had profound impacts on my life.

I graduated with distinction from the University of Illinois in 2010 with a degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology. I immediately started my first business, a tutoring company that has served thousands of middle school, high school, and college students and their families.

I developed a passion for serving communities marginalized by harmful practices and policies, so I ran a successful campaign for my local school board.

After I was elected to school board, I unwittingly began a four-year journey filled with challenge, failure, struggle, success, growth, and self-realization. I saw a future for myself within public education, and I poured my life into being the best school board member and parliamentarian I could. I co-authored the very first antiracism resolution for a school district in the state of Illinois, and many school districts followed our lead. I wrote and advocated for many resolutions aimed at improving public education, especially increasing funding. I was elected by other school board members to lead this work and to advocate for policy reform at state delegate assemblies.

All of this was happening while a global pandemic burned down life as I’d known it.

I gained friends and lost friends. I loved from the depths of my soul and had my heart broken. I entered into reunion with my biological mother and learned how to build relationships out of the trauma that is adoption. My lifelong struggles with addiction came to a head when I finally chose alcohol sobriety in July 2022.

I felt really lonely and incredibly overwhelmed almost every day as a school board member. I struggled with addiction and suicidal ideations. I was new to politics and I was bombarded with painful lessons from my novice mistakes every day. This led me to become hateful and distrustful of everyone for a while. I leaned on toxic friendships, thinking that toxic friendships were better than none at all.

I began to question everything and everyone in my life. Who am I? What is my gender? Who am I attracted to? Where am I going? What do I want out of life?

In my most broken moments, I cried out for help. Harry Styles’ hit song, “As It Was,” perfectly captured how I was experiencing life at the age of 33: Ringin’ the bell, and nobody’s comin’ to help.

And finally, someone did come to help. That person was me.

Nobody knew my dark hole as well as I did. Nobody knew my rock bottom that way I did, so nobody else knew how to build a ladder to get out. I was painfully lonely because nobody understood what I needed from my friendships and relationships, and I learned that I would have to say what I needed from the people who loved me. I never considered that I’d lost my voice – I had been in the public eye for years and I felt very comfortable being a loud, passionate advocate for others.

I realized I had rarely used my own voice to advocate for myself, for what I needed to be happy. I realized I had burned myself down to keep others warm and trapped myself in this dark hole. Every day that I abandoned myself, every time I chose what someone else wanted instead of what I wanted, every moment I gave up my chance to choose myself, kept me at my lonely rock bottom. And I decided to come out.

I had to acknowledge really hard truths about myself. I started healing and growing. I developed really strong boundaries and expectations. I became very selective about who and what was allowed in my life.

Now I am combining all of my lived experiences, along with my skills and expertise as an entrepreneur, educator, and coach, to work with folks of all walks of life who are ready to blossom into their next best season.