Conference Session & Workshop Descriptions
*Content subject to change
2024 session descriptions to be released in October
Friday November 3, 2023
*All times listed are in Central Daylight Time
Keynote Speaker, Susan Ito, MFA
CEUs: 1.75 Total for LMSWs, LPCs, LMFTs
The Arc of Adoption is Long (And So Is Your Story)
Adoption is a lifelong experience with infinite milestones including placement, search and sometimes reunion, moments of understanding identity, family and more. The arc of an adopted life changes shape and form throughout a lifetime. Susan Ito, author of I Would Meet You Anywhere, will chart the 30-year journey of writing this memoir, how it shifted and changed over time, and share with participants a lens with which to reflect on their own lifelong narratives.
Friday Afternoon Educational Sessions
Session 1 1:00 PM - 2:45 PM
CEUs: 1.5 Total for LMSWs, LPCs, LMFTs
A. “You’re Not My Real Mom!” And 9 Other Real Adoptive-Parenting Conversations, Barbara Herel & Lori Holden
As adoptive parents, weaving adoption conversations into our daily lives is one of our greatest responsibilities. This workshop will help hopeful adoptive and newly adoptive parents create a comfortable environment for their child to ask questions; and help HAPs/APs to start and keep adoption conversations going from childhood into adulthood.
HAPs and APs will understand that being approachable and receptive to their child’s adoptive experiences is vital for their well being. This workshop will help HAPs and APs answer questions that will come up at some point in their family’s adoptive journey – questions from their child, family members, and even strangers. HAPs and APs will learn how to handle questions and have conversations (or not) with straightforwardness, sensitivity, and humor.
B. Managing our inner wounds with mind/body/energy training, Danielle Gaudette
This presentation will go over the 8 Steps of self-Mastery that Danielle Gaudette wrote about in "Healing Tree", sharing about how to bring the mind back to the body, allow yourself to feel, let go of self-judgment and learn self-acceptance and self-love. She will follow this with a short training practice and meditation so attendees can experience it.
Session 2 2:45 PM - 4:15 PM
CEUs: 1.5 Total for LMSWs, LPCs, LMFTs
A. Race, Adoption & Religion: How to Build Religious Communities that Affirm Transracial Adoptees, David McCarty-Caplan, PhD (Social Work)
The history of transracial adoption within the United States has unique and long-standing ties to issues of religion. A wealth of evidence demonstrates that such adoptions happen at disproportionate rates within particular religious communities due to religiously grounded understandings of moral action, service, and humanitarianism. However, while the motivations for most adoptions within religious contexts are certainly benevolent in intent, emerging research suggests that white-dominant religious communities can often be unwelcoming or uncomfortable environments for adoptees of color. Therefore, examining the intersections of race, adoption, and religious identity appear particularly salient and valuable issues to address, if we are to improve the capacity of religious communities to support families with transracial adoptees.
This interactive presentation will explore these issues through an in-depth discussion of existing research on the topic of religion and transracial adoption, and the presenters’ lived experience as a transracially adopted Jew. Participants will be presented with a description of common challenges experienced by adoptees of color within religious contexts, examples of how religious identity can serve as protective factor for transracial adoptees, and suggestions for how to build religious communities that are more welcoming and affirming of people of color; particularly adoptees.
B. What Grows When We Find Common Ground in Adoption Land, Sara Easterly, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, Lori Holden
Adoptee Sara Easterly, birth parent Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, and adoptive parent Lori Holden have been collaborating together for several years on articles, a podcast, and their forthcoming book, Adoption Unfiltered. Together, they have not only created ground-breaking work, but they’ve also built friendship and learned to rely upon each other in ways they never imagined at the start of their working relationship. In this session, they’ll share highlights of what they’ve learned through collaborating, and ideas for reaching across the aisle with openness, curiosity, empathy, and discernment. After all, true change is more likely to happen when adults in adoption work together—to learn and do better for future generations of adoptees and their first and adoptive families.
C. The Power of Memoir to Heal Your Heart and Claim Your Story, Patricia Knight Meyer
Across the constellation, we find communion and kinship through sharing and claiming our stories. We discover we are not alone on our journey. We explore the diverse experience of others and learn that no two stories are ever the same. Through memoir, we look back to the past through the lens of the present, and examine how our lived experiences have shaped who we are today and may influence who we hope to become.
In this session, we will examine using memoir to claim our story and fully own our one-of-a-kind truths. Putting our life story on paper can feel daunting, but it can also help heal our primal wounds. Reflection can be hard and emotional, but the act is also healing and a way to take control of what was often out of our control. Memoir writing can serve as a courageous tool to consider how our life events formed us, changed us, hurt us, humbled us, held us back or compelled us forward. Whether you wish to write your life story for yourself, for future generations, or for the whole world, creative writing can be a cathartic and healing modality.
In this session, we will explore how to begin your memoir journey, how to mine your memory for the most impactful stories, and ways to choose the life experiences and key memories that best compel your story forward. We will also touch on story structure, finding the arc of your hero's journey, privacy, and how to identify and overcome the self-doubt that often creeps up even on the best of us. Expect to take away adoption constellation writing prompts, a list of adoption-themed memoirs, links and resources for online memoir writing courses, best-practices, workshops and a few adoption-centric writing groups to join.
Session 3 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
CEUs: 1.5 Total for LMSWs, LPCs, LMFTs
A. Strengthening School Belongingness for Adopted/Looked After Students: A Case Study on Educator Practice, Max Weinberg, PhD Candidate
The trauma and loss adopted/looked after children and adults experience from the beginning of their relinquishment throughout their life is rarely acknowledged in traditional school settings. Too often, children's identities as adopted/looked after are ignored, erased, or trivialized. My research shines a light on how educators, particularly educators who are adopted, work with finesse to create a sense of belonging for children. They bring their identity and stance towards supporting adopted and fostered children to the classroom in powerful ways that all educators stand to learn from. Creating an adoption-friendly learning space goes beyond a singular approach and has implications for school climate, academics, home-school partnerships, and more. Using School Belonging Theory, the experiences of adoptees are analyzed in an attempt to shift the burden from adoptees and adoptive parents to advocate onto schools as learning institutions to best support adoptees.
B. #BlackLivesMatter: Insights from Black Transracial Adoptees living in the Aftermath of the Nation's Racial Reckoning, Torie DiMartile, MA (Anthropology)
This presentation has been canceled due to circumstances beyond our control. We apologize for any inconvenience
Tori will share preliminary insights from her dissertation research regarding Black transracial adoptee racial identity formation within white adoptive families. In particular she will focus on the impact the #BlackLivesMatter movement has had on how Black transracial adoptees engage with their racial identity and how they define family. This presentation will rely on first-person accounts by Black transracial adoptees about how the summer of 2020 and the subsequent national racial reckoning shaped their adoptive family relationships. This presentation will include practical ways adoption agency professionals and parents can incorporate anti-racist actions into their practice and family values so to improve transracial adoptee mental health.
C. Expressing the Primal Wound: Navigating Fear, Grief, and Ambiguous Loss, Liz DeBetta, Ph.D.
Adoptees lives begin with preverbal trauma that is embodied, and the ability to express feelings creatively helps to process the grief of ambiguous loss. Writing about the self is an opportunity to begin the process of migrating trauma through the body and rewiring the brain to heal the deep primal wound that comes from maternal separation. The concept of writing as a means of integrating the self is especially important for adult adoptees who still struggle with making sense of who we are. This workshop focuses on identifying core language in adoptee writing that holds clues about unresolved trauma and how to use creative writing to unlock personal truth that can lead to insight and healing.
Friday Evening 7:00 PM
Home is Where the Heart is: An adoption and biological reunion perspective, Jenni Alpert (aka Cami) - Documentary + short Q&A
Jenni will be sharing her personal adoption and biological reunion story, about her memoir, as well as some of her music, inspirations, lessons leaned along the way, and her personal message of hope.
Saturday November 4, 2023
Keynote Speaker: Andie Coston
CEUs: 1.75 Total for LMSWs, LPCs, LMFTs
From Right to Left: One adoptee's journey of coming out of the fog and into my own
Growing up in an evangelical Christian home kept me repeating and replicating the positive adoption rhetoric that kept everyone around me comfortable in my adoption story except myself. Even after reunion, I felt the need to keep silent in fear of secondary rejection. In 2010, after almost losing my oldest to childbirth, a thread in my adoption tapestry became undone as my body felt the impact of almost losing a child. I began to pull on that thread, and slowly, throughout birthing more children, being a foster parent, adopting from foster care, finding other adoptees, and completing a Master of Social Work, the tapestry of my adoption story unraveled. This is my story how I wove my story into my own.
Saturday Afternoon Educational Sessions
Session 1 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
CEUs: 1.5 Total for LMSWs, LPCs, LMFTs
A. Racial Identity and Power Dynamics, Melissa Guida-Richards
This session will address:
B. Why Genetic Identity Rights Matter, Kara Rubinstein Deyerin, JD, LLM
This presentation has three parts: what are the impacts of a lack of genetic continuity, the intersectionality of genetic identity issues between the communities (DCP, NPE, adoptee) and the constellation, and what genetic identity rights are, their importance, and how to advocate for such rights.
C. FOG Fazes for Birth/First Parents, Amy Barker D'Alessandro, LMHC & Jennifer Joy Phoenix, LSWAIC
We will present an interactive therapeutic workshop introducing the next installment in our Adoption Savvy Series called "Coming Out of the FOG and Into Your True Self" entitled “FOG Fazes for Birth/First Parents.” We will present a psycho-educational tool for Birth/First Mothers that will take the participants through all the phases of emerging awareness to confront, process, and resolve the impact of adoption loss on their lives.
Session 2 2:45 PM - 4:15 PM
CEUs: 1.5 Total for LMSWs, LPCs, LMFTs
A. Adoptees & Eating Disorders: Clinical Considerations and Lessons from Lived Experience, Rebecca Berg, MS, RDN
Research shows that adoptees are at higher risk for eating disorders, but no one seems to be talking about it! Eating disorders are the second most fatal mental illness and misdiagnosis and delayed diagnosis continues to leave many suffering for far longer than acceptable. With major attachment trauma at the root of adoption, it makes sense that so adoptees struggle to eat. Trauma and PTSD is highly correlated with eating disorders. In this talk, Rebecca will discuss the connection between trauma, eating disorders and bodily sensations as eating disorder symptoms are often an expression of nervous system state. Participants will leave with a better understanding of their intersection and somatic practices that can support a return to normative eating.
B. The Power of Generative Choice, Rich Uhrlaub, M.Ed.
Given all the confusion, emotion and struggles people touched by relinquishment, adoption, foster care, donor conception and genetic surprises must navigate, it's easy to spiral downward into the abyss of unanswered, sometimes unanswerable questions. How can we honor and embrace the loss, grief and challenges we encounter in a way that harnesses and redirects that energy into creative, generative, seed-planting, world-changing outcomes? Our collective wisdom, love and determination is powerful!
C. The Healing Possibilities of Ethnoautobiography: Embodiment and Decolonization to Take Your Power Back, Joanna Mailani Lima, M.A., AMFT
When you feel disconnected from your roots, your stories, yourself, it can be hard to answer the question, “where are you from?” Often our collective narratives have been controlled by others. We’ve been discouraged and prevented from accessing information about our origins. Let’s change that! Figuring out where we come from and where we are going starts with knowing where we are right now. In this interactive session, you’ll discover a starting (or check-in) point for the process of excavating your personal history and cultures. We’ll explore what it could look like to attune to place, nature, mythic stories, and ancestry as we grieve, heal and thrive. Please join and have favorite writing implements or journal tools close by!
Session 3 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
CEUs: 1.5 Total for LMSWs, LPCs, LMFTs
A. History, Heritage, and Healing (for adoptive parents), Abbey Whigham & Alexa Orndahl
Presentation for Adoptive Parents (and others): We will share our experiences truthfully but with the purpose of highlighting how the histories and heritages of our adoptive parents have impacted us. We will discuss how the lack of our parents' knowledge about their own heritage (which includes whiteness, racism, and other harmful ideologies) have caused harm for us. We will emphasize that while it is important for us adoptees to learn and know our histories and heritages, (and learn how to weave them all together into a beautiful tapestry), it is just as important for the parents to do the same. Should they neglect to learn about the positives and negatives of their own stories and cultures, they put their adopted children at risk.
B. What I Wish I Had Known About Addiction as an Adoptive Parent, Beth Syverson
Beth's inter-racially and internationally adopted adult son has struggled with addiction for the last 6 years. Beth will present her family's journey (with her son's explicit permission) in order to help other families learn from some of the mistakes she made. Adoptees are 43% more likely than their non-adopted peers to struggle with substance use disorder in their lifetime. If Beth had known that statistic when she adopted her son as an infant, she would have done many things differently along the way. Find out what those things are.
C. Secrets Told/Masks Unfold, Sharon Cummins & Jeanette Mooney
This presentation will explore the freedom that comes when no longer keeping secrets.
*Please note, content subject to change.
Friday November 3, 2023
*All times listed are in Central Daylight Time
Keynote Speaker, Susan Ito, MFA
CEUs: 1.75 Total for LMSWs, LPCs, LMFTs
The Arc of Adoption is Long (And So Is Your Story)
Adoption is a lifelong experience with infinite milestones including placement, search and sometimes reunion, moments of understanding identity, family and more. The arc of an adopted life changes shape and form throughout a lifetime. Susan Ito, author of I Would Meet You Anywhere, will chart the 30-year journey of writing this memoir, how it shifted and changed over time, and share with participants a lens with which to reflect on their own lifelong narratives.
Friday Afternoon Educational Sessions
Session 1 1:00 PM - 2:45 PM
CEUs: 1.5 Total for LMSWs, LPCs, LMFTs
A. “You’re Not My Real Mom!” And 9 Other Real Adoptive-Parenting Conversations, Barbara Herel & Lori Holden
As adoptive parents, weaving adoption conversations into our daily lives is one of our greatest responsibilities. This workshop will help hopeful adoptive and newly adoptive parents create a comfortable environment for their child to ask questions; and help HAPs/APs to start and keep adoption conversations going from childhood into adulthood.
HAPs and APs will understand that being approachable and receptive to their child’s adoptive experiences is vital for their well being. This workshop will help HAPs and APs answer questions that will come up at some point in their family’s adoptive journey – questions from their child, family members, and even strangers. HAPs and APs will learn how to handle questions and have conversations (or not) with straightforwardness, sensitivity, and humor.
B. Managing our inner wounds with mind/body/energy training, Danielle Gaudette
This presentation will go over the 8 Steps of self-Mastery that Danielle Gaudette wrote about in "Healing Tree", sharing about how to bring the mind back to the body, allow yourself to feel, let go of self-judgment and learn self-acceptance and self-love. She will follow this with a short training practice and meditation so attendees can experience it.
Session 2 2:45 PM - 4:15 PM
CEUs: 1.5 Total for LMSWs, LPCs, LMFTs
A. Race, Adoption & Religion: How to Build Religious Communities that Affirm Transracial Adoptees, David McCarty-Caplan, PhD (Social Work)
The history of transracial adoption within the United States has unique and long-standing ties to issues of religion. A wealth of evidence demonstrates that such adoptions happen at disproportionate rates within particular religious communities due to religiously grounded understandings of moral action, service, and humanitarianism. However, while the motivations for most adoptions within religious contexts are certainly benevolent in intent, emerging research suggests that white-dominant religious communities can often be unwelcoming or uncomfortable environments for adoptees of color. Therefore, examining the intersections of race, adoption, and religious identity appear particularly salient and valuable issues to address, if we are to improve the capacity of religious communities to support families with transracial adoptees.
This interactive presentation will explore these issues through an in-depth discussion of existing research on the topic of religion and transracial adoption, and the presenters’ lived experience as a transracially adopted Jew. Participants will be presented with a description of common challenges experienced by adoptees of color within religious contexts, examples of how religious identity can serve as protective factor for transracial adoptees, and suggestions for how to build religious communities that are more welcoming and affirming of people of color; particularly adoptees.
B. What Grows When We Find Common Ground in Adoption Land, Sara Easterly, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, Lori Holden
Adoptee Sara Easterly, birth parent Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, and adoptive parent Lori Holden have been collaborating together for several years on articles, a podcast, and their forthcoming book, Adoption Unfiltered. Together, they have not only created ground-breaking work, but they’ve also built friendship and learned to rely upon each other in ways they never imagined at the start of their working relationship. In this session, they’ll share highlights of what they’ve learned through collaborating, and ideas for reaching across the aisle with openness, curiosity, empathy, and discernment. After all, true change is more likely to happen when adults in adoption work together—to learn and do better for future generations of adoptees and their first and adoptive families.
C. The Power of Memoir to Heal Your Heart and Claim Your Story, Patricia Knight Meyer
Across the constellation, we find communion and kinship through sharing and claiming our stories. We discover we are not alone on our journey. We explore the diverse experience of others and learn that no two stories are ever the same. Through memoir, we look back to the past through the lens of the present, and examine how our lived experiences have shaped who we are today and may influence who we hope to become.
In this session, we will examine using memoir to claim our story and fully own our one-of-a-kind truths. Putting our life story on paper can feel daunting, but it can also help heal our primal wounds. Reflection can be hard and emotional, but the act is also healing and a way to take control of what was often out of our control. Memoir writing can serve as a courageous tool to consider how our life events formed us, changed us, hurt us, humbled us, held us back or compelled us forward. Whether you wish to write your life story for yourself, for future generations, or for the whole world, creative writing can be a cathartic and healing modality.
In this session, we will explore how to begin your memoir journey, how to mine your memory for the most impactful stories, and ways to choose the life experiences and key memories that best compel your story forward. We will also touch on story structure, finding the arc of your hero's journey, privacy, and how to identify and overcome the self-doubt that often creeps up even on the best of us. Expect to take away adoption constellation writing prompts, a list of adoption-themed memoirs, links and resources for online memoir writing courses, best-practices, workshops and a few adoption-centric writing groups to join.
Session 3 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
CEUs: 1.5 Total for LMSWs, LPCs, LMFTs
A. Strengthening School Belongingness for Adopted/Looked After Students: A Case Study on Educator Practice, Max Weinberg, PhD Candidate
The trauma and loss adopted/looked after children and adults experience from the beginning of their relinquishment throughout their life is rarely acknowledged in traditional school settings. Too often, children's identities as adopted/looked after are ignored, erased, or trivialized. My research shines a light on how educators, particularly educators who are adopted, work with finesse to create a sense of belonging for children. They bring their identity and stance towards supporting adopted and fostered children to the classroom in powerful ways that all educators stand to learn from. Creating an adoption-friendly learning space goes beyond a singular approach and has implications for school climate, academics, home-school partnerships, and more. Using School Belonging Theory, the experiences of adoptees are analyzed in an attempt to shift the burden from adoptees and adoptive parents to advocate onto schools as learning institutions to best support adoptees.
B. #BlackLivesMatter: Insights from Black Transracial Adoptees living in the Aftermath of the Nation's Racial Reckoning, Torie DiMartile, MA (Anthropology)
This presentation has been canceled due to circumstances beyond our control. We apologize for any inconvenience
Tori will share preliminary insights from her dissertation research regarding Black transracial adoptee racial identity formation within white adoptive families. In particular she will focus on the impact the #BlackLivesMatter movement has had on how Black transracial adoptees engage with their racial identity and how they define family. This presentation will rely on first-person accounts by Black transracial adoptees about how the summer of 2020 and the subsequent national racial reckoning shaped their adoptive family relationships. This presentation will include practical ways adoption agency professionals and parents can incorporate anti-racist actions into their practice and family values so to improve transracial adoptee mental health.
C. Expressing the Primal Wound: Navigating Fear, Grief, and Ambiguous Loss, Liz DeBetta, Ph.D.
Adoptees lives begin with preverbal trauma that is embodied, and the ability to express feelings creatively helps to process the grief of ambiguous loss. Writing about the self is an opportunity to begin the process of migrating trauma through the body and rewiring the brain to heal the deep primal wound that comes from maternal separation. The concept of writing as a means of integrating the self is especially important for adult adoptees who still struggle with making sense of who we are. This workshop focuses on identifying core language in adoptee writing that holds clues about unresolved trauma and how to use creative writing to unlock personal truth that can lead to insight and healing.
Friday Evening 7:00 PM
Home is Where the Heart is: An adoption and biological reunion perspective, Jenni Alpert (aka Cami) - Documentary + short Q&A
Jenni will be sharing her personal adoption and biological reunion story, about her memoir, as well as some of her music, inspirations, lessons leaned along the way, and her personal message of hope.
Saturday November 4, 2023
Keynote Speaker: Andie Coston
CEUs: 1.75 Total for LMSWs, LPCs, LMFTs
From Right to Left: One adoptee's journey of coming out of the fog and into my own
Growing up in an evangelical Christian home kept me repeating and replicating the positive adoption rhetoric that kept everyone around me comfortable in my adoption story except myself. Even after reunion, I felt the need to keep silent in fear of secondary rejection. In 2010, after almost losing my oldest to childbirth, a thread in my adoption tapestry became undone as my body felt the impact of almost losing a child. I began to pull on that thread, and slowly, throughout birthing more children, being a foster parent, adopting from foster care, finding other adoptees, and completing a Master of Social Work, the tapestry of my adoption story unraveled. This is my story how I wove my story into my own.
Saturday Afternoon Educational Sessions
Session 1 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
CEUs: 1.5 Total for LMSWs, LPCs, LMFTs
A. Racial Identity and Power Dynamics, Melissa Guida-Richards
This session will address:
- Unpacking the white adoptive parent loss
- White Racial Identity and its role
- Tackling racism in families
- Unpacking and unlearning biases within your American context
- Outlining racism in America
- How to be an antiracist advocate
- Centering the adoptee vs yourself
- Learning from Adoptee lead resources
B. Why Genetic Identity Rights Matter, Kara Rubinstein Deyerin, JD, LLM
This presentation has three parts: what are the impacts of a lack of genetic continuity, the intersectionality of genetic identity issues between the communities (DCP, NPE, adoptee) and the constellation, and what genetic identity rights are, their importance, and how to advocate for such rights.
C. FOG Fazes for Birth/First Parents, Amy Barker D'Alessandro, LMHC & Jennifer Joy Phoenix, LSWAIC
We will present an interactive therapeutic workshop introducing the next installment in our Adoption Savvy Series called "Coming Out of the FOG and Into Your True Self" entitled “FOG Fazes for Birth/First Parents.” We will present a psycho-educational tool for Birth/First Mothers that will take the participants through all the phases of emerging awareness to confront, process, and resolve the impact of adoption loss on their lives.
Session 2 2:45 PM - 4:15 PM
CEUs: 1.5 Total for LMSWs, LPCs, LMFTs
A. Adoptees & Eating Disorders: Clinical Considerations and Lessons from Lived Experience, Rebecca Berg, MS, RDN
Research shows that adoptees are at higher risk for eating disorders, but no one seems to be talking about it! Eating disorders are the second most fatal mental illness and misdiagnosis and delayed diagnosis continues to leave many suffering for far longer than acceptable. With major attachment trauma at the root of adoption, it makes sense that so adoptees struggle to eat. Trauma and PTSD is highly correlated with eating disorders. In this talk, Rebecca will discuss the connection between trauma, eating disorders and bodily sensations as eating disorder symptoms are often an expression of nervous system state. Participants will leave with a better understanding of their intersection and somatic practices that can support a return to normative eating.
B. The Power of Generative Choice, Rich Uhrlaub, M.Ed.
Given all the confusion, emotion and struggles people touched by relinquishment, adoption, foster care, donor conception and genetic surprises must navigate, it's easy to spiral downward into the abyss of unanswered, sometimes unanswerable questions. How can we honor and embrace the loss, grief and challenges we encounter in a way that harnesses and redirects that energy into creative, generative, seed-planting, world-changing outcomes? Our collective wisdom, love and determination is powerful!
C. The Healing Possibilities of Ethnoautobiography: Embodiment and Decolonization to Take Your Power Back, Joanna Mailani Lima, M.A., AMFT
When you feel disconnected from your roots, your stories, yourself, it can be hard to answer the question, “where are you from?” Often our collective narratives have been controlled by others. We’ve been discouraged and prevented from accessing information about our origins. Let’s change that! Figuring out where we come from and where we are going starts with knowing where we are right now. In this interactive session, you’ll discover a starting (or check-in) point for the process of excavating your personal history and cultures. We’ll explore what it could look like to attune to place, nature, mythic stories, and ancestry as we grieve, heal and thrive. Please join and have favorite writing implements or journal tools close by!
Session 3 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
CEUs: 1.5 Total for LMSWs, LPCs, LMFTs
A. History, Heritage, and Healing (for adoptive parents), Abbey Whigham & Alexa Orndahl
Presentation for Adoptive Parents (and others): We will share our experiences truthfully but with the purpose of highlighting how the histories and heritages of our adoptive parents have impacted us. We will discuss how the lack of our parents' knowledge about their own heritage (which includes whiteness, racism, and other harmful ideologies) have caused harm for us. We will emphasize that while it is important for us adoptees to learn and know our histories and heritages, (and learn how to weave them all together into a beautiful tapestry), it is just as important for the parents to do the same. Should they neglect to learn about the positives and negatives of their own stories and cultures, they put their adopted children at risk.
B. What I Wish I Had Known About Addiction as an Adoptive Parent, Beth Syverson
Beth's inter-racially and internationally adopted adult son has struggled with addiction for the last 6 years. Beth will present her family's journey (with her son's explicit permission) in order to help other families learn from some of the mistakes she made. Adoptees are 43% more likely than their non-adopted peers to struggle with substance use disorder in their lifetime. If Beth had known that statistic when she adopted her son as an infant, she would have done many things differently along the way. Find out what those things are.
C. Secrets Told/Masks Unfold, Sharon Cummins & Jeanette Mooney
This presentation will explore the freedom that comes when no longer keeping secrets.
*Please note, content subject to change.