Adoption-Competent Counseling
A video-first training course
Language, identity, grief, and meaning-making across the lifespan
Developed by Renée M. Murphy, with co-researcher Angela Christianson and faculty advisor Dr. Jamie Bower.
Antioch University New England, 2026.
About the course
Adoption begins with a legal event and keeps unfolding across a whole life, touching identity, loss, belonging, and the story a person tells about who they are. Most counseling graduate programs offer little or no training in any of it, which leaves clinicians underprepared for what adopted clients actually bring into the room.
This course provides foundational adoption-competency training grounded in the Adoptee Lifespan Framework, developed through qualitative research with adult adoptees. At its heart are recorded conversations with adoptees themselves: most lessons pair a short teaching segment with an adoptee speaking about the topic in their own words, so clinicians learn to feel the experience and notice their own reactions alongside learning what there is to know. The focus is the clinical work of being with adoptee clients. It is designed for licensed counselors, social workers, school counselors, and graduate trainees, and it holds birth-parent and adoptive-parent perspectives as context rather than subject.
The course is in development. The lessons are under review, and the adoptee conversations that anchor them are being recorded now. If you're an adoptee who'd like to take part, you can sign up here.
The chapters
Each lesson is short: a video, a brief reflection, and a one-page takeaway to download. Each chapter closes with a scenario-based check.
Foundations
The words that carry weight, the seven core issues, the forms adoption takes, and adoption across a whole life, including when the adoptee becomes a parent.
Identity and Self
Origin, body, and cultural story; the story you were given; the strategies that protect belonging; and what happens when identity reorganizes.
Loss and Grief
The gratitude bind, ambiguous loss, grief that keeps coming back, and estrangement, including which way it runs.
Language and the Clinical Encounter
How assumptions leak into your questions, how to repair a slip, and the intake form as a first message.
Clinical Practice
Is this about adoption or not; raising it when the client won't; what the body carries; accompanying a client into reunion; and the adoption lens in your own modality.
Complexity and Context
Transracial and intercountry adoption, kinship and other family configurations, late discovery, donor conception and NPE, and the records and policy systems around the client.
Integration and Continued Learning
Competence as a direction, not a destination: supervision, consultation, community, and a personal practice plan.
Foundations
The words that carry weight, the seven core issues, the forms adoption takes, and adoption across a whole life, including when the adoptee becomes a parent.
Identity and Self
Origin, body, and cultural story; the story you were given; the strategies that protect belonging; and what happens when identity reorganizes.
Loss and Grief
The gratitude bind, ambiguous loss, grief that keeps coming back, and estrangement, including which way it runs.
Language and the Clinical Encounter
How assumptions leak into your questions, how to repair a slip, and the intake form as a first message.
Clinical Practice
Is this about adoption or not; raising it when the client won't; what the body carries; accompanying a client into reunion; and the adoption lens in your own modality.
Complexity and Context
Transracial and intercountry adoption, kinship and other family configurations, late discovery, donor conception and NPE, and the records and policy systems around the client.
Integration and Continued Learning
Competence as a direction, not a destination: supervision, consultation, community, and a personal practice plan.
Learning outcomes
After completing this course, participants will be able to:
CE approval is not yet in place. Completing the course earns a certificate of completion, not continuing education credit.
Access the Course
The course is hosted on our learning platform at learn.adopteeresearch.org. Head there to view chapters, register, and track your progress. Questions about the program or group access? Get in touch.