Key Takeaways
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- Katie Currier, t-LMHC shares her perspective on adoption-competent therapy and how her lived experience as a transnational and transracial adoptee has shaped the way she works with clients.
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- Adoption and foster care can remain relevant throughout life, including in experiences with identity, belonging, relationships, grief, race, culture, and family.
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- Adoption-related concerns do not always present as obvious “adoption issues.” People may seek therapy for anxiety, perfectionism, people-pleasing, relationship difficulties, grief, or other concerns.
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- Katie’s unique experience also brings depth to her work beyond adoption, particularly with clients navigating attachment and relationships, identity and belonging, cultural experiences, anxiety, and life transitions.
Finding a therapist who feels like a good fit can be difficult. For adoptees and people impacted by foster care, there can be another question to consider: Will this therapist understand the ways adoption or foster care may intersect with identity, relationships, grief, culture, and belonging?
At Nurturing Therapy Services, our therapist Katie Currier has unique experience with that concern. Through her clinical work and years spent in community with adoptees, current and former foster youth, and adoptive and foster families, she has heard how difficult it can be to find therapists who understand the complexity of these experiences.
Katie also knows that complexity personally. She is a transnational and transracial adoptee whose own questions about identity, belonging, and connection have helped shape the way she listens to clients today.
“Often, some therapists treat adoption or foster care as a single event in someone’s history, rather than an ongoing part of identity, belonging, loss, grief, and disconnection,” Katie says.
Her point is not that adoption inevitably creates any particular emotional or psychological experience. It is that a therapist needs to understand the ways adoption can remain relevant in order to recognize when it matters to the person in front of them.
What Adoption-Related Concerns Can Look Like
Someone does not necessarily enter a session with Katie saying, “I think this is about adoption.”
Instead of naming “adoption issues” or “relationship struggles” outright, clients frequently describe:
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- Anxiety, perfectionism, or people-pleasing patterns
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- Difficulty trusting others or forming stable relationships
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- Persistent sense of not fully belonging
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- Complicated or ambivalent feelings toward birth families, adoptive families, or foster placements
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- Identity confusion or discomfort surrounding race, culture, ethnicity, or nationality
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- Complex grief that isn’t always socially recognized as loss
Katie sees value in remaining curious about what surrounds these concerns.
That does not mean anxiety, perfectionism, people-pleasing, relationship difficulties, or questions about belonging are inherently adoption-related. They are not unique to adoptees, and adoption should not become the explanation for every struggle an adopted person experiences.
An adoption-competent therapist needs to be able to hold both possibilities. Adoption may be relevant, perhaps deeply so, and the client gets to discover what role it actually plays.
When Lived Experience Enters the Therapy Room
Katie’s understanding of these questions did not begin with her clinical work.
During adolescence, she wrestled with her own questions of identity, belonging, and connection. She describes that period as a difficult journey, but one that ultimately strengthened her ability to accompany other people as they explore their own experiences.
One of the things she learned was how difficult some feelings can be to name, particularly when they are complicated or ambivalent.
Someone’s experiences with their birth family, adoptive family, foster placements, race, culture, or identity may not fit comfortably into a single emotional category. Feelings may even appear to contradict one another and change as a person moves through life.
“Because I’ve done that work myself, I can help clients slow down and make sense of what they’re feeling without rushing to resolve it.” -KC
It does not provide her with someone else’s answers. Being an adoptee does not mean she automatically understands another adoptee’s family, losses, relationships, identity, or feelings about adoption. Her experience gives her another perspective from which to recognize complexity and remain with it.
Looking Beneath What Initially Brings Someone to Therapy
Katie describes herself as paying attention to the “fuller picture” surrounding a client.
If someone seeks therapy for anxiety, for example, there is the immediate experience of anxiety to understand. There is also a person around that anxiety, with relationships, family experiences, identities, cultural influences, expectations, losses, strengths, and a history.
For someone impacted by adoption or foster care, that larger context might include experiences within birth, adoptive, or foster families. It might include grief and loss, attachment and relationships, race and culture, or an evolving sense of where they belong.
Sometimes those experiences will have a meaningful connection to what is happening now. Sometimes they will not.
Katie’s lived experience has made her particularly attentive to asking the questions that can help uncover those connections.
“Understanding this from the inside helps me ask questions that acknowledge and reach the experiences underneath the symptoms, rather than treating adoption or foster care as background information.” -KC
This does not mean looking for an adoption explanation behind every symptom. It means knowing enough about adoption and foster care to recognize that there may be a connection worth exploring.
That distinction sits at the center of Katie’s understanding of adoption-competent therapy.
What Adoption-Competent Therapy Actually Means
Katie has used the phrase “adoption-informed and culturally competent therapy” to describe her work, while noting that “adoption-competent therapy” has become increasingly common terminology.
The language matters less than what it looks like in practice.
An adoption competent therapist understands that adoption and foster care can have psychological, relational, familial, cultural, and systemic dimensions. Depending on the individual, therapy may involve identity development, attachment and relationships, grief and loss, family dynamics, belonging, or disconnection.
For transracial and transnational adoptees, that understanding also needs to leave room for race, ethnicity, culture, nationality, racism, and cultural connection.
There is research supporting the importance of this kind of professional awareness. A 2024 qualitative study of adult transnational adoptees found that participants described barriers to health and mental health care that included limited professional knowledge about adoptee health and unwillingness to address racism. Participants expressed a need for greater professional competence around adoption-related themes.
For a prospective client, an adoption therapist’s ability to engage with these subjects may therefore be an important part of determining whether the relationship feels like a good fit.
Making Room for Ambivalence, Grief, and Belonging
Adoption can bring up feelings that are hard to sort through or even put into words. Katie has seen how questions about family, grief, identity, and belonging can exist alongside love and connection. An adoptee might feel close to their adoptive family while also wondering about their birth family or thinking about relationships and experiences they did not have.
Grief can be part of that conversation, although it will not be part of every adoptee’s experience. When it does come up, the loss itself may be difficult to identify. It could involve a relationship, information about one’s history, connection to a culture, or something else that feels significant to that person. Katie gives clients room to talk about those experiences without expecting them to arrive at a particular conclusion about what their adoption means to them.
For transracial and transnational adoptees, conversations about identity may also include race, ethnicity, culture, and nationality. These parts of a person’s experience can be closely connected to adoption. Growing up in a family of another race, navigating racism, or thinking about connection to a culture of origin can all raise questions that deserve space to be explored.
Katie brings her own experience as a transnational and transracial adoptee into how she understands these conversations, while being careful not to assume that another adoptee will relate to them in the same way. Her experience helps her know where there may be more to ask about. The client gets to decide what is meaningful in their own story.
Adoption Does Not Automatically Mean Trauma
Some people specifically seek therapy for adoption trauma because trauma is part of how they understand what they experienced. For other adoptees, that language does not fit their story.
Being adopted does not automatically mean someone has trauma, attachment difficulties, abandonment concerns, or another mental health condition.
When trauma is part of a client’s history, an adoption-competent therapist can consider it within the fuller context of that person’s life. Adoption may be part of that context without becoming the only thing the therapist sees.
Katie applies the same principle to attachment, grief, identity, and belonging. These are areas she understands can be important, but their presence and meaning need to come from the client’s actual experience.
The Experience Katie Brings Beyond Adoption
While Katie is uniquely positioned to work with adoptees and people impacted by foster care, the perspective she brings to therapy extends well beyond adoption.
Her lived and clinical experiences have given her a genuine understanding of how identity, relationships, attachment, culture, and larger systems can shape a person’s life. She brings that awareness to her work with clients navigating anxiety, life transitions, relationship concerns, identity and belonging, attachment patterns, and cultural or racial experiences.
Katie is especially attentive to the context surrounding what brings someone to therapy. If a client is struggling with anxiety, going through a major transition, or having difficulty in a relationship, she takes time to understand the experiences, relationships, expectations, cultural influences, and systems that may be affecting what is happening now. Her approach is personal and individualized, taking into account the relationships, identities, cultural experiences, communities, and environments that have shaped each client and the challenges they are facing.
The insight Katie has gained through her own experiences allows her to bring authenticity and depth to this work, while her clinical experience helps her tailor therapy to the person in front of her. That combination brings depth to her work with attachment, relationships, identity, cultural experiences, and life transitions.
Finding an Adoption Therapist Who Feels Like the Right Fit
For someone searching for an adoption therapist, Katie suggests looking beyond whether a therapist simply lists adoption among the issues they treat.
It can be useful to ask about the therapist’s training and clinical experience with adoptees or people impacted by foster care. You might ask how they approach adoption-related grief, identity development, attachment, and family relationships.
“Not every therapist is equipped to handle the specific dynamics of adoption and foster care, and that’s okay.” -KC
For transracial or transnational adoptees, there may be additional questions worth asking. How comfortable is the therapist talking directly about race and racism? Can they engage with ethnicity, cultural identity, nationality, and cultural connection rather than treating those topics as separate from mental health?
The answers can tell you something about whether the therapist has the knowledge to understand your context.
There is another part of fit that is harder to reduce to credentials or a checklist. The therapist also needs enough openness to learn what adoption means specifically to you.
For some people, working with an adoptee therapist may provide a meaningful layer of shared context. For others, different aspects of a therapist’s training, approach, identity, or personality may matter more.
Working With Katie at Nurturing Therapy Services
Katie’s work at Nurturing Therapy Services brings together her clinical experience, years spent in community with people impacted by adoption and foster care, and her lived experience as a transnational and transracial adoptee.
She supports clients exploring adoption and foster care experiences as well as concerns involving identity, belonging, grief, relationships, attachment, race, culture, anxiety, perfectionism, and people-pleasing.
She offers in-person therapy in Ankeny, Iowa, and telehealth therapy for clients throughout Iowa.
If something in Katie’s perspective connected with you, you can schedule a free consultation to learn more about her approach, ask questions, and decide whether she feels like the right therapist for you.
