Online Counselling for Adult Adoptees - A space to explore your adoption story, at your own pace, without having to justify how it affects you.

 

Your adoption experience is yours. All of it.

People often expect adoptees to feel grateful. To see adoption as a straightforwardly positive story. And sometimes it is. Often it's more complicated than that.

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You might carry questions about where you come from that have never been fully answered. You might feel a sense of not quite belonging, even in families that love you. You might be navigating a search, or a reunion, and finding that it's bringing up things you didn't expect.

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Or you might have spent years managing these feelings quietly, not wanting to seem ungrateful or difficult, and you've reached a point where that's no longer sustainable.

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Whatever your adoption experience looks like, there is space here for all of it.

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What brings adult adoptees to counselling?

• Questions about identity and where you come from that feel unresolved

• A sense of not quite belonging, even in relationships and families where you are loved

• Feelings of rejection, abandonment, or loss that are hard to name or explain

• Beginning a search for birth family, or thinking about it

• Navigating a reunion that has brought up unexpected or complicated emotions

• The impact of adoption on your adult relationships and how you attach to people

• Processing a childhood that felt different from those around you

• Coming to terms with limited or absent information about your origins

• Feeling like your adoption experience isn't acknowledged as significant by others

You don't need to be in active crisis to benefit from this work. Many people come to counselling around adoption at a particular life stage, after having children of their own, when a parent dies, when a significant birthday arrives. Something shifts the question back to the surface, and it deserves proper attention.

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You might be feeling...

Like you have to hold two stories at once, and neither one feels entirely like yours.

Grateful and grieving at the same time, and unsure you're allowed to be both.

Curious about your origins, but afraid of what you might find, or not find.

Like the people closest to you don't fully understand what this experience has been like.

Like you've been managing this for so long that you've stopped noticing how much it costs you.

All of these are welcome here.

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What happens in our sessions?

We'll go at your pace. There's no script for this work, and no particular destination we're working towards. Instead, we'll follow what feels most present and most important for you.

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That might mean exploring your early life and what you understand of it. It might mean looking at how adoption has shaped the way you relate to others, how you handle attachment, intimacy, or conflict. It might mean making sense of a reunion, or processing the decision not to search.

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I work integratively, drawing on psychodynamic approaches to understand deeper patterns, alongside more present-focused work to help you find steadier ground now.

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Many adoptees have never had a space where they could speak about their experience without worrying about the impact on others. Without managing someone else's feelings. This is that space.

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A note on specialist experience

Adoption is a specialist area and not all counsellors have experience of working with adult adoptees. I am a registered member of the BACP and serve on the BACP Expert Reference Group, contributing to the development of a competency framework for counselling adults affected by adoption. This is an area I take seriously and know well.

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Why online?

All sessions take place via Zoom, which means you can access support from anywhere in the UK without the added difficulty of travel. For people exploring adoption-related questions, the privacy of being in your own space can make it easier to speak openly.

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Sessions can also continue without interruption if life takes you somewhere different.

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About Lucy

I'm Lucy Bello, an integrative counsellor and psychotherapist. Working with adult adoptees is one of my specialist areas, and it's work I find genuinely meaningful. I bring warmth, curiosity, and no assumptions to this work. Your story is your own, and I'll follow your lead.

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I offer a free 20-minute initial session. There's no commitment and no pressure.

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