Healing for Adults Who Grew Up in Adoption or Foster Care: Positive Strategies for Overcoming Emotional Challenges

Positive and practical, this guide is designed to offer a route to recovery from grief and loss after adoption or long-term foster care.

Children growing up in adoptive families or foster care often have complicated feelings about the loss of their birth parents - feelings which become all the more complex as they gain independence and become young adults, and which can endure throughout their lives. Common life events such as entering new relationships, building a family or losing a loved one can give rise to difficult questions about their own childhood and identity. In this book, Ren e Wolfs provides an accessible explanation of the feelings of loss and grief commonly experienced by adults who grew up in adoptive families or foster care, and how debilitating they can be. She provides grounded advice and strategies to aid recovery and provides the reader with a useful tool: The Circle of Connecting. The Circle provides strategies for healing from loss, spanning all seven elements of your life: your body, mind, heart, environment, past, present and future.

This book is essential reading for older teens and adults who need help in addressing feelings of grief and loss, as well as those who support them including adoptive and foster parents, social workers, counsellors and therapists.

Renée Wolfs lives near Utrecht, the Netherlands. She specializes in communication, counselling and grief. She is the author of Adoption Conversations and More Adoption Conversations (BAAF) which are popular among many families of adopted and foster children. She has worked as a copywriter, information officer, counsellor and group coach. She writes columns and articles in adoption magazines and is an adoptive mother of three teenagers.