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APA Psychotherapy Training Videos are intended solely for educational purposes for mental health professionals. Viewers are expected to treat confidential material found herein according to strict professional guidelines. Unauthorized viewing is prohibited.
In Helping Children Understand Adoption, Dr. Marc A. Nemiroff shows how to help adopted children come to terms with the question of "Where did I come from?" and with any potential traumas they may have experienced before adoption. The child-centered approach illustrated in this video emphasizes empathizing with the child and helping parents to truly understand their adopted child's experience.
In this session, Dr. Nemiroff meets with a 9-year-old girl who, before being adopted, was believed to have been abused by her birth family as a toddler; in addition, she lived for some years in an orphanage. Dr. Nemiroff works separately with the girl's adoptive mother, assisting her in understanding her daughter's interpretation of her adoption and helping her to help her daughter cope with the trauma she has experienced.
Dr. Nemiroff's approach to working with adopted children utilizes a theoretical integration of Kohut's theories of the development of the Self, Winnicott's theories about containment and "the space between," and the work of the Object Relations theorists focusing on attachment and separation. The concepts of mirroring, containment, the existential experience of loss, and the possibilities of re-attachment to an "other" are emphasized.
Read more about the approach
holds a PhD (1975) in clinical psychology from The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC. He is cochair of the Infant/Young Child Mental Health Training Program at the Washington School of Psychiatry, and an affiliate member of the Baltimore–Washington Society for Psychoanalysis.
Read more about Dr. Nemiroff
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