Beneath the Mask: The Intersectionality of Adolescence and Adoption
Dates: 10/2/26, 10/9/26, and 10/16/26
Time: 12-2pm EST/11am-1pm CST/9-11am PST
Faculty: Debbie Riley, LCMFT
Adolescence is a time when adoptees struggle with an extra layer of challenges related to their identity formation and integrating their sense of self as it relates to their adoption journey. Participants will explore how the typical developmental tasks of the teen years are intensified and complicated by adoption, particularly if teens are being raised by parents of a different race or culture. Participants will gain an understanding of how to assess how adoption influences the developmental process of identity formation, separation from parents, and interpersonal relationships, including birth family connections. Based on the book, Beneath the Mask: Understanding Adopted Teens, by author and C.A.S.E. CEO Debbie Riley, this training highlights “the six spots where teens get stuck” as key vulnerabilities around the adoption experience in adolescence. Assessment considerations and clinical strategies will be explored for application in clinical practice.
About the Faculty:
Debbie B. Riley, LCMFT, CEO, is co-founder of The Center for Adoption Support and Education (C.A.S.E.), a national leader in mental health services for the foster care, kinship, and adoption community. A nationally recognized adoption expert, author, and public speaker, Ms. Riley has 40 years of professional experience, including health care management, administrative, designing and developing nationally acclaimed adoption-competent training programs, and direct delivery of specialized pre- and post-adoption counseling services. Ms. Riley created a continuum of innovative, culturally responsive, evidenced-informed programs to improve the behavioral outcomes of foster and adopted youth and their families, which have become nationally recognized models.
For over a decade, Ms. Riley has built and implemented a framework for training an adoption competent mental health workforce nationally, and is the founder of TAC (Training for Adoption Competency Curriculum). Through two federal grant awards to C.A.S.E from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services through the Administration for Children and Families, Ms. Riley serves as the PI for the National Adoption Competency Mental Health Training Initiative (NTI) and the National Center for Child Welfare Competent Mental Health Services, to improve mental health outcomes for children and families experiencing child welfare systems.
Ms. Riley is co-author of the book, Beneath the Mask: Understanding Adopted Teens (Riley and Meeks, 2006) and Adoption Specific Therapy, A Guide to Helping Adopted Children and Their Families Thrive (Waterman, Langley, Miranda, and Riley, 2018). She is a contributing author to The Need for Adoption Competent Mental Health Professionals in Transracial and Intercountry Adoptions, Cultural Guidance for Professionals (Fong and McRoy, 2016); Training for Adoption Competency Curriculum in The Routledge Handbook Of Adoption (Wrober, Helder, and Marr, 2020); Adoption as a Diversity Issue in Professional Preparation: Perceptions of Preservice Education Professionals, Adoptions Quarterly (Taymans, Marotta, Lynch, Riley, Ortiz, Schutt, Mallery, Embich, 2008); Adoption Competent Clinical Practice; Defining Its Meaning and Development, Adoption Quarterly (Atkinson, Freundlich, Gonet, Riley, 2013); and Training for Adoption Competency: Building a Community of Adoption-Competent Clinicians, Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services (Atkinson and Riley, 2017).
Adoptive Identity & Origins Search/A Narrative Clinical Framework for Search, Contact, and Connection
Dates: 11/13/26, 11/20/26, and 12/4/26
Time: 12-2pm EST/11am-1pm CST/9-11am PST
Faculty: Dr. Anne-Marie Piché
Adoptive identity work does not begin or end with origins searching. Adopted people may seek support in exploring identity, belonging, family narratives, or racial and cultural difference without wishing to search for information or initiate contact. When origins are explored, the process extends beyond gathering facts: information from records, family accounts, social media, genealogy, or DNA testing must still be interpreted within an evolving life story.
This advanced six-hour online course presents adoptive identity as a lifelong, relational, and narrative process—one that can become sufficiently integrated, livable, flexible, and open to revision. Participants will learn to accompany adoptees as clinical “co-captains”—whether a search is considered, as well as before, during, and after information gathering or connection—while protecting each person’s agency, pace, privacy, and ambivalence. Focused teaching is paired with clinically adapted tools including narrative mapping, a search roundabout, pacing signals, scenario exploration, narrative letters, quizzes, and composite case vignettes. The course offers a practical framework for moving from information to meaning without prescribing whether, when, or how a person should search.
About the Faculty:
Anne-Marie Piché, PhD, MSW, is an Associate Professor of Social Work at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and a registered social worker whose clinical practice and practice-development work has included direct work and consultation with adoptees, adoptive families, and professionals navigating origins-search, contact, and connection processes for 25 years. Her research focuses on adoption, identity formation, kinship, and adoptees’ lived experiences across the lifespan. She leads projects on origins searching, including research on the psychosocial impacts of direct-to-consumer DNA testing. Her scholarship integrates ecosystemic and narrative approaches to examine how adoptees negotiate origins, belonging, relational complexity, and personal agency. She also develops professional practice tools, clinical training, and knowledge-mobilization resources that translate research into usable frameworks for assessment, reflection, and support.
*Please note: Completion of Training for Adoption Competency (TAC) or NTI-Mental Health Professionals is a requirement for this course.
Two-Course Academy Bundle Fall 2026
This two-course bundle includes Beneath the Mask: The Intersectionality of Adolescence and Adoption and Adoptive Identity & Origins Search/A Narrative Clinical Framework for Search, Contact, and Connection.