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.
*Please note: Completion of Training for Adoption Competency (TAC) or NTI-Mental Health Professionals is a requirement for this course.
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.
Adoptive Identity & Origins Search/A Narrative Clinical Framework for Search, Contact, and Connection
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.
