workshops and speaking

 What if we stopped searching for where we belong and began building a home within ourselves?

Adoption is often presented as a single event, yet for adoptees, its impact can unfold across a lifetime—shaping our understanding of identity, belonging, relationships, grief, and the stories we carry about ourselves.

Building a Sound House: Reclaiming the Adoptee Inner Narrative is an interactive, adoptee-centered presentation that invites participants to examine those stories, question inherited narratives, and explore what it means to build a stronger inner foundation.

Drawing from my lived experience as an adoptee, my clinical work as a Licensed Professional Counselor, and the framework behind my guided journal, Build Your Sound House, I introduce a reflective process built around three interconnected phases:

• Excavation: Exploring the experiences, emotions, unmet needs, and beliefs that have shaped our understanding of ourselves.
• Decluttering: Identifying inherited messages, limiting beliefs, and narratives that may no longer reflect who we are or who we are becoming.
• Reorganizing: Reclaiming authorship of our stories and making room for self-trust, connection, belonging, and personal agency.

The experience culminates in the concept of Creating Your Love Map, an invitation to bring together the pieces of our identity, values, relationships, and lived experiences into an inner home that reflects who we are today.

Through storytelling, guided reflection, journaling, and optional group discussion, participants are invited to explore their experiences without pressure to disclose, arrive at a particular conclusion, or frame adoption through a single narrative.

The goal is not to rewrite how our stories began, but to reclaim how we understand them and what we choose to carry forward.

This presentation can be adapted for adoptee-centered conferences, community organizations, educational events, professional gatherings, and facilitated workshops.