Helper Sectors: Adoption Community

At Gap Relief, we focus our trauma-informed training and therapeutic services within the career sectors that keep our communities safe, that say yes to hard things, and that intentionally stand in the fire of trauma so that we don't have to. Those are the helpers we want to serve.

In the coming weeks, we want to spend some time highlighting these different sectors and the difficulties they face in serving their local and global communities.

One of these sectors is Adoptive Families. We consider the family unit as an important tenet of strong communities. When a family unit is strong, it can provide a safe base for family members to rest and get grounded so they can enter the world with resilience.

When children are not experiencing that safety within their family unit and disruption from their family of origin is required, we are very passionate about helping foster and adoptive parents who are standing in that gap for our next generation. The job of these foster and adoptive parents is very difficult as they often stand in painful spaces--holding their hearts open to everything that comes with saying yes to the children in their care. Everything they do can be very difficult and sacrificial, and we want to hold their arms up as they fight for the younger generation.

Kids who find themselves in foster care or in an adoptive placement experience trauma, and we know that the parental system takes on much of that trauma as they carry out their mission. They need a lot of training to learn how to appropriately care for a child with a traumatic background and how to make sense of kids' behaviors through a trauma lens. When foster/adoptive parents are able to respond to children in a trauma informed way, the children can begin to enter into feelings of safety and begin to learn and thrive.

It is Gap Relief's mission to fight for these parents as they fight for adoptees and hold many of the other relationships together on this journey.