What is the experience of psychoanalytically informed child and adolescent psychotherapists working with adoptive parents?

Recent research into parent work with adoptive parents highlights the increasing number of adopted children in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapists’ (CAPT) caseloads and the need for further thinking and training in parent work with their adoptive parents (Boyd, 2020). This study explores the lived experiences of CAPT with significant amounts of experience providing parent work to adoptive parents. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect data which was analysed using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). The study retrieved 5 super-ordinate teams that emerged from the data analysis: ‘Complicated Truths’, ‘The Value of Countertransference’, ‘Dimensions of Time in Adoption’, ‘Perilous Journey’ and ‘Unwanted Experiences’. The live experiences of the clinicians captured in the results conveyed a skilled level of insight gained by the CAPT from their experiences of the parent work that were shaped and influenced by their psychoanalytic training and clinical experience. The results also indicated a high level of complexity, reported by the CAPT, involved in being an adoptive parent, with parents tasked with facing and managing unexpected and painful experiences directly related to this. There are parallels between the common themes found in the results and the literature advocating for parent work for parents of traumatised children and the literature advocating for psychoanalytically informed parent work specifically with adoptive parents. It is argued that due to the complexity of the nature of parent work with adoptive parents, further research into psychoanalytically informed parent work could be beneficial for clinicians involved in working with adoptive parents, and indeed potentially useful for the parents themselves. It is also argued that due to the increasing number of CAPT working with adoptive families, more emphasis should be placed on the importance of working with the parents’ experiences of adoption.