Friendship Lab with Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao and Anne Heffron -- for adopted people

Begins June 9th for a year of Sundays. 10-11:30 am ET

Making and keeping friends can be complicated for people who were adopted and both fear and crave connection. We will spend a year of Sunday mornings in Friendship Lab, together defining and claiming the relationships we most desire.

These days, loneliness is a huge public health issue, and because adopted people show up in a higher bracket of suicidality, it’s imperative we slow to look at the importance and value of friendship.

Adopted people often feel under-seen and under-heard and struggle with the ability to trust anyone or anything wholeheartedly. Friendship then, both with ourselves and with others, can feel complicated, like something other people have and do well. Join us in a year-long course to explore how those who were relinquished and adopted wade through trust/mistrust and friendship. We will look for ways to strengthen the bonds that we have and create new ones that make us feel like an even more vital presence in the world.

There are so many different types of friends. Friends, to scratch the surface, include family by birth and by adoption, childhood/ historical friends, work or school friends, friends of friends, acquaintances, and others. Over the year, we will look at questions such as How do you both create and fall out of friendship? What happens when friends don’t feel the same level of friendship? When do you shuttle friends from a circle to a lower or higher one, or out of all circles entirely?

In the groups we’ve done in the past, we’ve been deeply moved by the quality of friendships that develop solely on Zoom. The best is when people then go to the trouble to meet in real life and become, possibly, forever friends--friends who know what it means to be adopted and just how life-affirming trust and connection are.

Join us!

TESTIMONIALS:

After my reunion with my biological family, I had a lot of issues with identity and wrapping my brain around how adoption has colored my life. I found adoptee communities on social media, but there was no real connection. So I took the plunge and signed up for Anne and Dr. Joyce's group. I have learned so much from their guidance; the value of vision and dreams, the power of our stories and community, how to trust that being seen is essential to connection. Their layers of experience and wisdom have created a home for me like no other. Where all adoptees belong.

S.K.

Anne and Joyce led our Sunday group with compassion, kindness and truth and created the safest space where I was welcome to use my voice, cry, laugh, and listen while I discovered more about my adopted self.

D.K.

For the last two years I have been meeting weekly with the most beautiful group of adoptees with Anne and Dr. Joyce leading us into thoughtful and heart opening places. I feel safe, heard, held and seen…and most of all I have given myself the time and space to see myself and feel my feelings. Anne is a bright light full of ideas, prompts of things to think/talk about and just keeps it all so “real”. I love the balance Dr. Joyce brings to the group, she is wickedly compassionate, loving and wise. Joyce and Anne create the perfect environment for me to flourish, be with other adoptees who get the wide range of emotions I hold and open me up to new ways of being as I navigate my blossoming into me!

L.F.