Healing Adoption Imprints with Annie Brook

ADOPTION IS NOT A FOREVER TRAUMA

HEALING ADOPTION IMPRINTS

REPAIR IS ALWAYS POSSIBLE

A 5 week online journey

Live with Annie Brook, Ph.D.

Explore the unique challenges of the adoption experience and learn how to heal adoption imprints.

The adoption experience challenges relationships at an uncanny level.

Adoption has a unique nervous system signature, and this course will help you understand, work with, and resolve that imprint.

Wednesdays, 9:30 AM-11:30 AM ET

Starting November 19th, 2025

There's more to healing adoption imprints than most therapists know about!

Adoption has an unusual co-dependency due to inutero/post-birth "unmet needs." Learn how to unravel the pieces of need.
Get to the root of emotional imprints
Use specific types of movement that prune out hyper-sensitivity, right in the brain!
Access implicit memory (before thought) that lodges in the primitive brain as protective responses and shows up as sensation
Re-inform the brain through movement

You will explore...

Class 1: The Unique Nervous System of Adoption, How orienting gets shaped with adoption, and confusion/brain states left over from the adoption imprint

Class 2: Why the Body Helps You Heal the Adoption Imprint, how to re-attune attention to safety, what to do if there was neglect

Class 3: How to Listen to the "Hidden Story" from Adoption, what are attachment styles and behaviors, and integrating "infant heartbreak and insufferable loss"

Class 4: Interrupt self-attack thinking and blame, and finding a "good-enough" life!

Class 5: Grief, Closure, Celebration, Moving Forward

WHY HEALING ADOPTION IMPRINTS

Annie Brook, Ph.D. brings decades of experience in working with adoptees and their families. Her methods are designed to create lasting results. Join us and transform your understanding of adoption and the lives of those you care for.

Live sessions with Annie Brook
Practical tools for the needs of adopted children
Identifying and addressing destructive beliefs in adoptees
Helping regulate sensation and emotions in adopted children
Healing the pain of adoption imprints for yourself, your child, or your clients

GET STARTED: HEAL THE ADOPTION IMPRINT

Heal the Pain of Adoption Imprints Online Course

and help more clients (or yourself/your child) work with:

Identity Pain: All the compensations around self worth; self attack, false sense of self, grandiosity, needing to be center of attention.
Emotional Pain: turns to mental aggression on self, or others.
Hard to know what your feel, followed by confusion, inner collapse, getting lost
Behavioral Pain: controlling, blaming, whining, perfectionism, super achiever or avoiding success, collapsing under pressure, cutting off from others.
Relational Pain: melt-downs, reactivity, pushing others away, not "needing" anybody!
Parenting Pain: Your child clings and pushes you away, is anxious, needs to be the "lightning rod" of attention, draws attention especially when you and your spouse are together; creates couple difficulties due to the stress of parenting an adopted child!

Heal adoption imprints

Therapist Training: Get mentored in this topic after every class. Chance to "study directly" with Annie. 45 minute Q and A immediately follows course content. Plus mentoring/supervision. Learn more below.

Somatic Therapist Training in this Topic

The hidden story in adoption is fear

Adopted children push you away because that is what happened to them.They are testing you to see if you love them; but it is a test that never ends. They are terrified you will both love them and give them away. Being abandoned at birth imprints an infant’s brain. Even though they were young, or you adopted them at birth, they hold this fear.

They are trying to tell their story, do you know how to listen?

Are you constantly repeating these steps?

Alarm – Your child becomes alarmed
Fear – They react with fear or become over-controlling
The Blow-up – They blow up and you blow up (or you both have melt-downs)
Separation – You separate because you need space. (Your adopted child perceives this as abandonment)
Reconciliation – When the heat of the moment has passed, you both seek contact.

You endlessly repeat this cycle which reinforces their inner belief that they are bad.

I am confident you are a great parent. But, adoptive kids have an inner alarm bell that is different than other children. Their first experience was being given away. Nothing soothes that fear without professional intervention. When their inner alarm bell rings, they will act out unless you learn new skills.

Does your adopted child…

Try to control you or others
Push you away
Have unusual demands
Need your attention all the time

Transform interactions and break the cycle:

Learn how to better manage the special needs of adopted children
Identify the destructive “bad baby” beliefs
Bring the deep-seated fears to the surface “ I am unloveable, and you will leave me”
Help the brain regulate sensation and respond normally
Acknowledge the emotion and link that emotion to the early need for protection.

Meet Annie Brook

Ph.D in Perinatal and Somatic Psychology, LPC, MSME, RSME, Body-Mind Centering teacher, Somatic Psychologist, Author, Biodynamic Cranio-Sacral practitioner, Gyrotonic/Gyrokinesis instructor, Kaiut Yoga Teacher and a therapist in high regard in the Somatic community

YOUR INSTRUCTOR

Annie Brook

Annie Brook, with over 45 years of experience working with hundreds of children and training therapists for over three decades, will guide you through this transformative journey. She understands the real-life struggles therapists face and provides practical tools to apply in your practice.

Healing Adoption Imprints Now Enrolling!

Don't miss this opportunity to make a profound impact in the lives of children and families. Join us on this empowering journey of self-discovery and professional growth. Enroll now!

JOIN HEALING ADOPTION IMPRINTS

"Despite my best efforts to do so in the last couple of years, I had not been able to find an adoption informed therapist with whom to work. I was working with a therapist whom I saw glancing briefly at that primal wound and quickly diverting our attention away from it as something that she did not have any skills with and which I interpreted as too painful for us to bear. That was an instance of a therapist doing more harm than good, and was part of the fuel for my coming on your specific course and for some activism I have been engaging in trying to raise awareness of the need for therapists to receive specific training in adoption issues." L

"The steadfast way in which you stay with the discomfort is very loving. You demonstrate that there is a process we can practice engaging in whereby we can witness our discomfort's dissipation. I have experienced enough of the benefits of such an approach to attach to dedicatedly working it going forward." Lindsay

"I got so much from this course. I have gained an ability to integrate each week's content and tools to be able to begin seeing change on a cellular level almost immediately. I would say my activation became apparent around module 7 when we began really getting into more triggering stuff with my emotional neglect and things I had been discovering about my attachment style...The overwhelm and confusion is something I have such a better grasp on... Peeling back the layers to this has been so eye-opening and your facilitation of the material was healing on a nervous system level, Annie." M

"Your passion for sharing your expertise, practice and insight with adoptees and caregivers is appreciated. I’ve never found a person or sources so holistically designed and offered." TC

"Thank you again for this amazing opportunity. I feel it’s so much more than a course." S

"Your work has helped me tremendously to lift the imprint – and the weight of my adoption story." E

"you are illuminating what I have experienced as lifetime struggle and frustration from what has felt like foundational flaws. With more awareness, my attention moves to ways I can integrate new learning with you into a practice of self-compassion, healing movement practices and patience for the process of integration and change." Tina

If you are treating people who were adopted, or were adopted yourself, learn to heal the foundation of attachment and relationship.

If you are the parent of an adopted child, learn how to relate in ways where you are empowered and your child feels safe, and you are not the target of their unresolved fears and needs.

The adoption experience challenges relationships at an uncanny level. Adoption has a unique nervous system signature, and this course will help you understand, work with, and resolve that imprint.

Many adoptive parents try really hard and are good; however the basic "adoption signature" creates attachment issues: and power struggles! You become the projection of the "bad mother" or unsafe mother, the father becomes the "rescuer" your relationship falls apart because you are both desperate and detached.

Adoption has an unusual co-dependency due to inutero/post-birth "unmet needs," until you know how to unravel the pieces of need found within the adoption imprint.

This class guides you to heal...

Your own double bind thinking
Unconscious shock patterns
Taking your seat more confidently
How birth or early trauma will come alive in your treatment room and what you can do with it to help children
Whether you have a grounded approach to an effective play therapy practice

10 Online Sessions

View live or at your convenience

Starts Wednesdays, Nov 19th

live with Annie

Can't make the time? No worries! All classes are recorded and you can view at your own timing.

Access to Q and A with Annie Brook

Hear real questions from real people! Annie is a unique educator who understands real life struggles. Annie has helped many adults, children, and infants who were adopted.

Her clients often come from other therapists or coaches who are "stumped," or from parents who changed therapists because they wanted better results.

How Is My Method Different?

What people don't know is that you can change the brain to change the pain.

I know how to get to the root of emotional imprints, and use specific types of movement that prune out hyper-sensitivity, right in the brain!
I help people access implicit memory (before thought) that lodges in the primitive brain as protective responses and shows up as sensation
I give people new information through movement that re-informs the brain

My methods work. I designed and tested them in clinical practice. I have been in practice for over 40 years! Results last. People graduate from therapy.

Children learned to bond and settle, and adults to not "get hooked" in the "frustration despair cycle" with their adopted child.

A mother's precocious 9 month old would not settle and rest. We did a warm pool session and repaired that "sense of safety" in the womb. The infant "rebonded" with her new parents and immediately began to settle and relax.

A couple who adopted was losing their relationship due to the stress of parenting an adopted child. They are using my methods to reclaim health and quality of focus in their marriage...and then using the same strategies to help their child relax and gain confidence.

A family with 2 adopted children from China is finally getting relief and the kids are changing their behaviors! (they also got my book, The Adopted Parents Handbook which is a free bonus when you sign up for the course)

"There's more to healing adoption imprints than most therapists know about!"

Discover new tools and share them with others.

Sign me up! Course starts soon

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