Staff

• Teen, Adult and Family Clinician
• Foster Care and Adoption Competent
• Trauma & PTSD
• E.M.D.R. Certified
• Anxiety, Depression, Stress Management
• Internal Family Systems
• Adoptee Personal Experience

As an adoptee, my clinical focus is working through the lifelong traumatic impact of adoption, abandonment or relinquishment and process unmet childhood emotional needs. I work with all members of the adoption constellation, and those who struggle with feelings of abandonment and feelings of disconnection. I have experience treating addiction, depression, anxiety, relationship problems, and finding relief from overwhelming psychological trauma. I use an integrative approach of psychotherapy attuned to the mind body connection. I believe in creating a comfortable and safe therapeutic environment, and developing a compassionate and trusting therapist-client relationship allowing for authentic growth. 

• Teen, Adult and Family Clinician
• Foster Care and Adoption Competent
• Trauma Sensitive Yoga Instructor
• Grief and Loss Processing
• Anxiety, Depression, Stress Management
• Adoption Reunion Facilitator
• Adoptee Personal Experience

Cathy is a Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Instructor, Adoptee Speaker/ Writer / Educator. After reuniting with her birth family at age 43, Cathy found herself on an unexpected healing journey related to her own relinquishment. The process included yoga, through which she found significant healing, and a new career path. As a yoga teacher since 2012, Cathy teaches others about the adoptee experience, strategies for unearthing and healing adoption wounds, and mind-body practices that help with adoption-related difficulties. Trained in Trauma-Sensitive in 2014 with Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, and David Emerson, author of Overcoming Trauma through Yoga. Cathy is currently pursuing an M.A. in Counseling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute.

• Clinical Substance Abuse Counselor
• Master Addiction Counselor
• Independent Addiction Consultant
• Recovery Consultant
• Relinquishment and Adoption Consultant at Beacon Confidential LLC.
  

  He is co-author of the monograph Relinquishment and Addiction:  What Trauma Has To Do With It, and the award-winning memoir Parallel Universes—The Story of Rebirth, which chronicles the author’s experiences within the intersection of adoption and addiction. He is a member of the National Association for Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors (NAADAC), and an Advisory Board Member of Wisconsin Adoption and Permanency Support. David was relinquished, adopted, and currently lives in southeastern Wisconsin and works around the country and world. He enjoys spending time with his wife of 38 years and adult children. He relentlessly pursues Blue Mind (that mildly meditative state characterized by calm, peace, unity, and a sense of general happiness and satisfaction with life at the moment) that comes from being in and around the water.

https://davidbbohl.com/

In 2013, Phil Weglarz became a first-time parent of an infant through a private, local same-race adoption with an ongoing direct two-way relationship with his daughter’s birth mother. Prior to this, he had professional experience as an attachment-based play therapist and parent coach for birth/first parents seeking reunification, and foster-to-adoptive parents in an agency that specialized in working with children with co-occurring mental health and learning challenges.

Phil’s interest and specialty have always been trauma-informed, sensory-based, and creative modalities for parent-child and peer-to-peer engagement, and he currently serves as core faculty and program chair for the Expressive Arts Therapy program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, based in San Francisco. Most recently, he completed a Ph.D. dissertation entitled, “Kaleidoscopes of Kinship: A Narrative Inquiry of Birth Fathers’ and Adoptive Fathers’ Experiences of Open Adoptions” (2022), in which he interviewed 5 birth fathers and 23 adoptive fathers about what it is like for them to belong to families created through foster care or private adoptions. This work has already been recognized by the Rudd Adoption Research Program at UMass-Amherst, and he will be sharing these intimate stories of men’s perspectives of adoption in various ways soon.