by CeliaCenter | Jan 23, 2023
FREE monthly open support group called ADOPT SALON CONSTELLATION for all members of the Adoption Constellation: First Birthparents, Adoptees, Former Foster Youth, Foster, Adoptive Parents, and Kinship Families. Ages 18 and above.
A place for the Adoption & Foster Care community to come together to share stories, thoughts, feelings, and ideas, receive psycho-education, process grief/loss, and build strong bonds and connections.
The group is facilitated by Adoptions/Foster Care Psychotherapist, adult adoptee Cathy Leckie Koley, Adoptee and Intern.
5 – 7 pm Pacific Time
8-10 pm Eastern Time
Time and place are shown in the Events Calendar. Meetings held virtually via ZOOM until further notice.
Please register below to receive your ZOOM link for the event.
Cathy Leckie Koley BIO:
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 now teaches others about the adoptee experience, strategies for unearthing and healing adoption wounds, and mind-body practices that help with adoption-related difficulties. She 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.
by CeliaCenter | Jun 2, 2022
FREE monthly open support group for Foster Parents, Adoptive Parents, and Kinship Families. Ages 18 and above.
A place for the Adoption & Foster Care community to come together to share stories, thoughts, feelings, and ideas, receive psycho-education, process grief/loss, and build strong bonds and connections.
The group is facilitated by Phil Weglarz, Adoptive parent, Psychotherapist/Expressive Arts Therapist, Adoption Researcher.
7 pm – 8:30 pm Pacific Time
Time and place are shown in the Events Calendar. Meetings held virtually via ZOOM until further notice.
Please register below to receive your ZOOM link for the event.
Phil Weglarz BIO: In 2013, he became a first-time parent of an infant through a private, local same race adoption with on-going 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 which specialized in working with children with co-occurring mental health and learning challenges. Phil’s interest and specialty has 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 PhD 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.
