Beyond Permanency: Adoption Rupture, Attachment, and Relational Repair in Child Welfare

Friday, October 2, 2026, 9:00 AM–12:15 PM ET

Online via Zoom

This course is available for free to Michigan Department of Health and Human Services child welfare professionals. If you do not have the discount code to waive the course fee, please reach out to us at ssw.conted@umich.edu and we will assist you.

Continuing Education Offered

• 3 hours general live interactive online

Description

This training invites child welfare professionals to look beyond permanency as an endpoint and consider the relational realities that can continue long after placement. It focuses on how separation, grief, attachment disruption, identity complexity, and the absence of language to name adoption-related loss can affect adoptees and families across the lifespan. The session also examines how professional assumptions, dominant adoption narratives, and institutional language can unintentionally reinforce disconnection rather than support healing.

Through a trauma-responsive, relational, and inclusive lens, participants will explore ways to strengthen practice with adoptees, first families, adoptive families, and caregivers by using more honest, nuanced language and more attuned approaches to relational repair. The training will also incorporate reflection on race, culture, power, and inclusive practice in child welfare and adoption work.

Objectives

1. Identify key forms of adoption-related rupture, grief, and attachment disruption that may persist beyond legal permanency.
2. Describe how language, dominant narratives, and worker assumptions can shape relational outcomes for adoptees and families.
3. Implement trauma-responsive and inclusive practice strategies that support attachment, relational repair, and post-adoption stability.

Agenda

• 9:00am–9:30am Welcome, introductions, training overview, and learning objectives
• 9:00am–10:30am Language, dominant narratives, and child welfare practice: lecture and group discussion
• 9:30am–10:00am Understanding adoption rupture: grief, attachment, loss, and identity beyond permanency
• 10:30am–10:45am Break
• 10:45am–11:15am Reflective writing and discussion: examining language, assumptions, and practice
• 11:15am–11:45am Race, culture, transracial adoption, and inclusive practice in child welfare
• 11:45am–12:15pm Relational repair strategies, post-adoption support, discussion, and closing Q&A

Instructor

Dr. Liz DeBetta is an award-winning solo performance artist, writer, educator, and the founder of Migrating Toward Wholeness™, a trauma-informed, arts-based narrative healing framework. She holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies (Humanities & Culture) with certificates in Women's & Gender Studies and Creative Writing. Her work encompasses autoethnographic performance, creative writing, feminist critical theory, and social justice, and she has spent over a decade working at the intersection of lived experience, research, and storytelling for systems change. She is the author of Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal: Migrating Toward Wholeness and creator of the award-winning one-woman show Un-M-Othered, which explores adoption and patriarchy. Her work centers voice reclamation, identity integration, and the healing power of transforming silence into language and action. Un-M-Othered emerged directly from her long-term creative, scholarly, and embodied inquiry into adoption, trauma, and becoming the subject of one’s own story. Dr. Liz's interdisciplinary approach and commitment to social justice make her a leading voice in using creative expression as a tool for personal and collective transformation.

CE Approval Statement

The University of Michigan School of Social Work, a CSWE-accredited program, is authorized by Administrative Rule R 338.2923 4(b) to award Michigan social work continuing education contact hours.

Please see the CE Policies page for more information about continuing education.