A Conversation about Attachment for Adoptive Parents with Stacey Cales, LCSW

A lot of adoptive and foster parents are handed an impossible goal: your family should look seamless, your child should feel “forever” the moment adoption is finalized, and your bond should eventually feel just like biology. When that does not happen, it can leave you spiraling between overcontrol and despair. Rebecca Harvin sits down with Stacy Cales, LCSW, a former foster parent, adoptive mom, and licensed clinical social worker known in Jacksonville for helping families untangle attachment challenges, and we name the pressure out loud.

We talk about Stacye’s “beloved aunt or uncle” benchmark and why it can be the missing permission slip for exhausted parents. Lowering the bar is not lowering the love. It is removing the intensity that keeps everyone braced for failure. From there, we dig into why adoption day can feel like a letdown or even a threat, how our own attachment histories shape what feels urgent, and why we often parent our kids to survive the childhood we had. If you have ever thought, “Why is this still hard after all these years?” you are going to feel seen.

You will also get practical tools you can use today: the calm storytelling voice, small consequences you can actually enforce, the power of repair, and why boundaries are a core ingredient of healthy attachment. We even touch on prenatal and early childhood brain wiring so you can stop blaming yourself for what is really nervous system math.

If you are raising a child through foster care or adoption and you want more peace at home, listen through and then share this with a parent who needs it. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell us what belief about attachment you are ready to release.

If you'd like to know more about the work that Stacey does, or if you're a Florida resident looking for an attachment therapist, you can find more at her website here: https://floridaattachment.org/

We know that foster care and adoption present unique challenges for your marriage, so we created this Same Page Checklist as a conversation starter for you and your spouse. You can download it for free on our website at https://www.havenretreatsinc.org/couples-free-resources-1. Enjoy!

Registration is now open for our annual Bio Kid Retreat weekend June 26-28 at North Florida Christian Camp. Go to www.havenretreatsinc.org for more information.

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