You can deeply love your child and still feel exhausted.
I'm Samantha Severin, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, an adoptive mom through foster care, and a Foster the City Vision Team member for Orange and LA County. I walk with foster and adoptive parents through trauma, attachment, and the everyday weight of caregiving.
Support for Foster & Adoptive Parents
Fostering and adoption can bring deep joy alongside grief, uncertainty, and emotional exhaustion. As an adoptive mom through foster care and a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, I offer a compassionate space for parents to process their experiences, strengthen relationships, and care for their own emotional well-being.
Also part of my practice
Speaking & Church Training
Talks and trainings for churches and ministries on trauma, attachment, and caring well for foster and adoptive families.
Explore speaking & training →The thread through all of it
Healing happens in relationship.
Foster and adoptive parents often arrive wondering if they're the only ones finding it this hard. You're not. The exhaustion, the second-guessing, the grief that surprises you — all of it makes sense in the context of what your family is carrying.
My clinical work draws primarily on EMDR and attachment-based approaches — supporting foster and adoptive parents navigating trauma, attachment, and the nervous system underneath challenging behaviors.
For clients who want it, Christian faith is welcome in the room and can be thoughtfully woven into our work. For those who don't, the care is exactly as attentive.
More about Samantha