About Root & Return Wellness

Adoption Community, Identity & Belonging

Healing within the adoption community asks us to hold many truths at once — grief and gratitude, longing and love, loss and resilience. At Root & Return Wellness, we honor the full spectrum of the adoptive family experience. This work inspired the founding of our practice and continues to shape the compassionate, integrative care we offer today.

Led by Rachel Forbes, LCSW, an adoptee and licensed clinical social worker, Root & Return Wellness provides therapeutic support, education, and guidance for adoptees, families, and professionals seeking to deepen understanding, felt belonging, and connection within the adoption constellation.

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For Adoptees

Reclaiming Your Story, Your Voice, & Your Belonging

This space was created with adoptees at its heart. Whether you are newly exploring your story or have spent years reflecting, Root & Return Wellness offers compassionate support at every stage of the adoptee experience.

We understand the complexity of living between worlds: navigating identity, origin, and belonging while holding grief, gratitude, and the protective parts that helped you survive. Our work is grounded in Internal Family Systems (IFS), Polyvagal Theory, and embodiment practices that help you connect with your Self energy, honor your emotions, and build inner trust.

For adoptees in Connecticut, this may include psychotherapy focused on trauma healing and integration. For those outside Connecticut, we offer consultation and coaching that provide education, reflection, and community support around themes of attachment, identity, and the adoptee experience.

Healing here means finding space for all parts of your story—the known, the missing, and the becoming—while learning to hold them with compassion and curiosity.

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COMING SOON: Self-paced courses and group circles where adoptees can connect, share, and heal in community.

For Adoptive Parents & Families

Supporting the Journey Toward Connection & Understanding

Adoption weaves together multiple stories, each layered with loss, love, and longing. For adoptive parents and families, this often means learning how to hold your own emotions while supporting your child through theirs.

Root & Return Wellness provides guidance, education, and one-on-one sessions to help families strengthen connection, expand empathy, and deepen awareness of adoption’s lifelong impact. We explore themes such as attachment and nervous system regulation, grief and guilt, racial identity and advocacy, and creating safety through presence rather than perfection. Self-paced courses for adoptive parents and families are coming soon.

This work invites families to move beyond fear or uncertainty and into relationships built on honesty, compassion, and mutual understanding. Healing as a family means learning to listen with openness and to hold space for truths that can coexist.

EXPLORE THERAPYMEET OUR TEAM
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For Professionals & Agencies

Bringing Compassion and Competence to Adoption Care

Professionals and agencies play an essential role in shaping adoption experiences across generations. Root & Return Wellness offers both self-paced education and live workshops for clinicians, social workers, and organizations seeking to deepen their adoption competence and trauma-informed care.

Through psychoeducation, case reflection, and embodied practice, participants gain tools to:

  • Understand the emotional and developmental impact of early attachment rupture and loss
  • Honor the grief that exists within each part of the adoption constellation
  • Cultivate awareness of bias and systemic inequities in adoption narratives
  • Integrate IFS and nervous system–informed tools into their work

Our goal is to help professionals move from awareness to meaningful change, creating systems that honor truth, agency, and belonging.

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Founder Rachel Forbes standing outdoors in autumn, wrapped in a large multicolored scarf, looking to the side with dry plants in the background.

Speaking, Training & Advocacy

Expanding Awareness Through Story, Education, and Community

Rachel Forbes is a passionate speaker and educator who brings warmth, clarity, and authenticity to conversations about adoption, identity, and belonging. Her talks, workshops, and collaborations invite both professionals and communities to engage with adoption as a lifelong, layered experience that calls for tenderness, understanding, and courage.

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Speaking topics include:

  • The lifelong impact of attachment trauma
  • Integrating IFS and somatic awareness into adoption support
  • Reframing “adoption as a gift” into “adoption as complexity”
  • Cultivating compassion, honesty, and curiosity in families and organizations

Rachel’s approach blends professional expertise with lived experience, offering audiences education, insight, and hope. She also provides consultation for agencies, clinicians, and educators seeking to develop trauma-informed, adoption-competent frameworks.

Work With Rachel

Words from the Community

Reflections from Adoptees, Families, & Colleagues

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Working with Rachel in NUMARU’s Deep Talk Series was such a nourishing experience. From the very beginning, there was an ease that felt honest, heartfelt, and full of warmth. Rachel brings both professionalism and deep authenticity. She embodies compassion in a way that instantly builds trust and safety, qualities so essential in this healing work. I am deeply grateful not only for our collaboration, but also for the personal connection that formed through it. Her presence, enthusiasm, and grounded spirit made this experience truly special. I would say yes to working together again anytime.

Sun Mee Martin-Klein
,
Adoptee and Founder of NUMARU

I was a client of Rachel’s during a wild time in my personal life and in the world. During the years I worked with her, Rachel served as a significant source of support, guidance, and healing. She possesses the kind of energy, even virtually, that instantly puts you at ease and makes you feel safe. She has a remarkable ability to make you feel seen, heard, and cared for. She balances validation with insight, perspective, and critical thinking. As a Korean adoptee myself, I cannot begin to express how our shared experience laid the groundwork for one of the most profound growth experiences of my life. Rachel is an exceptional provider and human being. She is deeply compassionate and nurturing, warm and inviting, funny with an appropriate sense of humor, and truly an incredible person to have the privilege of working with. Anyone who gets to work with Rachel in any capacity is beyond lucky, and I will forever be grateful for her.

Emily R.
,
Client and Adoptee