Adoption Difficulties Unit
Mind Area
What do we do?
The Blue Healthcare Adoption and Relationship Improvement Unit offers an adoption support service with general training activities and group, individual and family therapy sessions. The objective is to support families throughout the adoption process by offering information, training and advice and providing them with tools to manage the needs and difficulties of adopted children and adolescents.
- We help adoptive families and adopted children to work as a family after adoption
- We offer information, training and advice to families to provide them with strategies for managing difficulties
- We contextualise the experiences of adopted children
- We offer a structured space for families and children to reflect on their adoptive status and difficulties
The objective is to support the families and the adopted child/adolescent in preparing for adoption, looking at the background to adoption and the integration process to bring the new family together.
How do we do it?
- We consider it essential to do preparation work with the parents to understand the adopted child’s situation and the family impact
- After the adoption process, is essential to:
- Help the adopted child to regulate their emotions and establish good family ties
- Help the parents better understand the relational and emotional dynamics of these children in order to give them a healing upbringing.
- Support the family by providing them with strategies and tools to help with the child's educational difficulties
- Offer parents a space for expression and emotional support to implement the emotional resources necessary to look after the child
Services portfolio: A programme for each individual
Psychoeducational sessions are offered to parents seeking guidance when starting an adoption process in the following areas:
- Understanding the story and the process (your story and my story)
- Behaviours: learning how to interpret them
- How do I act? Educational guidelines for bonding
- Discovery and development of life story narrative: help with this process
The main objective is to offer a structured and secure context in which families are helped with the process of supporting the adopted children. For this, we offer a family therapy and workshop service to continue parents’ training as well as therapeutic groups and individual sessions on working with children (age-adjusted) . It aims to:
- Facilitate the process of integration into the family
- Repair physical, emotional and cognitive damage
- Look into past history and origins
- Integration of identity
The objective of these workshops is to work as a family. The workshop’s themes are aimed at specifically improving:
- Emotional regulation
- Capacity for awareness and empathy
- Healthy relationships
- Anxiety and impulsive behaviour management
- Development of mindfulness techniques
Unit manager
Dr Marina Díaz-Marsá
Medical Director of the Mind Area
As well as being Blue Healthcare’s Medical Director, Dr Díaz-Marsá is the head of department of the San Carlos Clinical Hospital in Madrid, where she manages the Eating Disorder Unit and the Early Intervention in Psychosis Unit.
Dr Díaz Marsá is the National Director of the Ministry of Health’s mental health strategy for eating disorders, President of the Psychiatric Society of Madrid, and, as part of her teaching experience, she is a full professor. It is worth mentioning her professorial work at the Complutense University of Madrid, and she is an Honorary Professor at the CES University in Colombia. She is President of the Ibero-American Forum on Gender and Mental Health.
She graduated in Medicine and Surgery from the Complutense University of Madrid in 1991. She specialised in Psychiatry at the Ramón y Cajal Hospital in Madrid. She graduated cum laude as a Doctor of Medicine from the University of Alcalá. Dr Díaz Marsá has an established line of research in the neurobiological bases of anorexia and bulimia and its relationship with trauma and personality. She is a researcher at CIBERSAM and she leads the Master’s course for Eating Behaviour Disorders at the Complutense University. Her experience also covers the field of depression and anxiety and women's mental health. She has received several awards and prizes in the public and private spheres, and is the author of numerous articles in prestigious scientific journals.
