The Dear Claire Podcast

There's a little one inside you who's been waiting a very long time. For adoptees, she's often younger than words — holding the original loss alone since before you had memory of it. This week, we go inward to meet her. I'm braiding together three things that changed how I do this work: Internal Family Systems (Richard Schwartz) to understand your parts — the wounded "exil...

You cannot do deep healing work from a state of fight-or-flight. I wish I'd known that a decade ago. I would have saved myself hundreds of hours of therapy I wasn't biologically ready to use. Because the body — your beautiful, brilliant, way-too-loyal body — is the one carrying the wound. And until we learn to come home to it, no amount of insight is going to move the trauma. This week w...

I always thought the problem was the wine. Or the scrolling. The over-working. The over-functioning. I'd white-knuckle a promise to myself, last about four days, and crash right back into the thing I swore I'd quit. Then I'd hate myself for it. None of it was ever the problem. It was the band-aid. The pain underneath — the grief, the relinquishment wound, the belief I had to earn my...

For most of my life, I thought having no boundaries made me a good person. Easygoing. Loving. Available. The truth? It just meant I was showing people exactly how to walk all over me. And it was slowly costing me my body, my peace, and my sense of self. As adoptees, our relationship with boundaries is rooted in survival. We learned really early that saying no could mean rejection or abandonment. S...

If you've ever felt like you had to perform okayness to be kept — this episode is for you. As adoptees, so many of us learned early that being loved was conditional. To stay, we had to be a certain way: easy, grateful, not too much. So we took the parts of ourselves that felt too big, too messy, too needy, too angry — and we hid them. Not just from other people. From ourselves. That's th...

Why is it that we often find ourselves acting in ways that contradict what we truly want in our relationships? In this episode of Dear Claire , we explore the powerful reality that our needs are the invisible architects of our behavior—governing how we show up for others and, more importantly, how we show up for ourselves. We are diving into the transformative power of the AHAI Framework (Adoptee...

In this transformative episode, Claire dives deep into the "invisible script" that many adoptees carry—the subconscious roadmap formed in the earliest stages of life. You will finally understand why you get triggered and learn exactly how to master your emotions. If you’ve ever felt like you’re repeating the same relationship patterns or "freezing" when someone gets too close,...

The Art of Healing Adoptee Attachment Are you tired of just "knowing" your attachment style but still feeling stuck in the same anxious or avoidant cycles? In this opening episode, Claire Magenheimer—The Adoptee Empowerment and Integrated Attachment Theory coach—pulls back the curtain on why awareness is only the starting line when it comes to healing your core wounds. Claire shares her...