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 "exile" and the protectors guarding her; Self energy, the calm, undamaged inner parent that's been in you all along; and a real...

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 place — that was the issue. And you cannot willpower your way out of a wound. This week, we're getting honest a...

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 the shadow. And reclaiming it is how we come home to who we actually are. In this episode we cover: Why I sob...

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, this episode is your secret decoder ring for rewiring your subconscious mind and changing your attachment style for g...