Naming blocked care, and finding the way back to compassion.
Lisa and Melissa Corkum talk candidly about the point where caring for a child starts to feel impossible, a state they call blocked care and treat as a nervous-system response, not a character flaw. Conversations about fostering, grief, marriage and a child's mental health keep circling back to small, practical ways a depleted parent can recover.
PRESS PLAY
Adoption Wise treats a quiet crisis in adoptive and foster parenting as something with a mechanism, a name and a way back. The name is blocked care. On the show it is described as a protective mechanism in the nervous system, glossed as the brain-body connection, that suppresses the higher brain functions caregiving depends on. The result, as one episode puts it, can feel as if a parent's heart has left the relationship. Lisa and Melissa Corkum, the two voices who introduce the show, pair that diagnosis with reassurance: a parent in blocked care is not a bad parent, and compassion can be rekindled. Their book, Reclaim Compassion, which sets neuroscience alongside faith, is referenced in recent episodes, and a blocked care assessment from it is offered free. The science is taken seriously without turning clinical. In '#245: The Science of Caring with Dr. Jon Baylin and Jessica Sinarski', the conversation draws on mammalian studies in which caregiving can be seen turning on and off, then treats blocked care as more than a passing bad moment. Other conversations are more personal. Kayla North describes ten years of fostering and a family of six kids in an episode about community, where the talk turns to small things a parent can do in the tiniest spaces of the day to help their nervous system recover after hard interactions. Amber Reynolds, introduced as the team's Director of Communications, remembers nine days at her husband's family cabin on a remote Minnesota lake. She describes watching her children's bodies begin to relax, and remember how to play, after a year of stress. The follow-up question is direct: what did that year do to her own nervous system and mental health? When Lisa and Melissa Corkum talk on their own, the subjects get closer to home. '#244 When Blocked Care Affects Your Marriage' borrows Suzanne Stabile's four mantras, show up, pay attention, tell the truth and don't get attached to the results, and turns them into advice for raising blocked care with a spouse from a regulated place instead of in the middle of a disagreement. The last mantra draws an honest admission that it is the hard one. Grief is another thread, framed around the gap between what families expected from fostering and adoption and what they found. '#240: Tangible Ideas for Processing Grief' includes an account of public writing, going back to an early blog, and of talking with people who genuinely care as ways of working through loss. The feed also holds a workshop recording in which a presenter named Andy explains family inheritance through the biological-parent questions on a doctor's office form. The register is warm and plainspoken, with room for a laugh about getting through a recording without a coughing fit. Episodes sign off by reminding the listener that they are a good parent doing good work, which is about as clear a statement of the show's stance as it offers.
Made for: Suits an adoptive or foster parent who keeps showing up for a child but feels their compassion running low, and who wants a nervous-system explanation paired with guilt-free, practical next steps.
What sets it apart: It returns again and again to blocked care, the idea that a protective stress response can switch off a caregiver's compassion, and starts with the parent's own regulation instead of the child's behavior. The show's own book on reclaiming compassion anchors that approach.
Rediscover the confident and connected parent you long to be. We’ll show you how.
Blocked care gets a name before anyone asks you to be more patient.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A compassionate episode gives parents language for emotional distance and the experience of blocked care.
AdoptionWise's episode on blocked care names the unsettling experience of feeling emotionally absent in a parenting relationship. Psychologist Dr.
A tender, practical conversation about blocked care, honest communication, and hope inside a strained marriage.
AdoptionWise takes a hard marital subject and keeps it close to the daily work of attention, responsibility, and repair. Lisa C. Qualms and Melissa Corkum connect blocked care with the strain of parenting children with significant needs, then make room for vulnerable listener…
Kayla North links blocked care with the small acts of recovery that help parents keep showing up.
Kayla North brings nearly 20 years of foster and adoptive parenting to a grounded conversation about blocked care, compassion, and what it costs to keep showing up when family life feels emotionally spent.
A grounded conversation about the stress families carry when a child's distress reshapes daily life.
When children's stress starts setting the tone for the whole household, Adoption Wise turns its attention to parents' nervous systems, mental health, and capacity to keep showing up.
A family-systems workshop helps adoptive and foster parents trace inherited relationship patterns with care.
AdoptionWise's workshop frames family systems theory as a practical way to notice inherited relationship patterns in adoptive and foster family life.
Two friends, one microphone, no polite silences.
Messy parenting, made practical and warm.
School runs, stain tips and mom-group drama, compared out loud.
Practical hope for raising sturdy kids.
Faithful help for the hard parts of mothering.
Kayla North, a Texas foster parent who adopted four of six children after ten years of fostering, describes experiencing blocked care during crises involving a young foster child and an older adopted child.
Adoption Wise episode #235 presents Sandra Flack's workshop on accommodating children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, drawing on her experience raising eight children, including two sons diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome.
Lisa C.
A workshop on creating the best IEP for adopted children, hosted by an adoption support community.
AdoptionWise episode 233 features Nakole Wooley, a Missouri licensed master social worker who became guardian to two nephews and adopted a niece while raising three birth children.
Adoption Wise episode 245 brings John Balin and Jessica Sinarski together with Lisa C.
AdoptionWise episode 244 centers on blocked care's effect on marriage after a listener says her husband wants divorce over how she treated their daughter for 10 years.
Kayla North says she and Ryan have six kids, fostered for 10 years, and adopted four through the Texas foster care system before moving into TBRI trainings and parent coaching.
Adoption Wise episode 242 features Amber Reynolds, the show's Director of Communications, describing how foster care, adoption, and child mental health collided in her family on a farm in northwest Illinois.
["Adoption Wise #241, '[workshop] What Shapes You: Unlocking Your Family System for Hope,' has Andy Stoker laying out family systems theory for adoptees and foster-adoptive parents.", "He says the framework is 'about confronting our conditioning' and uses a Dallas driving moment, where he notices a Black man crossing the street and checks a racist fear response inherited from his family, the evening news, and Texas history.", "The middle of the conversation turns to triangles, Edwin Friedman\u2019s seventh law, and Andy\u2019s own 'primitive triangle' after his father William Craig Stoker died in a 1979 car accident when Andy was four.", "Later, he explains boundary ambiguity in adoption and tells parents to treat children's thoughts and feelings as information rather than directives."]
Lisa C.
Rebecca Cook of AdoptionWise describes fostering newborns through Jonah's Journey, a ministry serving incarcerated women in Tennessee.
Lisa C.
AdoptionWise hosts Lisa C.
Sandra Flack explains how FASD affects brain-based tasks such as planning, memory, organization, sensory management, and impulse control.
Sandra Flack teaches Lisa C.
Adoption Wise hosts Lisa C.
Nakole Wooley describes becoming responsible for six children in three years and five days after initially having no plan to foster or adopt.
Adoption Wise episode #232 features Angela Koston, an adoptive and foster mother from Texas, describing blocked care during COVID-19 shutdown while raising three boys and working from home.
Adoption Wise hosts Lisa C.
AdoptionWise hosts Lisa C.
Suzanne Stabile, guest on the Adoption Connection Podcast and host of The Enneagram Journey, connects her experience as a 72-year-old adoptee with Enneagram centers, default emotions, and adoption-related loss.
Robyn Gobbel, a former therapist who worked for 15–20 years with adopted children and families, explains her owl, watchdog, and possum pathways for understanding nervous-system responses.
Adoption Wise episode #227 answers four listener questions about placement preparation, young-adult rejection, blocked care between spouses, and decision-making for a child with suspected FASD.
Amy J.
Tristan McGee, a certified TBRI practitioner and adoptive mother, teaches families how to use a six-part nurture group at home.
Adoption Wise’s episode #224 shares a Raising Boys and Girls interview with Lisa Qualls and Melissa Corkum about adoption, foster care, grief, and family change.
Adoption Connection hosts Lisa Qualls and Melissa Corkum share adoption histories involving South Korea, Ethiopia, foster care, birth-parent loss, and large families.
Robin Goble interviews Melissa Corkum and Lisa Qualls of Adoption Connection about blocked care, which they describe as a nervous-system defense that can reduce parental joy and compassion.
Lisa Qualls and Melissa Corkum use three mid-year reflection questions for 2023: what they discovered, what is currently on their minds, and what they want to learn this summer.
Stephanie Fast tells Lisa Qualls and Melissa Corkum about surviving childhood trauma in South Korea, including being found on a garbage heap at age seven by a Swedish nurse.
Rachel Bell and Kristen Perso share vacation-planning strategies shaped by adoption, autism, OCD, anxiety, traumatic brain injury, severe food allergies, and power-wheelchair travel.
Lisa Qualls and Melissa Corkum answer questions about connecting with adult children, choosing between adopting teens and children ages three through eight, and interpreting a six-year-old’s repeated bedtime hug requests.
Adoption Connection's Lisa Qualls and Melissa Corkum host Beth Smith Feger, PhD, for a workshop on explaining adoptive and foster families to relatives and friends.
Kristen Thomas tells Lisa Qualls and Melissa Corkum how domestic violence, childhood abuse, family secrecy, and foster care shaped her development and relationships.
Adoption Wise’s mailbag episode features Lisa Qualls and Melissa Corkum answering questions about birth-family love, recurring psychosomatic pain, and blocked care for non-parent caregivers.
Lisa Qualls and Melissa Corkum preview their book Reclaim Compassion by reading Chapter 1 about blocked care in adoptive parents.
Crispin Mayfield explains how attachment science, developed through work associated with John Bowlby and later research, can shape a person's relationship with God.
Lisa Qualls and Melissa Corkum answer mailbag questions about consequences, boundaries, separation anxiety, and contact with birth family on the Adoption Connection Podcast.
Dr.
Darren and Margie Fink of Transfiguring Adoption explain how bibliotherapy uses books and characters to help foster and adoptive children discuss trauma indirectly.
Adoption Wise episode #207 features Jen Hook and Josh Hook discussing identity, culture, and grief in foster and adoptive families through their book Thriving Families.
Lisa Qualls and Melissa Corkum answer mailbag questions about biological siblings resisting foster care or adoption, a five-year-old struggling with his newly adopted three-year-old brother from Taiwan, power struggles over choices, and doubts about whether parenting efforts matter.
Lisa Qualls and Melissa Corkum reflect on 2022 through grief, adoption work, spiritual direction, family commitments, and decisions about what to accept or decline.
David Thomas, a therapist at Daystar Counseling in Nashville, explains how anxiety can appear as restlessness, perfectionism, anger, or restraint collapse rather than obvious fear.
Adoption Connection Podcast episode 203 features Susan, who adopted two children from China, and Brittany, who became a parent to three children through adoption and foster care.
Adoption Connection Podcast hosts Lisa Qualls and Melissa Corkum mark episode 200 with John, Brittany, Sarah, and Allison describing post-adoption support across kinship, foster, domestic, and international adoptions.
Jessica Sinarski explains how sensory processing can make children’s meltdowns, shutdowns, aggression, or food refusal easier to interpret.
Adoption Wise episode #197 features Jennifer Dyan Ghoston discussing how the Enneagram helped her understand her adoption story, anxiety, and tendency to gather information.
Lisa Qualls and Melissa Corkum answer four adoption questions about trauma responses, expectations, transracial adoption, and Job Corps.