Your Therapist: Claire Bell (she/her)

Claire is a Nigerian and Japanese Associate Marriage and Family Therapist supervised by Roz McMillan (LCSW 85799). Much of her work centers around helping people navigate identity, loss, and the question of how we make meaning when life changes us.

How do you make sense of what has happened? Who are you now? How do you grieve the life you thought you would have while still building a life that feels meaningful?

Claire works with transracial adoptees and people living with chronic illness because both experiences often begin with a profound rupture—an event or circumstance that changes how you understand yourself and your place in the world.

For adoptees, especially transracial adoptees raised by white families, that rupture may have happened before there were words for it. There can be a deep and quiet ache around identity, belonging, and cultural disconnection. Being separated from your original culture, language, community, and ways of knowing while being expected to assimilate into a world that may never fully reflect you can leave lasting questions. Adoption is often framed as a story of gain, yet many adoptees carry grief, loss, abandonment wounds, and the feeling of holding a story that others do not fully understand. Reunification can bring another layer of complexity—joy, overwhelm, anger, longing, and the challenge of integrating multiple truths about yourself and your history.

For people living with chronic illness, the rupture may come with a diagnosis. Whether HIV, a traumatic brain injury, diabetes, or another chronic condition, illness can fundamentally change your relationship to your body, your future, your sexuality, your independence, and your sense of self. Claire am particularly interested in helping people explore their illness story—not simply what happened medically, but how they understand what has happened to them and who they are becoming because of it. For serodiscordant couples, these experiences can also reshape intimacy, trust, communication, and partnership in ways that deserve thoughtful care and support.

In both adoption and illness, there is often an invisible process of mourning—mourning what was lost, what was never given, what might have been, and the versions of ourselves we imagined we would become. There is also the ongoing work of building an identity that feels authentic in the aftermath of change.

Claire’s approach is trauma-informed and grounded in curiosity, compassion, and meaning-making. She incorporates EMDR and other evidence-based approaches while also making space for the cultural, relational, and spiritual dimensions of healing that are often overlooked. Whether you are reconnecting with your roots, navigating reunification, processing a diagnosis, or learning how to inhabit a changed body, therapy can be a place to explore who you are, what matters to you, and how you want to move forward.

My hope is to help you come home to yourself—not the version shaped solely by survival, but the fuller, more integrated person underneath it. Together, we can make space for grief, reclaim identity, and create a life that feels connected, meaningful, and truly your own.