My contribution refers to the work done between 2014 and 2019 within a project that involved families engaged in national and international adoption, an art therapist and a psychotherapist. The work was carried out with art-therapeutic group and individual activities aimed at minors, and psychological-counseling group activities for the parents. The target of the project was to ease the minor’s integration process in the adoptive family, to offer support for the individuation and socialization processes, even in the school environment, to strengthen the exercise of the adoptive parents’ reflective functioning, offering them a broader and shared vision of the adopted minors’ attachment needs and mantalization capabilities. The work was structured in small groups (maximum 6 partecipants), as homogeneous as possible talking about age range. The group sessions were held simultaneously, so that at the end the parents and minors could share the previous experience together. The first and last sessions of every cycle has been structured as an art-therapeutic laboratory for both parents and minors together. Learning how to trust what experience has taught them as untrustworthy is the paradox every adopted child has to face.
Confronting a path that from loss and death goes towards a symbolic rebirth, three narrations become fundamental: the one that keeps together past me and present me, the familiar ones, capable of becoming memories, and the ones that can put the pieces back together, overcoming past fractures. In this way, in the building of a stable identity, fragmented and scattered narrative elements can be made consistent. Being looked for and be found as much as look for and find, present as fundamental components of the path that goes towards the reconstruction of our own personal history, in a narration that keeps our sense of identity: when you find the map, you find the treasure.