Specialty · Grief & Loss

Grief takes many shapes.

Loss of a person, a pet, a job, a relationship, an identity, a version of yourself you'd grown into — all forms of grief deserve space.

Dried lavender and a pale flower on a sunlit wooden table

Anticipated Grief

The mourning that begins before the loss does — terminal diagnosis, decline of a parent, a relationship visibly ending. The body grieves on two timelines at once: what is and what's coming.

Framed photograph beside a lit candle and orange flowers in a clay pot

Complicated Grief

When grief gets tangled with relational complexity — ambivalence, unfinished business, estrangement, the death of someone who hurt you. The mourning is real and so is the ambivalence; both deserve space.

Unmade bed in warm afternoon light beside a curtained window

Traumatic Grief

Sudden, violent, or shocking loss that leaves the nervous system stuck in the moment of impact. Here grief and trauma braid together, and the work has to address both layers.

The work I do with grief is humanist, not prescriptive. There's no five-stages model and no calendar that tells you when you should be 'better.' Grief is the long process of metabolizing a loss that has changed the shape of your life — and the only honest pace is the one your particular grief actually moves at.

We sit with what was lost, what remains, and what's slowly becoming. Some sessions are tears. Some are stories. Some are long silences. Some are anger at the unfairness of it. All of it counts as the work.

"Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a love that has lost its object — and the work is finding what to do with that love."

Losses we work with

Partner death, parent death, child death, sibling death, friend death, pet death, miscarriage, abortion, job loss, marriage end, career end, identity shift, health loss, ability loss, place and home loss, friendship loss, dream loss, faith loss, and the loss of a future self you had imagined into being.

$175 per 50-min session·Sliding scale available·Bilingual EN/ES

Questions

Common questions.

Do you follow the five stages of grief?

No. The stages model can be useful as one lens, but grief in practice rarely moves in order, on schedule, or toward a tidy 'acceptance.' We work with whatever shape your grief is actually taking, not the shape a textbook says it should.

What if my loss happened years ago?

Grief doesn't expire. Many people come in years after the death, having functioned through it, and find there's still substantial work that wasn't possible to do at the time. Old grief is welcome here.

Can grief work happen alongside other therapy?

Yes. Grief threads through nearly every other concern — relationships, anxiety, identity, work — so the boundary is usually softer than it sounds. We'll work with where the grief shows up.

What if I don't cry?

Grief takes many somatic and emotional forms. Numbness, rage, restlessness, exhaustion, intellectualizing — all of it is grief showing up the way your particular nervous system carries it.

Grief & Loss