Grief Therapy

Grief work is life work.

Grief impacts our everyday lives as humans. Grief is the anguish experienced after a significant loss in one’s life. Grief is not just associated with the death of a family member, friend, partner, or pet; although it of course includes it.

In early life grief can be experienced through:

Psychological distress
Yearning
Confusion
Abandonment
Neglect
Rejection
Separation anxiety from a primary caregiver
Death

In adolescent and adulthood grief can be experienced through:

Relationship heartbreaks (including divorce)
Experiences of oppression
Financial instability
Poor health
Fertility issues
Loss of a dream
Loss of your youth
Guilt
Regret
Obsessive dwelling on the past
Apprehension about the future
Anticipated death and death itself

There are different types of grief. Collective grief occurs when communities experience grief as a whole, for example: school shootings, natural disasters, pandemics, etc. Inhibited grief occurs when emotions are repressed. These repressed emotions can present themselves as physical symptoms when they are not dealt with. Cumulative grief occurs when there are multiple losses at once. Delayed grief refers to emotions that accompany the loss, but appear weeks, months, or even years after the event.

Managing Grief.

The mental health world often diagnoses grief as anxiety, depression, and/or PTSD. My work with clients focuses less on labeling these experiences and more on normalizing them as part of the human experience. The work focuses on emotional regulation through the understanding of ‘ physical reactions, feelings, behaviors, and thoughts associated with grief. I empower clients in their own self care through the management and prioritization of their own needs and expectations from the relationships around them. This is accomplished by creating and maintaining boundaries.

I support clients experiencing all types of grief. In our work together we focus on the universal experience of grief and death to encourage feelings of connectedness to the world around them, and to promote healing.

My goal is to create a safe environment for my clients to process their grief and make sense of their life moving forward. I help connect the dots to understand how and why their perception of loss impacts them differently than others around them.