Working With Grief and Loss
Grief has its own timeline. It contains many different emotions, and often much of it looks nothing like we expect.
Maybe you’ve lost someone who defined your world. Maybe you’ve lost a relationship, a belief system, a career, a future you had imagined, or a version of yourself. Maybe the loss was sudden and shattering, or slow, ambiguous, and unrecognized by those around you.
Often, well-meaning people expect you to “move on” or be further along by now. But you don’t need to grieve faster, you simply need a space to grieve honestly.
What Grief Can Look Like
Grief is rarely a straight line or a predictable set of stages. It is a wave that can catch you completely off guard:
- Unpredictable waves: Searing sadness or crying spells that hit suddenly, sometimes out of nowhere.
- Unexpected emotions: Feeling intense anger, guilt, regret, or even relief, emotions that feel confusing or “wrong.”
- Numbness & fog: Watching your life from a distance, feeling completely detached from daily activities.
- Physical symptoms: Extreme fatigue, loss of appetite, or a general feeling of bodily weakness.
- Complicated grief: When the relationship with what was lost was itself complicated, conflicted, or unfinished.
- Anticipatory grief: Navigating the slow, painful arrival of a loss before it has fully happened.
My Background with Grief and Loss
Before establishing my private practice, I worked at Hospice of Santa Cruz County, sitting with bereaved individuals and families in some of the most profound, tender, and painful moments of their lives.
That clinical experience shaped me deeply. It taught me that grief is not a pathology to be cured or a problem to be solved, it is a sacred, human process to be accompanied. I bring that patience, respect, and holding capacity into every therapeutic relationship. I am willing to sit with you in whatever you are carrying, including the parts that feel completely unspeakable.
What Grief Therapy Looks Like
Because every relationship to loss is unique, there is no set protocol for grief. Instead, I follow your lead:
- Telling the story: For some, it is crucial to recount the details of the loss or the life of the person who died, again and again, in a safe space.
- Somatic integration: Sitting with where the physical weight of grief lives in the body and learning how to breathe through it.
- Meaning & identity: Exploring what the loss means about who you are now, how your world has changed, and how to carry the memory forward.
- Disenfranchised grief: Validating losses that society doesn’t always recognize, a miscarriage, the death of a pet, a family estrangement, a career shift, or leaving a high-control faith.
Grief deserves company. I’d love to talk.