Grief Therapy
Are you experiencing grief and need more support?
What this is…
We tend to think of grief as something that follows a clear event — a death, a diagnosis, an ending — and moves in a recognizable direction toward something called acceptance. But grief is rarely that tidy. It arrives in unexpected forms, gets stuck in unexpected places, and sometimes attaches itself to losses that don't get named or witnessed by anyone else. Therapy offers a space to grieve what actually happened — not the version that's easier to explain.
There are three forms of grief that don't fit the standard narrative, and that often go untreated as a result:
Ambiguous grief is grief without a clear ending, or without a body. It arises when someone is physically gone but not dead — through estrangement, dementia, addiction, or disappearance — or when someone is physically present but emotionally absent, as with a parent who could never really be reached. The loss is real, but there's nothing to bury.
Ambivalent grief is grief complicated by mixed feelings toward the person or thing lost. When someone you loved also hurt you — an abusive parent, a difficult marriage, a friendship that cost you — grief doesn't arrive clean. It arrives tangled with relief, anger, guilt, and love all at once.
Complicated grief is what happens when grief gets stuck — when the acute pain of loss doesn't soften with time but instead becomes a fixed state, colonizing daily life and making it hard to function, connect, or imagine a future. It's often a sign that the loss touched something much deeper than the immediate relationship.
Who this is for…
You might be in the right place if:
You're grieving someone who is still alive — through estrangement, emotional absence, addiction, or cognitive decline
You lost someone you had a complicated relationship with, and the grief doesn't feel like what grief is supposed to feel like
You feel relief alongside the sadness, and the relief makes you feel guilty
Your loss isn't the kind others recognize — a relationship that ended, a life you didn't get to live, a version of someone you loved who no longer exists
You've been grieving for a long time and it hasn't gotten easier
You find yourself unable to talk about the person you lost without it feeling as raw as the day it happened, years later
You're functioning, but something is sealed off — a numbness or a flatness that arrived with the loss and never left
You never got to say what needed to be said, and you're carrying that
What we work on…
Grief work isn't about achieving acceptance or arriving at closure — those are worthy destinations that can't be forced. It's about creating enough space for the full complexity of the loss to be held and understood.
One distinction that often matters here: grief and mourning are not the same thing. Grief happens on the inside — the internal experience of loss, the waves of feeling, the way absence reorganizes your inner world. Mourning happens on the outside — the expression of that grief, the rituals and witnesses and social acknowledgment that allow loss to be processed and integrated. Most of us need both. But ambiguous, ambivalent, and complicated grief often get stuck precisely because the mourning never happened. There was no ritual, no permission, no one who recognized the loss as real. When grief has nowhere to go on the outside, it has a way of going nowhere on the inside either — calcifying into depression, numbness, or a low-grade ache that becomes background noise to a life.
Using a psychodynamic approach, we look at what this particular loss means in the context of your whole story — what it echoes from earlier losses, what it's stirred up about identity and attachment, what remains unfinished and why. For ambiguous and ambivalent grief especially, we spend time naming what was lost precisely — because often the first step is simply being allowed to grieve something no one else has acknowledged as real. That recognition alone can begin to move something that has been frozen for a long time.
How to get started…
Working together starts with a complimentary consultation call that lasts about fifteen minutes. It helps me to hear briefly what’s bringing you into therapy at this time. I can then answer any questions you may have and share more about how I work. From there you might decide to schedule a session. The best way to tell if we are a fit is to have a session or few. My wish is for you to find the best therapist for your needs, whether that’s me or someone else and we can discover that together by beginning the process and seeing what unfolds.