Grief Support Articles & Insights

A Podcast Episode with Juniper Wong On Ambiguous & Ancestral Loss Sometimes, grief is obvious. Other times, we might not recognize our experience as grief until a major life transition shifts our perspective entirely. We are incredibly proud to share that Grounded Grief’s own Juniper Wong, MSW, LICSW, was recently featured on Episode 365 of The Dougy Center’s renowned podcast, Grief Out Loud. In this beautiful, vulnerable conversation with host Jana DeCristofaro, Juniper open

Insights from Alyssa Rose on the Breaking Patterns Podcast | When we think of grief, we often think of an endpoint—a loss we are supposed to "get over" so we can return to our normal lives. But what happens when we shift that perspective? What if, instead of something to outrun, grief is actually a profound reflection of our capacity to love?

AUGUST NEWSLETTER Finding Ground in the Wild Grief is often described as a wilderness—vast, unpredictable, and sometimes overwhelming to navigate. But there is also profound healing in bringing those heavy, complex experiences into the actual wilderness. We recently wrapped our Grounded Outdoor pilot retreat in the majestic North Cascades. Safely guided by our wilderness lead, Natasha Lexin, we explored what it means to hold space for loss outside the confines of our daily ro

Dolly’s death is breaking hearts, pushing on other griefs inside of us, needing to join in. Many of us are drawn to grief’s invitation to take part in this communal loss of such a feisty, sparkly, warm-hearted being in these unwieldy times.

June usually promises the warmth and ease of early summer, but this year, it brought us a surprising return to winter, complete with unexpected snow showers and sudden shifts. It has been a stark, visceral reminder of life's unpredictable cycles: the constant burning down and building back up. Just as we watch the abrupt shifts in the weather or the baby scrub jays suddenly leaving their nest, we experience these same unpredictable cycles within our own inner landscapes.

April brings a different energy. Where March was the quiet, barren in-between, spring is now here—and it doesn’t ask permission. Living things wake up whether we’re ready or not: the trees, the flowers, and often, our grief. This month, we are exploring the intersection of Awakenings, Surrender, and finding our own way.

March brings the quiet magic of the in-between. It’s that strange, uneasy stretch where the trees are still bare, yet the balsam root sunflowers are just beginning to bud. While the landscape looks barren to the eye, it is actually a powerful container teeming with new life. This month, we're exploring the concept of liminal spaces in our grief.

The New Year is a time when many of us are fed that clarity is supposed to arrive, a new leaf is to be turned, and that our grief may feel different or better. Yet for most who are grieving, New Year's can feel quite the opposite. ​

The animal folk have always shown us the way. If you've ever lived with a dog during a difficult season, you know they have an uncanny ability to sense when something shifts in the household. They feel the tension, the sadness, the weight of what we're carrying—even when we think we're hiding it well.

Grief Is Not a Problem to Be Solved | For those of you who are mourning the death of a beloved person, home, dream, identity, or relationship...this is for you 🫀. We're thrilled to announce Befriending Our Grief—a 4-week, in-person grief group where you can find community and discover ways to move through your grief rather than drowning in it alone.

My Updated Coping Plan as of February 2025 I admit that since November, I have coped by keeping my head down, not writing much, frenetically adding activities to the schedule, eating way too much licorice and cheese, and not carving any time to be still, to read, or to look up. Sound familiar? When the Universe Gifts You a Pause Three weeks ago, my 8-year-old fractured her ankle. She earned herself crutches and a boot. I earned myself hours of cancelling all of our activities

I witness my clients chew on, struggle with, consider, reconsider, fight against, and sometimes surrender to creating a relationship with grief. This is beyond noticing grief. Giving grief space is the next step.

Day 65 : After a series of heavier posts, I offer up an ode to one of the wisest grief companions in my life: our Holland Lop, Snowball. Seriously—he doesn’t speak, he doesn’t offer advice, he wants to be close, he is ridiculously soft, he is consistent and simple in his demands, and his downfalls are minimal (carpet chewing and feet licking). An important part of being able to move through grief is to oscillate-meaning coming up from the existential dread, deep missing, and

Day 64: Hard Grief Truths So much of my personal and professional work exists in the realm of building tolerance—tolerance for distress, tolerance for sitting with the unknown, with what doesn’t make sense, with what isn’t fair, and with what we cannot control and fix. On its face, this might sound like a dismal pursuit and job. Yet, it is not. For I believe we humans are all capable of expanding our tolerance—because we really don’t have much of a choice. To expand our

One of the hardest things about grief is how it can feel like it’s getting worse, seemingly out of the blue—a rawness that strikes a few months out.

Day 62: The “Who-to-Tell” Pyramid As I reflect on the early days of my own acute grief, I remember the hazy quality of everything—the air, my thoughts, other people’s offerings of condolences. There was a benevolent fog over everything. I remember needing to not talk about anything related to my dad’s death, except with my daughter, mom, and sisters, for about two weeks. My system couldn’t tolerate expanding this circle, and I honored that. My clients often describe so

Day 61: The Missing Keeps Happening Before experiencing acute grief, it’s hard to conceptualize the level of missing that grievers live with. Let me try to break it down: when a person you love dies, they continue to stay dead--every. single. day. My clients warned me of this. And now I know what this actually means. The missing doesn’t go away. In fact, it is cumulative. It adds up. It’s a lot of days that keep happening to miss someone AND it’s a lot of days to ponde

Day 60: Pause. Get Quiet. Get Still. Drink a Paloma. Turn Inward. Shift. I am living what I have witnessed so often—the increased rawness of grief, sometimes beginning a couple months after the loss. It’s the moment when people begin to stop asking about it/you/the person who died as much. And it is also the moment (for me) when it no longer feels healing to speak of the experience out loud, as much. I feel more protective of my grief—not because it needs to be closeted

Day 59: How Does a Therapist Grieve #12 ? PLAY Yep. You read it correctly. Even after my marriage died, then after my dad died—even after Buffalo and Uvalde, the assault on Roe-v-Wade, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Gorge Floyd, Jan 6, the wild fires out west—after each of these onslaughts—I tried to play. This is not an act of forgetting. Or being flippant or disrespectful. It is an act of connecting. An act of defiance and refusal. It doesn’t mean that playing feels wonderful

Day 58: How Does a Therapist Grieve #11 ? Knowing the Differences between Empathy and Compassion This may be a controversial topic because there is so much out there that tells us we lack empathy in the world. I don’t necessarily agree (mainly with the semantics of that). I think there is a lack of the ability to tolerate an empathetic connection beyond 4 seconds. Empathy is a feeling with—one human’s nervous system connecting to another’s to take the perspective and fe