February 20th came, and there was a moment...maybe even three that day...when the heaviness of my grief shifted. It seemed to fade, and I couldn't quite place it. Lately, that heaviness had been showing up right below my heart, then shifting into my stomach, rotating between those two residences. It had become a familiar character.

When I joined Grounded Grief I was excited to be part of a team looking to expand its support for youth and families in the Portland area. During a flurry of enthusiastic brainstorming, our Founder & Practice Lead, Katherine Hatch, and I landed on what seemed like a simple idea: a monthly blog dedicated to childhood bereavement.

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. ​

There's something about walking through the woods that changes how we hold our grief. Maybe it's the rhythm of our footsteps on the trail. Maybe it's the way sunlight filters through the trees, or how the forest holds space without asking us to explain ourselves. Whatever it is, we've learned that some of our deepest healing happens when we take grief outside.

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.

Children's Grief Awareness Day: A Reflection on Real Conversations | Today is Children's Grief Awareness Day, and in honor of that, I'm sharing a previous post about my kiddo's first fish death.

Your Grief Has Something to Tell You. I think a lot about my relationship to grief—both my own personal losses and the grief I encounter related to world events and the ongoing struggles in our country. I think a lot about my relationship to grief—both my own personal losses and the grief I encounter related to world events and the ongoing struggles in our country. And here's what I've come to understand: My ability to be with my grief directly informs my ability to discern

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.

We are glad to announce the start of our In-Person Adult Grief Group in Washington, D.C., beginning Tuesday, February 18th. If you're navigating the death of someone you love, this group offers a space to be witnessed, supported, and understood by others who know what it's like to carry loss.

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

Sometimes what we need most in our grief is connection. A space where we can be witnessed, where our losses are acknowledged, where we're not alone in what we're carrying.

With the current horrors and terror in the Middle East, the death and destruction from hurricanes in the Southeast, and countless other world events and states that deserve our attention and action, many of us are asking ourselves a difficult question: Where does my grief fit in when others are suffering so immensely in such extreme ways?

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