Day 2: Hope is Heavy to Hold When You’re Grieving We aren’t supposed to be able to hold hope alone in challenging times. Truly, we aren’t. It’s impossible in early grief, as well as when the waves of acute grief reemerge and pummel us. Think of it like this—when we go into flight, fight or freeze mode, unnecessary bodily functions for survival (such as executive functioning, emotional regulation, digestive and reproductive systems) shut down temporarily to prioritize t

Day 1: Want your Child to become an Emotionally Healthy Adult? I’ve noticed many weigh in on what it means to raise “emotionally healthy” children lately. I do not claim expertise in work with children (although yes, I do have experience with them), but I do know what I see when I work with adults. When folks brave the internal work in therapy that is actually transformative, we tend to work with their child or younger parts. These versions include the younger selves wh

Day 100b: 100-Day-Project. Check. Thank you. For following. For reading. For the encouragement to keep this up. This 100-day project was born out of a way to hold onto something everyday, amidst my own personal winter. It has seen me through to the finalization of my divorce, kept me (somewhat) centered as my dad received a heart-wrenching cancer diagnosis, and every day, reminds me that my nervous system needs me to pick up a pen to draw and write—preferably something v

Day100a: Healing in Grief is not a Matter of Time The brutal truth in grief is that the widely accepted definitions of healing, such as going back to normal, do not apply. I have spent many years thinking about what “healing” actually means in grief and how this “healing” occurs. This post is about the “how” of healing, more than the “what.” I’ve noticed a pattern in my clients who find a way to live within their grief—these folks receive compassion and empathy (NOT pi

Day 99: Holiday Reminders I wish this could be standard holiday etiquette. And this is certainly not comprehensive. What would your list entail? #grief #bereavement #grieftherapy #griefcounseling #groundedgrief #acutegrief #traumaticgrief #disenfranchisedgrief #miscarriage #suicide #homicide #infertility #nondeathloss #divorce #petloss #complicatedgrief #griefeducation #ambiguousloss #childgrief #selfcompassion #bereavedparents #bereavedfamilies #bereavedfamilies #bereavedmot

Day 98: Grief is an Act of Expansion You Never Wanted The more years I do this work, my conceptualization of what grief truly is and how us humans can best navigate it has distilled into something quite simple. At its core, I find that my work is to companion grievers as they learn to tolerate immense pain and begin to remember they are still alive, somehow. So many of us have not been taught to sit WITH. We have been taught to FIX and to PROBLEM SOLVE. Any griever wi

Day 97: This Holiday Season is Different I believe that the pandemic has extended the experience of acute grief, that initial phase of bereavement when all is a bit surreal, and every molecule of your brain, body, and heart is devoted to getting to the next day, or oscillating to some much-needed numbness. I believe this because I have noticed how the pandemic offered for some (and certainly not all) some not-hoped-for-but-welcomed shelter from going about business as

Day 96: No Time for Bullshit in Grief When socializing was more of the norm, my job was a reliable conversation stopper. And still, many people wonder why I continue to do this grief work. There are so many reasons I love my work, yet one of my most favorite is that I typically meet folks at their most raw. And yes, in this rawness, I witness massive pain, yet I also see an emboldened version of the person who is unabashed about their truths and unapologetic about what

Day 95: Sometimes the Lead-Up is Worse As the holidays are now upon us, we are entering the week when plans solidify (if they haven’t been already), and grievers are weighing their options (or non-options). Invites may have been offered and tentative yes’ may be swarming around in people’s minds. Along with all of this, grievers are not only weighing the options about what to do on the particular holiday, but also (without consciously knowing it or not), burdening the

Day 94: Grief is a Learning Process Grief is many things. And yet what I see so often is how much learning is involved. And let’s be clear—learning, especially in adulthood, is no small task. First, there is the learning of what happened. Meaning learning that this actually occurred. That can be brutally difficult, especially for our hearts, which don’t accept unwanted factual change quickly, nor without a fight. Then, there is the learning that this is your life—meani

Day 92: Grief Begs for Quiet, Stillness When a loss occurs, there is typically an outreach, even a deluge (if you’re lucky) of support. In the acuity of the shock and numbness and confusion and terribleness, saying “sure, yes” can be easier than “no, thanks.” Because how should we know what we actually need at the beginning of something we have never experienced? What I have come to know in my own grief, as well as what I observe in clients, is that when we finally hav

Day 91: Antidepressants Will Not Medicate Grief I have come to believe that when properly dosed, antidepressant medication DOES NOT medicate grief.** For some, this might come as a relief. I have many clients who fear that taking medication might dull or numb or make their grief journey different than it should be. For others, this might sound terrifying—that the tool they just bravely said yes to might not help. The main reason I believe that antidepressants do not medic

Day 90: Let’s get this straight I’m happy to report that it is less often that I hear from clients that someone has offered up the dreaded “well, they are in a better place” response. I think the word is getting out that this response can be quite unhelpful, no matter what belief system someone subscribes to. The main reason this response is unhelpful is because it doesn’t have anything to do with why someone is actually grieving—we don’t grieve because we think someon

Day 89: Healing in Grief is Confusing Many of my clients report that their experience of grief is not like anything else—that it is almost impossible to put in words: it comes suddenly; there is no preparing for how it might be; and, there is no actual fixing it without bringing the person back or pushing some button to reverse the massive change in their life. Being that grief is so confusing, healing in grief can also feel like a mystery. Most people say healing woul

Day 88: November in Grief I turned around this morning after making breakfast at a ridiculous hour due to daylight savings to find my 4-year-old hard at work updating our November calendar. I think she nailed it. (That, or she’s just ready for Christmas). In grief, November can be one big storm. No need to delineate the days. #grief #bereavement #grieftherapy #griefcounseling #groundedgrief #acutegrief #traumaticgrief #disenfranchisedgrief #miscarriage #suicide #homicide

Day 87: In Grief, Long-Term Thinking Doesn’t Make Sense Around the second month of the pandemic, I began to have a new relationship with time. I noticed that I could only think in blocks of one day at a time. This one-day-at-a-time thinking was not the flavor of being present in each lovely moment. It was different—it was more about survival. The energy towards goals and hopes and dreams and risks and future time markers did not only fall away—that kind of thinking just

Day 86: We want our suffering to mean something… There is a term in the grief world called “meaning making.” It used to bug me because when I first heard it, I interpreted the phrase as an over-simplistic prescription for how people should go about their grief—I thought it meant that all grievers should find meaning in the most terrible thing that happened to them. And frankly, that sounded tortuous and impossible. I have come to terms with “meaning making,” only becau

Day 85: We were Born Knowing How to Grieve I would say that 75% of my work is being with people as they unlearn the gamut of perceptions or beliefs they once learned to hold about grief. As I watch people shed some of these, I notice how they 1) gain access to a fuller range of emotions and 2) begin to have a higher tolerance for distress. Many of my clients learn that grief in and of itself is not the enemy—it is the not having it or dismissing it or judging it or lis

Day 84: Acute Grief—A Treacherous Landscape Acute grief is the term that refers to the initial phase of bereavement. Acute grief is the grief experience on steroids—the phase of grief in which every part of our bodies, heart, and minds are overcome with our human biological and psychological system’s desire to 1) figure out what happened and 2) assess if what happened is actually real. Acute grief is peppered with so many landmines including post-traumatic stress symptoms,

Day 83: What Does “Progress” Mean in Grief? A couple days ago I mentioned the words that don’t seem right when it comes to grief. These include “healing, recovery, getting better, and progress.” To someone who is grieving, especially early on in a grief journey, each of these words are a bit absurd. However, as time moves forward, I have noticed that many want to understand what constitutes “progress” when it comes to their journey. “Progression” might look to the outs