Grief Counseling in Seattle

At some point, the casseroles stopped coming. The condolence texts slowed and then stopped. The people around you resumed their lives — went back to work, made plans for the weekend, laughed at things — and there you were, still carrying something heavy, still not okay, still unable to explain to anyone how not okay you actually were.

Maybe someone said it’s time to move on. Maybe you said it to yourself, repeating what others told you.

Please hear this: it is okay to grieve. You are not behind schedule. You are not taking too long. And you are not alone.

Grief is not a disorder. It is not a detour from a normal life that you need to find your way back to. It is not five stages, in order, with a clear endpoint. These are cultural myths — understandable ones, because our culture is deeply uncomfortable with grief and has developed an entire apparatus to move people through it faster.

Here’s what grief actually is: a natural, nonlinear, deeply individual response to loss. It takes as long as it takes. It moves forward and backward. It intensifies on anniversaries and in seasons and in the middle of ordinary Tuesdays without warning. Integration — the process of weaving a loss into the fabric of who you are, rather than excising it — typically unfolds over two years or more. The people around you will almost certainly expect you to be finished before you are.

That incongruence — between what you feel and what you’re “supposed to feel by now” — is one of the most painful parts of grief. Hear me when I say: You are not broken. The cultural script is broken.

When I say I work with grief, I mean all of it. Not just death, though I work with death — sudden loss, anticipated loss, the loss of losing someone before the relationship was finished, the grief that arrives long after the funeral when the shock finally lifts.

I also mean the losses that don’t have a casserole attached to them. The grief of a marriage ending. Of leaving a career that held your identity. Of a late autism or ADHD diagnosis that reframes decades of your life. Of watching someone you love disappear slowly into dementia while they are still physically present. Of ecological loss — the modern sorrow of watching the world itself change in ways that feel irreversible. Of disenfranchised grief — the losses that society doesn’t recognize as losses, that you don’t feel permitted to mourn or have to mourn in secret.

If you are carrying something and you’re not sure whether it qualifies as grief: it does. Loss is the real or perceived deprivation of something meaningful.

The neuroscience of grief — O’Connor’s work on the grieving brain — tells us that grief is, at its core, a learning process. The brain has mapped the person or thing you lost into its model of the world, and now that model has to be updated. That is not a psychological weakness. It is the brain doing exactly what it is designed to do. And it takes time that our culture does not make room for.

The research also tells us that grief is not linear, that continuing bonds with what we’ve lost are healthy rather than pathological. You do not have to let go; you learn to carry it differently. Meaning-making is a central part of how we integrate loss: not finding a silver lining, but slowly, over time, building a new understanding of who you are and what matters in a world that has changed.

This understanding gives you permission to grieve as long as you actually grieve. To feel what you feel on the timeline that your heart and body require. To stay connected to what you’ve lost rather than detaching from it. To resist the pressure to choose productivity over sorrow.

I will come alongside you and stay there. For however long it takes. Without trying to fix it, resolve it, or reframe it into something easier to hold.

I will witness your grief without flinching. I will not rush you toward hope. I will never suggest a silver lining. I will not pathologize what is happening to you, because what is happening to you is not pathological. It is human.

I will validate what you’re experiencing, help you understand what your nervous system is doing and why, and support you in finding the path that fits your particular way of grieving — whether you move through loss by thinking and making sense of things, or by feeling and expressing, or by some combination of both that shifts as you go. There is no right way to grieve. Anything goes, as long as it doesn’t hurt you or anyone else.

I am a Certified Grief Informed Professional, and grief is one of my specialty areas.

This work is for anyone who has lost something meaningful. You do not need a death certificate. You do not need permission. You do not need to be in crisis.

It is for people in acute grief — the early weeks and months when getting out of bed is the whole accomplishment. For people further along who are still carrying more than anyone around them seems to realize. For people grieving losses that nobody around them recognizes as losses. For people who have been told they should be over it by now, and who know — somewhere underneath the pressure — that they are not.

The types of loss I work with include (but are not limited to) the following: death of a loved one, anticipatory grief, ambiguous loss, disenfranchised grief, ecological grief, loss of relationship, loss of identity or career, loss connected to a late diagnosis, and grief that has no name but is real and present and deserves to be tended.