Grief Counseling

Grief is normal, and most grief does not require therapy. Some people move through bereavement with the support of family, community, faith, time, and their own resources, and they do not need a clinician. Therapy becomes useful when grief is disrupting your life in ways that are not changing — when work, relationships, sleep, capacity to function, sense of meaning, or your overall well-being have been impacted for long enough that something else is needed. It is also useful when the loss is particularly complex: traumatic, disenfranchised, long-buried, layered onto previous losses, or carrying material that is hard to bring to people who haven't been through something similar.

There is no fixed waiting period. Some people benefit from beginning grief work soon after a loss; others find that the most useful time is months or years later, when the initial protective numbness has lifted and what is underneath has surfaced. For traumatic loss specifically, beginning sooner — with attention to the trauma component as well as the grief — often serves people well. For IADC® specifically, the protocol works best some interval after the loss; for most people that means at least a year, though sometimes less is fine. The right starting point is whenever you find yourself ready to do the work, or aware that you are not moving in the way you had hoped.

Yes. This is anticipatory grief, and it is real grief. When you are caring for or accompanying someone whose life is ending — through terminal illness, advanced dementia, prolonged decline — grieving often begins before the death. It can include sadness, dread, exhaustion, complicated emotions about what comes next, and a particular kind of preemptive loneliness. Anticipatory grief deserves its own space in therapy, and it does not need to wait until after the death to be addressed. For caregivers specifically, this is often part of the picture; see caregiver therapy.

Yes. We call that “disenfranchised grief.” That is unfortunately not uncommon. Even if those closest to the person who died have their own grief process, they might not include you in it, and you could feel alone with your grief.

Loss by suicide is one of the most common forms of disenfranchised grief in the world, despite how common the loss itself is. The stigma, the questions other people ask or do not know how to ask, the fear of being judged for the loss, and the survivor's own complicated feelings (including guilt and unanswerable questions) often combine to silence the grief. In therapy, you have a place where the loss can be talked about openly, and where the specific work of suicide-loss bereavement can happen. This often includes both grief work and trauma work, since the death itself frequently carries traumatic material.

Absolutely. The bond with an animal can be one of the longest, most consistent, and least complicated relationships in a person's life, and grief over a pet is real grief. Cultural pressure to "get over it" because "it was just a pet" makes pet loss a frequent form of disenfranchised grief — meaning the grief is real but other people do not recognize it. In therapy, your grief is taken seriously, and the work proceeds along the same lines as therapy for any other significant loss.

Yes, it is for you. This often occurs when the loss has occurred a long time ago, but you never processed it fully. If you are able to bring up those feelings of grief and feel them, we can work through them using IADC and lift that weight off your heart.

Yes. Non-death loss — the loss of health, a relationship, a role, a faith, a home, or a chapter of life — is real grief, and it often goes unacknowledged. We can work on it the same way we'd work on grief after a death.

Grief and depression overlap but are not the same thing. Grief is the response to a specific loss and tends to move in waves, with the wave structure organized around reminders, anniversaries, and contexts that bring the loss forward. Depression is a more pervasive and persistent shift in mood, energy, capacity for pleasure, and self-perception, often without a clear relational anchor. The two can co-occur — bereavement can trigger depressive episodes, especially in people with a prior history — and the clinical work then needs to address both. A consultation can help sort out which is which in your particular case, and what kind of work is most likely to help.

Yes. One of the most common patterns I see is grief that was set aside at the time of the loss — because of practical demands, because there was no space for it, because no one around could hold it, because the loss happened on top of other losses — and that surfaces later, sometimes decades later, often triggered by another life event. Older losses are often very workable in therapy, and in some cases, IADC® and related protocols can move grief that has been stuck for many years. The grief is not too old. It has been waiting.

Because in my experience, IADC is most effective when integrated into a broader course of grief work. Clients who come specifically for IADC because they have read about it tend to arrive with very particular expectations — about whether they will have an after-death communication, what it will look like, what it will mean — and those expectations frequently block the open attention the protocol relies on. The work also benefits from addressing whatever may be blocking grief before engaging the IADC protocol itself. So we begin with the broader work, and we use IADC at the point in our work together when it can do what it is designed to do.