OVERVIEW
All kinds of grief
Grief reorganizes things. The world that existed before the loss and the world after it are not the same world. Most people know this in theory before it happens and are still caught off guard by the reality of it.
About 10% of bereaved people develop prolonged grief disorder, grief that doesn't move through in the expected way, but stays intense and disabling over time. The American Psychiatric Association formally recognized prolonged grief disorder as a diagnosable condition in 2022, acknowledging what clinicians had observed for years: some grief needs professional support, not just time.
There's grief for deaths. And grief for relationships that ended, futures that didn't happen, identities you've had to leave behind. There's old grief that got stored away because there wasn't space for it at the time. There's grief nobody else seems to recognize, the losses that don't make it to a funeral, and the ones that others expect you to have moved past by now.
Disenfranchised grief is real. The pregnancy loss that people minimize. The friendship ending that nobody treats as significant. The estrangement that brings both relief and a particular kind of mourning. These deserve as much attention as the losses that come with visible ceremonies.
IN SESSION
What grief therapy is and isn't
It's not a set of stages to complete. The five-stage model has done real damage by making grief feel like a process you should be further along in by now. Grief is not linear and it's not on a schedule.
What it is: a relationship with loss that changes over time. The goal is not to get over it. It's to carry it differently and to let it be part of your story without it becoming the whole story. We work with grief at all stages, from early and acute to the kind that's been sitting for years and recently resurfaced.
You don't need to know exactly what you're grieving or why it's hitting as hard as it is. That's what the work is for.
COMMON QUESTIONS
What people ask about grief therapy
How long should grief last? When does it become a problem that needs therapy?
There's no correct timeline. What tends to signal that grief needs support, rather than just time, is when it's not shifting at all, when it's preventing you from functioning in your daily life, when it's been a long time and the intensity hasn't softened, or when it's become complicated by guilt, anger, or ambivalence about the relationship that was lost. You don't need to meet a clinical threshold to deserve help. If grief is significantly affecting your life, that's reason enough.
My loss isn't a death. My loss is a breakup/a miscarriage/a dream I had to give up. Does grief therapy still apply?
Yes. Grief is a response to loss, not only to death. Breakups, pregnancy losses, estrangements, the ending of a career or identity, the loss of a version of the future you'd counted on — these all produce grief. The fact that others don't recognize certain losses as significant doesn't make your grief less real. Disenfranchised grief (loss that isn't socially acknowledged) is often harder to move through precisely because it's invisible to the people around you.
Everyone else seems to have moved on from this loss. Why haven't I?
Grief doesn't follow social timelines, and "everyone else has moved on" is usually a perception filtered through the fact that people stop talking about their grief publicly long before they stop feeling it privately. You may also be grieving something others didn't recognize as significant, or carrying old grief alongside new grief, or dealing with a loss that was complicated by other things. The pace of your grief is not evidence of weakness or dysfunction. But if it feels stuck, therapy can help it move.