Grief Therapy

Online in California & Bay Area

Grief doesn't follow a timeline or a checklist. It doesn't move in stages, it doesn't resolve cleanly, and it doesn't always look like sadness. Sometimes it looks like numbness, or anger, or a sudden wave that hits you in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday. Sometimes it looks like carrying on completely normally and wondering if something is wrong with you because you haven't fallen apart.

There is no right way to grieve. But there are ways to move through it that don't require you to do it alone.

At Compassionate Tides Therapy, I offer a compassionate, body-informed space to tend to your grief, whatever shape it takes, whatever you've lost, however long you've been carrying it.

Is this you?

You might be in the right place if:

You've lost someone or something significant and the world expects you to be further along than you are. You feel guilty about how you're grieving, whether that's too much, too little, or in ways that don't look like what grief is "supposed to" look like. You're caring for someone who is dying and carrying the weight of anticipatory loss while still showing up every day. You lost a pet and have felt dismissed or minimized by people who don't understand the depth of that bond. You experienced a miscarriage, pregnancy loss, or reproductive grief and found that most people around you didn't know how to hold it with you. You are grieving something the world doesn't officially name: a relationship, a diagnosis, an identity, a future you had imagined. You're holding your grief privately because you don't want to burden others or because you're not sure it counts. Your body is carrying the grief even when you're not actively thinking about it: fatigue, physical heaviness, difficulty being present.

Grief is not a problem to be solved or a process to be optimized. It is a human experience that deserves to be witnessed and held with care.

What makes this approach different

Grief therapy is not about moving on. It is about learning to carry what you've lost in a way that doesn't require you to leave it behind or hold it at a distance.

Many people come to grief therapy expecting to be taught how to feel better faster. What they often need instead is a space where they are allowed to feel exactly what they feel, without being redirected toward acceptance before they're ready, without someone else's timeline imposed on their process, and without having to protect the people around them from the full weight of what they're experiencing.

My approach to grief is somatic, relational, and paced entirely by you.

Somatic Therapy recognizes that grief lives in the body as much as in the mind. The heaviness, the tightness, the waves of sensation that arrive without warning: these are not symptoms to be eliminated. They are part of how the body processes profound loss. We work with them rather than around them.

IFS (Internal Family Systems) offers a way to understand the different parts of grief. The part that is devastated, the part that is numb, the part that is angry, the part that is trying to hold everything together. IFS creates space for all of those parts to be present without any of them having to be in charge all the time.

EMDR is available for grief that is entangled with trauma. When a loss was sudden, violent, or otherwise shocking, grief and trauma can become difficult to separate. EMDR can help process the traumatic elements so that grief itself has more room to move.

Relational and attachment-informed care is woven throughout. Loss is fundamentally relational, and healing grief often involves understanding the attachment that was lost, what it meant, and how to stay in connection with it in a new way.

You are not grieving wrong. You are grieving.

Presentations I frequently work with:

  • The loss of someone central to your life, whether expected or sudden, leaves a particular kind of absence that doesn't simply fill back in. Grief after death can be acute, prolonged, complicated, or all three at different moments. All of it belongs here.

  • The loss of a pet is real loss. The bond between a person and their animal companion can be among the most uncomplicated, unconditional relationships in their life, and losing it deserves the same quality of care and recognition as any other grief. You do not have to justify or minimize this here.

  • Grief does not only begin after a loss. When someone you love is dying, or when you are caring for someone through serious illness or cognitive decline, grief begins long before the end. Anticipatory grief is its own experience: exhausting, isolating, and often invisible to others who don't yet see what you're already losing. Caregiver grief also includes the grief of watching someone change, of losing the relationship you had before illness, and of carrying tremendous responsibility while having very little space to fall apart.

  • Losing someone to suicide is its own kind of grief. It carries the weight of a sudden, often traumatic death alongside layers that other losses don't always bring: the questions that may never have answers, the guilt that shows up even when it doesn't belong to you, the way the cause of death can overshadow who the person was, and the silence that sometimes surrounds it because others don't know what to say or how to ask.

    Grief after suicide loss can be complicated by shock, trauma, anger, relief, love, and confusion all at once. You may find yourself replaying moments, searching for signs, or carrying a sense of responsibility that was never yours to hold. You may also find that the people around you are grieving too, making it hard to find space for your own experience.

    This kind of loss deserves care that doesn't flinch. Here, you are welcome to bring all of it: the grief, the questions, the complicated feelings, and the love for the person you lost.

  • Pregnancy loss is one of the most common and least supported forms of grief. The isolation that follows can be profound: a loss that was real and significant, often met with silence or platitudes that minimize rather than hold it. Whether you experienced miscarriage, stillbirth, a terminated pregnancy, failed IVF, or the grief of infertility, your loss deserves the same quality of care and recognition as any other.

  • Some losses don't come with a clear ending, which can make them some of the hardest to grieve. Ambiguous grief includes losses like caring for a loved one with dementia who is physically present but no longer recognizable, estrangement from a family member, or the loss of a relationship that has no official closure. Without a clear moment of loss, there is often no ritual, no social permission to grieve, and no external validation that what you're carrying is real. It is.

  • Disenfranchised grief happens when a loss is not recognized or supported by the people around you, or by society more broadly. This can happen after the death of an ex-partner, a close friend whose relationship to you others didn't understand, a pet, a pregnancy, or any loss that others minimize or fail to acknowledge. The absence of social support doesn't make the grief smaller. Often it makes it harder to move through.

  • Many people are carrying grief that doesn't have a single name: grief about what is happening politically, grief about climate change and ecological loss, grief about systemic injustice, grief about the world their children are inheriting. This kind of grief is real, it is accumulating, and it deserves space. Therapy can offer a place to process collective grief without having to minimize it, perform resilience, or feel alone in carrying it.

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What to Expect

Grief therapy at Compassionate Tides does not follow a fixed curriculum. We begin where you are. Some people need space to speak the unspeakable. Others need help understanding what's happening in their body. Others are trying to figure out how to keep living while also honoring what they've lost. We follow your lead.

Sessions are telehealth, available to adults throughout California. I am a private-pay practice and can provide superbills for potential out-of-network reimbursement.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • No. There is no waiting period. Some people find support most helpful in the immediate aftermath of a loss. Others come months or years later when the grief has shifted but not resolved. Wherever you are in the process, there is a place for it here.

  • Also no. Grief does not have an expiration date, and unprocessed grief has a way of making itself known, sometimes in ways that don't look obviously like grief. If you are still carrying something, it is not too late to tend to it.

  • Please don't. Pet loss is one of the most underacknowledged forms of grief, and the dismissiveness people often receive from others can compound the pain significantly. Your grief for your animal is welcome here without qualification.

  • It is. Pregnancy loss is a real and significant loss regardless of how early it happened, and the lack of social acknowledgment that often follows makes it harder, not easier, to grieve. You don't have to have the "right" amount of grief to deserve support.

  • It does. Anticipatory grief is a recognized and significant experience, and caregivers often need support long before the people around them realize it. What you're carrying counts, and you deserve support for it.

  • Grief therapy may bring things to the surface that you've been managing by keeping them contained. That can feel harder in the short term. The goal is not to make grief more painful but to create conditions where it can actually move rather than stay frozen. Most people find that having a consistent, safe space for it ultimately provides significant relief.

  • That's exactly what disenfranchised and ambiguous grief are, and both are welcome here. If your loss feels real to you, it deserves space regardless of whether others around you have validated it.

  • Yes, and it matters that it be held somewhere. Collective and ecological grief is real grief, and it often sits alongside personal losses in ways that compound both. Therapy can offer a place to process what you're witnessing in the world without having to perform hope you don't feel or carry it entirely alone.

Grief is not something to get over. It is something to move through, with the right support alongside you.

You don't have to carry this alone.
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