I have worked with grief since my very first day as a practicum student in graduate school. I worked with a lot of folks 65 and above because not a lot of fully licensed providers take Medicare as an insurance and it was free to come to me. Many people in their older years are looking to reckon with grief and loss, even if they do not recognize that they are. As we age, we naturally lose things; our way of life and movement, our cognition, the people around us. As outlandish of an opinion as it is going to sound like, I think grief is one of the most beautiful things about humans.

Grief sees us through the best and the worst times of our lives – it is in everything we do, even when we do not expect it to be. It is the most beautiful and heart wrenching thing that we as humans get to experience. Grief is as much of a gift to us as it is a taker from us; we experience grief in the first place because we had something worth grieving. It is a teacher and a punisher, always leaving a mark in the place of what was.

‍ ‍What treating grief looks like:acceptance and stillness often. Grief work, like all therapeutic work, is so individual, as the way we experience our grief will never, ever, be like any other person around us. We are never on each other’s timelines when it comes to experiencing our grief and sadness. Grief in therapy often looks like sitting with the loss; being sad and forlorn so that we can take those emotions and show them that we can also find the joy and calm in grief as well. There is also a recognition of trauma in grief and processing the release of control and the assumption of what could have been.

I see experiencing grief in the therapeutic space as such a sacred thing, and I’d be honored if you’d want to explore it together.