The grief that has no funeral.

Our culture has rituals for the griefs it recognizes. A death. A divorce. A diagnosis. There are cards for these. Casseroles. A socially acceptable window in which to fall apart.

But many of the deepest griefs do not have names, and they do not have rituals. The grief of a mother who is alive and cannot mother. The grief of a childhood that was not abusive but was not attuned. The grief of a career that consumed your thirties. The grief of the self you performed so convincingly that you lost track of the one underneath. The grief of the life you wanted and did not get to live.

These are the griefs I work with. The ones that have no funeral.

Kinds of grief that rarely get named

• The mother wound: grief for the mother you needed and did not have
• Ambiguous loss: grief for someone who is still alive but emotionally gone
• Disenfranchised grief: grief the culture does not validate (estrangement, infertility, career loss, queer identity grief)
• Anticipatory grief: grief for what you sense is coming but has not arrived
• Developmental grief: grief for the childhood, adolescence, or young adulthood you did not get to have
• Identity grief: grief for the version of yourself you had to abandon to survive
• Postpartum grief: grief that surfaces during or after pregnancy, often connected to the mother wound

Why grief needs depth therapy

Grief that has no name tends to get translated into something else. It becomes anxiety. Depression. Numbness. Irritability. Burnout. The body holds it even when the mind cannot locate it. Therapies that focus on symptom management may reduce the anxiety without ever touching the grief underneath it.

Depth therapy for grief does not rush toward resolution. It does not offer stages or timelines. It creates a space where the grief can finally surface, be witnessed, and move. Sometimes this means crying. Sometimes it means rage. Sometimes it means sitting in a silence that has weight and substance. The work is not to fix the grief. It is to let it exist.

Grief in the body

Grief lives in the body. It lives in the chest that tightens when someone offers care. In the throat that closes when the tears try to come. In the exhaustion that no amount of sleep resolves. In body-aware depth therapy, we listen to what the body is carrying and we follow its lead.

You cannot grieve what you never let yourself need. The work begins when you let yourself need it.

Sessions are $150, Fridays, 8 AM to 4 PM. In-person in Seattle and telehealth throughout Washington State.