Grief Changes More Than You Expect
You know grief isn’t just sadness. It’s the way your world rearranges itself after a loss. The sudden gaps in your routine, the relationships that shift, the questions about who you are now that something fundamental has changed.
Maybe you lost someone close to you and the weight of it hasn’t lifted the way people said it would. Maybe you’re watching a parent decline and grieving a loss that hasn’t happened yet. Or maybe the loss isn’t a death at all. It’s a marriage, a career, an identity, a family relationship. And you’re struggling with grief that others don’t fully recognize or validate.
Whatever brought you here, you don’t need to navigate this alone.
Going Deeper Than Coping Strategies
Many approaches to grief therapy focus on helping you manage your emotions day to day. That matters, and we’ll do that work when it’s needed and helpful. But if you’re someone who wants more than surface-level relief, if you want to actually understand what this loss is bringing up for you and why, then insight-oriented grief therapy may be what you’ve been looking for.
Grief has a way of revealing things. It can surface old relational patterns, unresolved feelings about family, long-held beliefs about what you deserve or what you’re supposed to endure. When we work together, we don’t just talk about the loss. We explore what the loss illuminates: your relationships, your identity, and the ways you’ve learned to move through the world.
This isn’t about “getting over it.” It’s about integrating your loss into a life that still has meaning, direction, and depth.
What I Bring to This Work
Grief is not just one of many things I treat. It’s a specialty I’ve dedicated years to. Early in my career, I worked in hospice and bereavement programs, providing counseling to terminally ill individuals and their families. That experience shaped everything about how I practice today.
I’ve sat with people in some of the most difficult moments of their lives, the kind of moments that most people turn away from. That work taught me that grief isn’t something to rush through or fix. It’s something to be understood. And when you understand it, you often find that it opens a door to deeper self-knowledge and, eventually, a more intentional way of living.
Who This Is For
I work with adults who are navigating:
- The death of a parent, partner, sibling, child, or close friend
- Anticipatory grief: the slow loss that comes with a terminal diagnosis or a parent’s cognitive decline
- Complicated grief that feels stuck, overwhelming, or unresolved months or years after a loss
- Non-death losses like divorce, estrangement, career upheaval, or major identity transitions that carry real grief but often go unacknowledged
- Disenfranchised grief: losses that others minimize, don’t understand, or don’t see as “real” grief
If you’re a thoughtful, driven person who tends to push through hard things rather than slow down and feel them, this work can be especially valuable. Grief has a way of demanding your attention whether you make space for it or not.
What to Expect
We’ll start with an initial session where I get to know you, your history, and what you’re dealing with right now. From there, we work at your pace. Most clients start out with weekly appointments, frequency can be adjusted as you make progress and as needed.
Sessions are available in person at my Streeterville office, located steps from Northwestern Memorial Hospital, or via secure telehealth anywhere in Illinois.
Take the First Step
You don’t need to have the right words or know exactly what you need. You just need to be willing to start.
If you have questions before booking, feel free to e-mail me to schedule your no-cost phone consultation at aaa.lcsw@gmail.com
