Grief & Loss Therapy

The truth is, grief lasts a lifetime. What changes is how it looks and feels day-to-day. Grief is a natural human process, and you can’t force it to go away.

When you’re in the room it looks like a lot of different things. Sometimes it’s tears. Sometimes it’s feeling flat and shut down, where the feelings just stop and you don’t seem like yourself.

No one else can see it because you’re carrying an unemotional mask out into the world. And sometimes grief gets stuck, which is where the therapy really helps. It’ll get you stepping back to look at what isn’t moving along naturally and therapy helps the grief start to move, so you can feel the feelings and get through them.

Grief is complicated.  Sometimes other emotions get all tied up in the grief and keep us from being able to move forward.  Therapy helps untangle all those mixed emotions so that you can give them the attention they need and move forward.

You’ll always live with that grief in some way, but rest assured that it doesn’t have to stay as raw or as loud as it is today.

1. Anyone actively grieving a death, whether it’s fresh or years old
2. People whose grief has gone flat or shut down instead of tearful
3. Folks who feel stuck, like the grief isn’t moving the way it should
4. People carrying a loss quietly behind a still face mask at work and/or at home
5. Anyone grieving something other than a death, a relationship, a future, a way of life

There’s no need to have your grief organized or explainable. At Fireside, we invite you just come as you are, as a witness to your life.

So much of this work is simply sharing your grief with someone willing to see it, hear it, and walk with you, because grief can be a scary, lonely place if you let it.

We want to get it moving. When your grief is stuck, we help you step back and look at what isn’t moving naturally, and nudge it until it starts to move again.

We also work to help you carry it differently. The aim isn’t to erase it. It’s to help you feel the feelings and get through them, so what you carry doesn’t stay this raw.

Available in person or by telehealth.

You’ll always carry it, and a scar doesn’t have to be raw and bleeding and painful. That’s the whole difference we’re working toward. Grief can become something precious you carry, still tender sometimes, but yours to keep rather than something to get over.

Aaron Shipps works from the relational side of this. What he’s after, in his own words, is an honest approach that helps a person feel seen and valued, and he’s candid that the field doesn’t always practice that way. He’ll tell you about a client who came to him carrying a significant loss with a great deal of trauma alongside it, at about the lowest point a person can reach. What changed over time wasn’t that the grief went anywhere. They rediscovered their relationship with the person they had lost, and then carried that relationship forward into the people still in their life. Their family relationships ended up deeper and more engaged than they had been before, and they were planted back into their own life. Watching that happen is the part he calls beautiful.

More than one of our clinicians came to this work through their own grief, having gone through it without anyone to help them do it. That’s most of why we take it seriously.