Experience
Grief Counselor & Educator
My Grief Guide
Grief Guide Consulting, LLC
Founder & Owner
2022-Present
Hospice Bereavement Specialist Bereavement Services Manager
Grief Counselor
2017 – 2022
Credentials
Fellow in Thanatology
Awarded by Association of Death Education & Counseling
December 2022
Mental Health First Aid Instructor
Awarded by Nat’l Council for Mental Wellbeing of Death Education & Counseling
May 2023
Certifications
Prolonged Grief Disorder Treatment
The Center for Prolonged Grief, Columbia U
March 2023
Grief Treatment
PESI Continuing Education
June 2022
Grief Educator
David Kessler Training
January 2022
Education
Master of Social Work
Emphasis in Health
San Diego State University
Bachelor of Arts in Sociology
Emphasis in Social Work
Point Loma Nazarene University Recipient of the Alumnus of PLNU Award, 2017
Grief Specialist
“Sorrow is a sustained note in the song of being alive. To be human is to know loss in its many forms. This should not be seen as a depressing truth. Acknowledging this reality enables us to find our way into the grace that lies hidden in sorrow. We are most alive at the threshold between loss and revelation; every loss ultimately opens the way for a new encounter.”
– Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow
Grief is painful. Grief is distressing. Grief is overwhelming. Grief can sometimes be traumatic. But grief is not a problem to solve. Grief is our natural response to loss. And grieving enables us to navigate the unchartered terrain that emerges when we lose someone or something essential.
Loss is a universal and often defining experience of being human. This is why many of our beloved stories begin with the main character in grief and end with a demonstration of their transformation empowered by loss. Grief as a reflexive response has endured tens of thousands of years of intellectual, emotional, and social evolution because grieving continues to be our best hope for thriving despite the pain of loss. Unfortunately, our contemporary mindset is to avoid grief in a futile attempt to avoid pain. But without grieving, humans get stuck in the pain of loss, and that becomes suffering. Rejecting the social norm that grief is best managed by avoidance, denial, or minimizing is essential for building resilience, adaptive coping, and renewed hope when our lives are derailed by loss.
And yet, most of us have never learned how to grieve as an essential life skill. Healthy, normative, adaptive grieving (which is super messy) is rarely modeled to us when we are children. Adults often go into another room and shut the door to grieve privately. As a society, we don’t normalize the value of all human emotions or learn how to experience and express complicated feelings. Most of our childhood and adolescent systems reinforce the limiting belief that some emotions are good while others are bad. Happy emotions are rewarded, while the expression of dark emotions often results in punitive measures. Furthermore, we don’t teach our helping professionals how to respond to grieving patients or clients with supportive insight. You can become a licensed doctor, nurse, therapist, social worker, or minister in our academic system without ever taking one course on grief. We train our helping professionals to diagnose, cure, and heal – but leave them unequipped for how to respond to people living with losses that can’t be fixed.
After losing someone or something essential, many things can be done to help ourselves and others cope with and adapt to loss. Grief is not meant to be a passive experience of merely holding on to the remnants of our life with white knuckles until the pain subsides. Grief is an active process that utilizes agency—our inner capacity to act and influence our circumstances.
To practice this, it is necessary to understand the difference between “grief” and “grieving.” Grief is a noun. It is all the things we feel and experience after loss. Grieving is a verb. It is an action, what we do to process difficult emotions, adapt to unwanted changes, and grow around a loss. While it is true that we often do not have control over devastating events that overwhelm our lives with loss, we do have a lot of control over how we grieve. This is how we build resilience – the ability of a person to adjust to or recover from adversity. Resilience isn’t a trait we are born with; like grieving, it is a skill we can learn.
Because my professional career began in hospice bereavement, my specialty as a Grief Counselor & Educator is death loss. However, grieving is the dynamic process hard-wired into humans that allows us to adapt to ALL types of significant loss – not just death loss. According to dictionary.com, grief is keen mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss, sharp sorrow, and painful regret. Re-read that definition slowly and consider what word is missing. Death. We have made grief synonymous with death loss, but the heartbreak of non-death losses can be debilitating as well. When we don’t give ourselves permission to acknowledge and grieve our non-death losses, we get stuck in ruminations of our pain. Grieving is the path forward through all types of loss.
Regardless of whether we are anticipating a loss or living post-loss, we need grief. Grieving is the energy that moves us toward restoration if we trust it rather than avoid it. Engaging with our grief enables us to find a way through the shock of loss, process difficult emotions, adapt to unwanted changes, renew our sense of identity and purpose, form continuing bonds or relinquish them, and create meaning after loss. This is a rough map of the typical grief journey. However, what restoration looks like for each griever and how to get there varies tremendously. No two grieving paths are the same.
Grief is a journey we all must learn to navigate to expand our territory around loss, making space for peace, pleasure, and purpose to return as familiar features of life’s terrain. If you are feeling lost in grief, the skills needed to navigate the terrain of loss can be challenging to learn when traveling alone. It helps to have a Grief Guide.
My services include Grief Counseling for individuals, couples, and families; facilitation of in-person and virtual Grief Support Groups; and Grief Education for organizations supporting staff, clients, and communities living with loss. Contact me to schedule a complimentary phone call to assess your unique needs and determine together what services are the best fit for you.
Grief Counseling & Education 