providing compassionate grief support

Experiences like birth trauma, miscarriage, pregnancy loss, and NICU stays can lead to profound grief, feelings of guilt and shame, and anxiety about the future. These challenges often disrupt emotional well-being, self-identity, and relationships. Grief can feel like the heaviest of companions, the ache can feel isolating—especially when the world seems to move on without fully understanding your pain.

Birth trauma can impact your emotional wellness, ability to manage day to day tasks, bonding with baby, and social withdrawal. Birth trauma therapy can help you process your experience, understand the impact, learn healthy coping mechanisms, reduce triggers, and reshape the narrative around the trauma.

Miscarriage and pregnancy loss creates a unique multilayered grief that can feel lonely and isolating. Most types of loss are related to grieving the past, but the loss of a pregnancy or neonatal death is grieving the future you envisioned with your baby. Pregnancy loss therapy can provide a safe space to grieve, process your experience, identify ways to honor the loss and rewrite your story. There is no one right or wrong way to feel and respond to such a loss.

High risk pregnancies, bed rest, preterm birth, and your baby being admitted to the NICU can impact your emotional health. Therapy can help you practice self compassion, learn healthy coping skills to care for yourself through the journey.

Facing life-threatening surgeries, chronic illness, or long COVID can evoke fear, helplessness, and frustration, while body image concerns after reproductive health changes may affect self-esteem and sense of identity. These experiences can disrupt trust in the body, strain relationships, and cause long-lasting emotional distress.

An oncology psychologist or Psych-oncology specialist can provide you with emotional support trhough every stage of cancer treatment. Therapy includes emotional support, behavioral strategies for support with symptoms management, processing and meaning making, adjustment and support with your relationship to your body through treatment, support with anxiety and fears, reproductive concerns, and navigating relationships.

Health psychology emphasizes the mind body connection and focuses on the biological, psychological and social factors that influence health. Therapy can help you process and adjust to a new diagnosis or treatment, help with managing physical symptoms related to an illness, learn tools to support with management of pain and pacing around fatigue symptoms, manage stress and anxiety, and improve communication with healthcare team.

The effects of traumatic experiences of previous generations can be passed down from one generation to the next. The transmission of trauma between generations, or intergenerational trauma can impact mental health, parenting styles and attachment, physical health and even biologically impacting genes. Generational trauma therapy can help you identify and process unresolved emotions and patterns of behavior stemming from past traumatic epxeriences within your family lineage. Therapy can help you heal generational trauma, learn how the trauma patterns have impacted your life and promote resiliency and healing by breaking free of the cycle of trauma and developing healthier coping mechanisms.

Complex trauma is a type of trauma fthat involves repeated or prolonged exposure to multiple traumatic events. These events can include abuse, neglect, interpersonal violence, discrimination and war. It can also be caused by structural and institutional forms of violence and oppression, and can be compounded by compounded patterns of dysfunction that affect generations of families. It can impact emotional regulation, impact self perception and lead to feelings of guilt or self doubt, relationship issues, difficulty trusting others, and physical symptoms impacting sleep, memory, and physical health. Complex trauma treatment involves learning about trauma, the physiological impact, and how your body responds to trauma and stress, learning tools to manage symptoms, identifying and reframing unhelpful thinking patterns, and exposure therapy.

Medical professionals face unique challenges, including trauma from adverse events, burnout, moral injury, understaffing, the lingering effects of the pandemic, and the ever-increasing demands of EHR systems. These stressors can leave you feeling emotionally depleted, disconnected, and burdened by guilt or self-blame. Over time, they may lead to compassion fatigue, a loss of identity, and difficulty balancing personal well-being with professional responsibilities.

It’s essential to recognize the very real strains that healthcare providers face—strains that are often minimized or dismissed. While therapy cannot resolve systemic issues within healthcare, it can provide a space to process your experiences, regain a sense of relief, and reconnect with yourself.

Evidence-based trauma therapy draws on approaches such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), and mindfulness practices. These methods can help you increase psychological flexibility, reconnect with your values, challenge unhelpful thought patterns, and build practical coping skills to navigate the demands of your work and life.