Counseling for Grief and Loss
Grief is one of the most universal human experiences — and one of the most isolating. The world tends to move on quickly, leaving you to wonder why you haven’t. There’s often an unspoken expectation that grief follows a timeline, that it gets smaller with distance, that at some point you should be over it. But grief doesn’t work that way. It’s not a problem to be solved or a phase to get through. It’s the price of love and attachment — and it deserves to be honored, not rushed.
Grief shows up in the body, the mind, and in how we act. If you are experiencing a loss, you may notice the following:
In your body
Exhaustion, physical heaviness, changes in appetite or sleep, a hollow feeling in the chest, or an ache that seems to live somewhere words can’t reach
In your thoughts
Replaying memories, difficulty concentrating, questioning meaning or purpose, or wondering how life can possibly look the way it used to
In your feelings
Sadness, anger, guilt, relief, numbness, or all of these at once — sometimes within the same hour. Grief rarely arrives as just one emotion.
In your behavior
Withdrawing from others, going through the motions, avoiding reminders of what you’ve lost, or throwing yourself into busyness to avoid slowing down
Grief doesn’t always look like sadness. Sometimes it looks like anger, or exhaustion, or a quiet flatness that settles in and stays. However yours is showing up, it’s valid — and you don’t have to navigate it alone. The therapists at Sequoia Counseling Collective offer a space to grieve without having to minimize your loss, perform resilience you don’t feel, or explain yourself to people who don’t quite understand.
Common Types of Grief and Loss
Death of a Loved One
The death of someone you love changes the landscape of your life in ways that are hard to prepare for. Beyond the immediate loss, grief reshapes your sense of the future, your identity, and your place in the world. Whether the death was sudden or anticipated, recent or years ago, there is no expiration date on grief and no right way to move through it. Therapy offers a space to honor your loss at your own pace, without pressure to be anywhere other than where you are.
Chronic Health Conditions
A chronic illness diagnosis (your own or someone close to you) brings a particular kind of grief that rarely gets named as such. The life you expected, the body you trusted, the future you had planned — all of these can shift in ways that accumulate slowly and are often suffered quietly. Chronic illness grief doesn’t have a clear endpoint, which can make it especially disorienting. Therapy can help you grieve what has changed while finding ways to live meaningfully within a new reality.
Cancer and Serious Illness
A cancer diagnosis, whether your own or a loved one’s, sets off a particular kind of grief that begins before any death occurs. There is the grief of the life you had before the diagnosis, the loss of certainty and safety, the fear of what’s ahead, and the exhausting work of holding hope and terror at the same time. For those caring for someone with cancer, the grief can be compounded by invisibility and your own needs quietly disappear into the demands of caregiving. Therapy offers space for all of it: the fear, the anticipatory grief, the anger, and the love.
Loss of Identity or Life as You Knew It
Not all loss involves death. The end of a career, a relationship, a chapter of life — the person you were before a diagnosis, a divorce, or a major life transition — these are real losses that deserve real grief. When the life you had, or the version of yourself you knew, is no longer available to you, the disorientation can be profound. Therapy offers space to grieve those losses without having to justify why they hurt as much as they do.
Treatment Approaches for Grief and Loss
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
ACT is particularly well-suited to grief because it doesn’t ask you to feel differently than you do. Instead, it helps you make room for the full weight of your loss while staying connected to what still gives your life meaning. For people navigating chronic illness or anticipatory grief — where the loss is ongoing rather than singular — ACT offers a way to hold pain and purpose at the same time.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Grief can generate powerful and painful thought patterns — guilt about what you did or didn’t say, beliefs that you should be coping better, or a sense that life can never be meaningful again. CBT helps gently identify and challenge those thoughts, not to minimize the loss, but to loosen the grip of the narratives that are making grief harder to bear.
Animal Assisted Therapy
Grief can be wordless. The presence of a therapy animal offers something that language sometimes cannot — comfort, warmth, and a kind of unconditional steadiness that can be quietly profound during a time of loss. For those who find it hard to open up, or who are simply exhausted by the effort of putting grief into words, animal assisted therapy can make the healing process feel more accessible.
Attachment and Interpersonal Therapy
Our losses are always filtered through our attachment history — how we learned to love, to depend on others, and to cope with separation. Attachment-based therapy explores how your early experiences shape the way you grieve, and offers a therapeutic relationship that can itself become a source of steadiness during one of the most destabilizing experiences of a life.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
When loss is connected to traumatic circumstances — a sudden death, a frightening diagnosis, a difficult caregiving experience — the grief can carry a traumatic charge that makes it harder to process. EMDR can help reprocess those experiences so that the memories lose some of their intensity, making it possible to grieve without being flooded.