Grief & Loss therapists

About grief & loss

Grief is not a process that follows a timeline. The five-stages framework people often invoke was developed by a researcher describing the experience of people who were themselves dying — Elisabeth Kübler-Ross never meant it as a prescription for the bereaved, and contemporary grief research has largely moved past it. What actually happens is far less orderly. Grief comes in waves, sometimes years after the loss. It can be triggered by a smell, a song, a date on the calendar, a stranger's face. It coexists with normal life — you can be laughing at lunch and crying in the car on the way home. None of this means anything is wrong with you.

Therapists who specialize in grief and loss work with a range of losses, not just the death of a loved one. Loss of a relationship through divorce or breakup is grief. Loss of a job, a home, a community is grief. Anticipatory grief — the slower loss when someone you love is dying — has its own shape. Loss through estrangement is particularly under-recognized; the person is alive and unreachable, and the cultural script for that doesn't really exist. Reproductive losses — miscarriage, infertility, abortion — are often invisibilized but no less real.

Most grief doesn't require therapy; people move through it with their own resources and the support of their people. What sometimes calls for professional help is when the grief gets stuck — when it's still controlling your daily life many months in, when it's tangled up with trauma from the circumstances of the loss, when complicated relationships with the lost person are making it hard to feel any one thing cleanly, or when the loss is intersecting with depression that was already there. Therapists call the stuck pattern complicated grief or prolonged grief, and there are specific treatments for it.

Common approaches include grief-focused CBT, meaning-reconstruction work that helps you locate your relationship with the loss inside a story you can live with, EMDR when there's traumatic material connected to the death or loss, and longer-arc psychodynamic work for grief that touches old wounds. A good grief therapist will pace the work to what you can hold.

If you've lost someone to suicide, the support need is often particularly acute — both for the grief itself and for the specific questions and self-judgment it tends to bring. Several therapists in this directory have experience here; the matching form lets you note it.

To start, browse the profiles below or submit the matching form. We follow up within one business day.