Loss doesn't follow a timeline.
Depth-oriented therapy that makes room for grief without rushing it — and without asking you to have it figured out.
Free 15-min · In-person Palo Alto or telehealth ·
The Japanese have a word — mono no aware — for the bittersweet awareness that beautiful things pass. There's no equivalent in English. We don't have a language for grief that honors it rather than pathologizes it. This work tries to be that language: a space where loss is allowed to be what it is, for as long as it needs to be.
You may be grieving in ways that don't quite match the expected picture:
The loss was significant but the grief seems disproportionate — or it arrives late, in waves, at unexpected moments.
You're supposed to be over it. People keep telling you so. You are not over it.
The relationship was complicated. The grief is complicated. You feel things you're not sure you're allowed to feel.
You're grieving something that doesn't have a name: the life you didn't get to live, the relationship that never became what it should have been.
You function fine during the day. It's in the quiet moments that the weight lands.
You can't talk about it with the people around you — they're grieving too, or they wouldn't understand, or it would be too much for them.
The people around you are probably waiting for you to be done. That's not cruelty — it's their discomfort with something they don't know how to hold. This work is for what still needs room.
Western culture treats grief as a malfunction — something to move through quickly, recover from, put behind you. The window it allows is measured in weeks. Sometimes days.
Depth-oriented work understands grief differently. Grief doesn't resolve. It integrates. The person, the relationship, the life that was — these don't disappear from you. They find a different place to live. The work is making room for that to happen on grief's terms, not yours. What gets compressed goes underground — and surfaces later, often in ways that are harder to identify as grief.
Grief asks the deepest question: how does one continue? Not by overcoming the loss, but by allowing it to change you — slowly, on its own terms.
This is the orientation of depth-oriented therapy: not to fix, manage, or optimize — but to understand what has been organized inside, and make contact with it.
There's no schedule for this. No correct sequence. No point at which grief is supposed to have resolved. What I offer is a relationship in which that's genuinely true — where nothing is being tracked, managed, or moved along.
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”— Mary Oliver
It took years because that's how long it takes to stop fighting what arrived, and start letting it be part of you. That's not resignation. That's the work.
What I offer in grief work is a form of companioning — staying with what is here, without an agenda for where it should go. Grief work is not about processing the loss and moving on. It is about making contact with what was real — the person, the relationship, the life that was — and integrating the absence into a self that continues. This requires a container: a relationship in which there is no pressure to be further along, no timeline, no expectation that you'll emerge from it on any particular schedule.
Loss becomes something that is part of you rather than something threatening to overwhelm you. The relationship with the absence changes.
Grief is one of the most isolating experiences there is. Being genuinely witnessed — without agenda, without timeline — addresses the isolation directly.
Integration of grief frees energy that was organized around the loss. This doesn't mean replacing what was lost — it means having access to your own life again.
“In the end, just three things matter:
How well we have lived.
How well we have loved.
How well we have learned to let go.”— Jack Kornfield
No script. No intake form. Just a conversation — unhurried, no expectation of having it figured out.
An unhurried intake. Your history, what brings you here, how you make sense of things.
Regular 50-minute sessions, in-person in Palo Alto or via telehealth throughout California.
This is one of the areas I work with in individual therapy.
How individual therapy works →
I have worked with grief for deaths, divorces, estrangements, career losses, and the grief for lives not lived. I've found that the willingness to stay in the room with loss — without agenda — is what makes the work meaningful.
Full BiographyOther Areas of Focus
Not in the way people assume. Grief that wasn't given room at the time it happened will wait. Losses from years or decades ago can be just as alive as recent ones, sometimes more so.
Absolutely. Divorce, estrangement, the end of a relationship, the death of a future you expected — these require mourning too. There is no hierarchy of valid loss.
Unexpressed grief tends to grow heavier over time, not lighter. The relief of being genuinely witnessed typically outweighs the difficulty of contact.
Yes — in-network with Aetna, Wellfleet, and Stanford SHIP. Superbills for other PPO plans.
Falling apart in session is not a failure. It is often the beginning of the work. I can be with that.
Grief Therapy · Palo Alto
A free 15-minute consultation is a low-pressure first step.
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