Why Grief Therapy Is Its Own Specialty

In previous blogs and videos, I talked about what drew me to want to help others with their grief, and why I have continued this work for 20 years and counting. What I did not discuss is what that work actually looks like once someone is sitting across from me. I want to start by answering a question I get often, in one form or another: what is grief therapy, and is it really that different from regular therapy?

The short answer is, to me, yes.

What Makes Grief Different

Most of what people bring into therapy is a problem to work through. Grief is not a problem. It is a relationship that has changed shape, not ended. A client is not trying to solve their grief the way they might work through a conflict with a family member or a pattern of anxious thinking. They are learning how to carry something that does not resolve in the usual sense. That distinction changes almost everything about how the work is paced, how goals are set, and what “progress” even means.

A Misconception I Hear Often

Before people ever walk into my office, many of them believe grief therapy exists to help them get over the loss, or to reach some final stage of acceptance and be done. I understand why. Grief is often described in stages, as though it moves in a straight line toward a finish. In practice, grief does not resolve on a schedule, and it rarely disappears entirely. Part of my job in an early session is simply naming that, and hearing the relief in someone’s voice when they hear it is not a failure that their grief is still present two years later.

What Is Grief Therapy Like Week to Week?

Week to week, grief therapy is less about uncovering a single insight and more about building capacity. Some sessions are quiet and reflective, tracing the shape of a relationship that was lost. Others are physical, noticing where grief lives in the body and helping the nervous system settle when it gets overwhelmed. There are sessions built around a specific memory or an unfinished conversation, and sessions where we simply sit with a hard day. Over time, the work tends to move from surviving the loss toward being able to hold it alongside an ongoing life, one that still has room for connection, purpose, and even joy.

Grief therapy exists as its own specialty because grief itself does not follow the rules that other struggles follow. It has its own pace, its own physical presence, and its own way of asking to be witnessed rather than fixed. This is the work I love to do, and twenty years in, it still feels like some of the most meaningful.