Exploring Therapy Specialties: Grief
by Patricia McGuire, LPC-MHSP
10/10/2025
Grief is a complex and natural response to loss, encompassing a wide range of emotions including sadness, anger, fear, guilt, and loneliness. It is an intensely personal experience, often impacting your emotional and physical well-being in unexpected and difficult ways. Whether grief stems from the loss of a loved one, a significant life change, or other forms of separation or loss, it can be overwhelming to navigate alone. Seeking support can promote resilience and foster emotional balance.
There are many types of grief:
Anticipatory Grief - everything we feel when we know we are facing an impending loss
Complicated Grief: extended process of grieving with persistent and intense emotions
Ambiguous Grief: loss that lacks closure, information, or resolution
Disenfranchised Grief: grief that is not readily recognized or acknowledged by those around us
Collective Grief: grief we share with others or the entire world
How we may approach the grief process in therapy:
Explore your relationship with grief, how it’s changed and changed you
Discuss your grief narrative
Explore self-compassion and coping with grief
Enlist support from loved ones
Set times to feel your grief
Not wanting to process or discuss grief is normal; it is important to go at your own pace. Therapy can provide a supportive space to process your grief in ways that honors your unique needs. Together, we will identify and explore your feelings, discuss coping strategies, and work toward integrating your loss into the story of your life to help you rebuild.
In the context of grief, therapy is not about forgetting, minimizing, or “moving on”; rather, it’s about allowing yourself to feel and finding meaning amid pain. If you are struggling with grief, I would be honored to journey with you.
Go deeper: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/grief
*Some ideas in this post were pulled from Conscious Grieving: A Transformative Approach to Healing From Loss by Claire Bidwell Smith, LCPC (read more here)
If you’d like to explore these ideas further, connect with Patricia McGuire here
