For more than twenty-five years, I have worked as a counseling psychologist. My journey to become The Grief Midwife emerged not from a single experience of grief, but from the gathering of many sorrows and losses along my life path.
Now I have the privilege of offering others what I once needed myself. A compassionate witness. A trusted guide. Ritual that honors loss. And a community where sorrow can be acknowledged, shared, and transformed.
What is unnamed remains difficult to tend. What is unwitnessed is too heavy to carry alone.
As The Grief Midwife, I am the “woman who is with.”
You do not have to be alone in your grieving.
I have experienced many losses. Some were visible. Most were not. They were the losses that go unnamed and unwitnessed. The loss of dreams, relationships, identities, belonging, and parts of myself that had never been held in safety or seen with compassion.
For years, I carried these sorrows without recognizing them as grief. Like many people, I thought grief was only about death. I did not yet understand that grief can arise whenever something is missing. Whenever a longing goes unrealized. Whenever a deep ache persists.
Eventually, the weight of these losses brought me to what I call a dark night of the soul. I found myself in profound despair, searching for meaning, looking for a way to make sense of the sorrow I was carrying. I knew I needed something more than advice. More than coping strategies. More than being told to move on.
In that search, I remember sitting at my computer and typing two words into Google.
“Grief midwife”
I was looking for someone who could accompany me through grief the way a midwife accompanies a birth. Not fixing, not rescuing, not directing. Simply offering presence, wisdom, and a trusted companion beside me through an unknown threshold.
I found nothing.
No grief midwives. No one used that language. No one offered what I was longing for or what I knew in my bones I needed.
Until then, much of my grief had lived in isolation. I had learned to carry it quietly. To manage it. To make room for it in the corners of my life without ever truly turning toward it.
Something profound happened at that retreat.
For the first time, I experienced what it felt like to have my grief witnessed and held in a compassionate community.
There was no pressure to explain. No need to justify my sorrow. No expectation that I should be over it.
Instead, there was a safe and intentional space where the heaviness I had been carrying could be expressed, honored, and met with understanding. I experienced the power of being witnessed without being analyzed. Of being welcomed without being fixed. Of being allowed to tell the truth about what hurt.
Through ritual, I found ways to express what words alone could not hold. Through community, I discovered that while grief is deeply personal, it is also profoundly human.
It revealed a truth I have never forgotten:
The impact of those retreats was so profound that I returned again and again, each time deepening my understanding of grief and its essential place in human life. Eventually, I felt called to offer this experience to others.
I pursued extensive training in ritual grief tending and facilitation, studied how to create safe, compassionate spaces where grief can be welcomed, expressed, and witnessed. I learned practices that honor sorrow not as something broken or pathological, but as a natural response to love, loss, and longing.
Alongside my doctoral training as a psychologist, advanced study in the biology of trauma, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and somatic approaches, my work has evolved from a simple but profound understanding.
Grief touches every aspect of our lives. It lives not only in our thoughts and emotions, but in our bodies, our relationships, our attachments, and our sense of belonging. It shapes how we move through the world, how we connect with others, and how we make meaning of our lives.
As a faculty member of The Embody Lab and a presenter in their Integrative Grief Counseling Certificate Training, I have the privilege of helping train other practitioners in the art of grief tending and the essential roles of ritual, witness, and compassionate containment.
I work with both death-related and non-death grief, drawing on the wisdom of the Five Gates of Grief as articulated by Francis Weller, to help people recognize that grief is far broader than our culture often acknowledges. We grieve deaths, certainly. But also lost dreams, unmet longings, ruptured relationships, life transitions, places within us that have not known love, the sorrows of our changing world, the parts of ourselves left behind in order to survive, and the long lineage of ancestral grief.
I have come to believe that struggle is not evidence of brokenness. It is often an expression of sorrow that has been held in the shadows, longing for witness, compassion, and care.
Ph.D., Counseling Psychology, Ball State University
M.A., Counseling Psychology, Boston College
Licensed Psychologist-Doctorate
State of Vermont (#048.0000850)
Certified Level III, Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (Janina Fisher, Ph.D.)
Biology of Trauma, Trauma Healing Accelerated (Aimie Apigian, MD)
Certified Dialogue Therapist, The Institute for Dialogue Therapy (Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D.)
Faculty and presenter, Integrative Grief Counseling Certificate, The Embody Lab