Somewhere along the way, many of us picked up the idea that grief has a finish line. That eventually we will accept what happened. Move on. Find closure. Heal. Get back to normal. Transcending challenges that idea. In the Transcending Model of Grief and Loss, Transcending is not the final destination waiting at the end of grief. It isn't a place where pain disappears. It isn't acceptance dressed up in different language. And it isn't evidence that someone has successfully com

There is a particular kind of disorientation that doesn't always show up in conversations about grief. It isn't necessarily sadness. It isn't necessarily shock. Sometimes it is simply the unsettling feeling of no longer knowing which way is forward. Who am I now? What does my life look like from here? What am I supposed to do with what happened? What do I believe now? Where do I go when the life I thought I was living isn't the life I'm living anymore? This is the space we ca

Initial Reaction: When Life Is No Longer as It Was Grief doesn't wait for us to be ready. Sometimes a loss arrives suddenly and unmistakably. Other times, what has been lost becomes clear slowly: a diagnosis changes what we imagined for the future, a relationship becomes something we no longer recognize, a hoped-for possibility disappears, or we realize that something has changed long before we had language for what it meant. Initial Reaction is the TMGL space in which a lo

Most conversations about grief start after a loss. TMGL starts before it. Uncharted Territory is the only one of TMGL's four spaces that does not require a loss to have already occurred or been recognized. It represents the terrain of life as we know it: our routines, relationships, identities, assumptions, expectations, and the ways we understand ourselves and the world around us. For many of us, much of daily life happens here. We go to work. Make dinner. Raise children. Bu

If Context, Grief Expectations, and Identity are about what shaped this loss for you, Process is about what you actually do with it, day to day, and it might be the factor we get asked about the most. People cope in wildly different ways, and almost none of those ways are wrong. Some people process a loss by staying busy, throwing themselves into work or a project because it gives their mind somewhere else to go. Others need to slow everything down, journal, create, sit in si

Grief doesn't only ask what you lost. It asks who you are now that you've lost it, and that question turns out to be one of the most disorienting parts of the whole experience for the people we've talked to over the years. Part of that is simply about when a loss lands in your life. The same loss can mean something entirely different depending on the developmental moment it interrupts. Losing a parent at seventeen, right as you were supposed to be leaving for college and star

Most people don't walk into a loss with a blank slate. They walk in already carrying some idea, often one they never chose, of what grief is supposed to look like, how long it's supposed to last, and whether what they're feeling counts as grief at all. That idea rarely comes from nowhere. It comes from somewhere specific and naming where is the second factor of the Loss Template. One place it comes from is your own history. If this isn't your first loss, you already know some

Last night I saw Sara Bareilles's Good Grief Tour in Chicago. It was a special night of leaning into an emotional space many people avoid but all of us know well. As a grief researcher, and a songwriter who made my own grief album, I love seeing when loss, and the ways grief changes us, become a normal part of the conversation. Personally, it was a night I won't forget: tears on my face, sounds of sniffles all around me, and the clear sense that I wasn't alone. The grief educ

For decades, many of us have encountered grief through the language of stages: one experience followed by another, eventually leading somewhere that sounds a lot like being finished. But grief rarely behaves that neatly. We can feel steady one day and disoriented the next. A loss we thought we had learned to carry can feel entirely different when our circumstances change. An anniversary, a new relationship, becoming a parent, reaching an age someone we love never reached,

Several years ago, we booked a trip to Mexico to write. That was the plan, anyway: two friends and counselor educators finally carving out time to put words to the articles we kept saying we'd co-write. What actually happened on that beach was something else entirely. Katie was six months postpartum after giving birth to stillborn identical twin boys, holding a beautiful daughter in one hand and a grief with no clean edges in the other. Being home for Mother's Day that

Two people can lose almost the same thing and end up in entirely different grief. That is not a failure of one person's coping, or a sign the other is handling it better. It is context, and it is the reason we do not believe any single timeline or checklist can tell you how someone's grief should look. When we sat with people and asked them to talk about their losses, we were not handing them categories to fill in. We were listening for what they brought up on their own, unpr

Part 1 of a reflective series inspired by Netflix’s “The Crash” Netflix's The Crash documents the aftermath of a highly publicized tragedy involving adolescent relationships, loss, legal accountability, and the deaths of two young men. The documentary has generated intense public reactions surrounding mental health, parenting, blame, grief, and meaning-making after irreversible rupture. As I watched, I found myself reflecting less on the legal conclusions themselves and more

Spoiler alert for Episode 9 of the Testaments Watching Episode 9 of The Testaments was incredibly difficult for me to sit with, and I have been reflecting on why. From the very beginning of The Handmaid's Tale, viewers have witnessed profound death and non-death grief: the loss of safety, familiarity, bodily autonomy, innocence, identity, motherhood, connection, and imagined futures. We have watched people lose not only one another, but pieces of themselves; yet, this episode

Spoiler warning ahead Hamnet was a major presence this film awards season, with Jessie Buckley winning the 2026 Oscar for Best Actress for her portrayal of Agnes Shakespeare. After watching it, not only did I find myself with tears streaming down my face, I found myself thinking deeply about grief and how powerfully the story reflects the Transcending Model of Grief and Loss (TMGL). What stood out to me most is that Hamnet does not portray grief as neat, linear, or easily r

Grief is a deeply personal and evolving journey, one that often begins in uncharted territory and continues to shift across time, contexts, and life stages. When loss enters our lives, it can unsettle our sense of identity, safety, and meaning, leaving us feeling disoriented or adrift. Rather than something to resolve or move past, grief is an experience we learn to navigate and carry with us in new ways. Within the Transcending Model of Grief and Loss, healing is not defined

Sonya and I have a long history of working with clients experiencing grief and loss, and we have been studying grief reactions and...

The holidays tend to elicit and exacerbate our grief responses. They may look quite different than what you expect. Loss permeates our...

People who have integrated their losses often describe that self-compassion has been described as part of their integration of grief....

Recently, I have been working really hard to acknowledge the space of both, and in my personal and professional lives. It’s hard for me...

As the holiday season drew near, I found myself reflecting on various losses I have experienced in my short time on earth. This November,...