Do I need a diagnosis to start?
No. You do not need a name for what is going on to begin. Diagnosis is something we consider together if it becomes relevant, not something you bring to the door.
Wellness
Therapy for grief in Maryland
You might be grieving someone who is still alive. You might be grieving a version of your life that never happened.
Some losses come with a date and a service and people who know to bring food. Most of them do not.
You might still have the person and have lost the version of them you could call. You might be the only one who knows something ended, because nothing about it looked like an ending from the outside.
People stop asking after a while. Not unkindly. They move at a different speed than you do, and it gets easier to say you are doing better than to explain that you are not.
If any of this is the version of your week you recognize, you are in the right place.
What this actually looks like
- Missing someone who is still alive, or still in your phone, or still on your feed.
- Feeling like everyone else moved on from a loss and you are still standing in the same spot.
- Grief for a future you once imagined that no longer looks possible or how you planned.
- A date on the calendar that nobody else remembers, and you start feeling it a week out.
- The drawer, the room, the boxes, still exactly where they were.
- Laughing at something and then feeling bad for laughing.
- Telling the short version because the long one costs too much.
How I work with it
I am integrative. I do not run people through one method. I pull from what fits the person in front of me. Four things I actually use:
Cognitive behavioral work
We slow down what happens between a thought and a reaction and look at it together. The all-or-nothing story that turns one bad day into a verdict on your whole life. The certainty that someone is disappointed in you that arrived five minutes before any evidence. Often these are not truths. They are patterns the mind learned a long time ago and kept repeating. Once we can see them, we have already started loosening them. The work is not to argue with every thought. It is to stop treating every thought like evidence or fact.
Mindfulness-based intervention
Slowing down long enough to notice what is happening inside you instead of running ahead of it. Sometimes that is a breath. Sometimes that is a pause before you reply to a message. Sometimes that is asking yourself what your body is doing while your mind is somewhere else entirely. It is not meditation in the way you might expect. It is the habit of returning to the moment you are actually in. Grief, anxiety, and the late-night spirals are harder to get out of when you are not even in the present. Your present. This is how we practice being here. Together first, and then on your own.
Solution-focused work
We spend as much time on what is working as on what is not. The relationship that survived a hard week. The moment you did say the hard thing. The day you chose rest over another round of fixing something that is not yours to fix. Growth is easier to build from than shame is. Sometimes the small thing you are already doing well is the door. We find it and we keep walking through it.
Somatic technique
Some of what you are carrying lives in the body before it lives in words. The held jaw. The shallow breath. The tightness in the chest that shows up before a conversation. The way you only fully exhale on the drive home from somewhere you had to be. We do not ignore that. We listen to it. It is not a substitute for talking. It is the other half of the same conversation. Your body holds onto things for a long time, and this work is about letting it start to set them down.
Alongside these, I hold space for the cultural, generational, and identity-specific parts that do not fit neatly into any single framework. Language, belonging, family expectations, migration, faith, the version of yourself your parents recognize and the version you are still becoming.
What the first few sessions are like
The first session is the intake. We go through what has been going on, what you want this to be about, and what has and has not worked before. There is no questionnaire that asks the right question and no moment where I have you figured out. You talk. I listen. I ask. We see if the way I work is the way you want to be worked with.
The next few sessions are where the relationship actually starts. Sometimes it lands quickly. Sometimes it takes longer than expected to feel easy. Both are normal.
I cannot promise what the work will look like or how long it will take. I can tell you that it moves at your pace, not mine.
If this is not the only thing
You do not need to sort out what you are carrying before booking. You do not need the right words. You do not need to know whether this is depression or grief or something you do not have a name for yet. You do not need to figure out which version of yourself is the real one. The first conversation is for naming things together, not for arriving with everything already understood.
Things people ask before booking
Do you prescribe medication?
No. I am not a prescriber. If medication becomes part of the picture, I will help you find someone who prescribes, and I will work alongside them.
Is this confidential?
Yes. What you bring into sessions stays in sessions, within the standard professional and legal limits we will discuss in the first session.
Can I talk about the cultural or family-specific things?
Yes. Absolutely. This is your life. You get to decide.
How long will it take?
As long as you need, to get to the point where you have the tools to support yourself on your own. I will not give you a number before I have met you.
Do you see people in crisis?
Not outside business hours. If you are in crisis right now, the page linked here has the resources you need.
Sessions are virtual, anywhere in Maryland, and cost $150. If you use your health insurance, your plan decides your copay or coinsurance.
The consultation is fifteen minutes and free. You do not need to prepare anything, and you do not need to have the right words. You just need to be willing to show up.