From the moment a child, parent, sibling, partner or loved one is diagnosed, life suddenly becomes divided into a before and an after.

You are thrown into a world you never expected to enter. A world where there are specialists to find, decisions to make, unfamiliar language to learn, an absurd amount of information to digest - a world that spins so fast it’s hard to find your footing at times because every initial decision you make feels so important (and it is.)

After learning about a new diagnosis, you may find yourself coping in ways you never knew were even possible. Maybe you’ve hit the ground running full speed, pouring yourself into the research, pinning down experts, scheduling new appointments and identifying promising trials or procedures… over night, you become an expert and a fierce advocate for your loved one.

You may even appear to be functioning well on the outside to others (and have moments where you have even your own self fooled,) but inside you experience sudden, intense waves of emotions that come and go - fear, anger, heartbreak, grief, shock, panic.

Whatever you are experiencing in this very moment, my job is not to change that for you. I understand first-hand how important it is to function in these ways at times. It gets things done and moving at a speed we sometimes really do need for our loved ones and I don’t want to take that away from you. However, I do want to create a space for just you - one where you can process recent events, feel those waves of emotion without judgment, and help guide you in a direction where you can learn how to tolerate and navigate the uncertainty that follows a diagnosis it in a way that allows space for you feel cared for.

It is completely normal if you find yourself grieving the future you expected, the childhood or parenthood you imagined, a loss before it occurs, or the sense of safety and certainty you once knew.

Ambiguous grief occurs when there is no clear ending or recognized loss.

Anticipatory grief can emerge when you know more changes and losses are still ahead.

Both of these types of grief are messy and complicated to feel, and often the people around you may not fully understand why you are grieving at all. Unless someone has walked a similar path as yours, it can be difficult to understand how grief can exist when the person you love is still here.

Your grief does not need a silver lining nor do you need to be encouraged to stay positive and keep moving forward. Grief does not always need to be fixed or reframed. Sometimes, it needs a space to simply exist. As your therapist, I hope to offer a place for all of it, without requiring one feeling to cancel out another.

When you’ve spent months or years watching for symptoms, waiting for test results, managing medications, responding to emergencies, or preparing for what might happen next, your nervous system can learn it is safer to stay active and prepared for the next event.

You may notice yourself constantly scanning for changes, struggling to relax, waking easily at night, replaying decisions over and over again, or feeling uneasy when you aren’t actively doing something. Even when things feel relatively stable, your nervous system has learned ways of keeping you alert and ready.

Through the introduction of sensorimotor psychotherapy and EMDR in therapy, we can together become curious about these patterns and the many ways they are of service to you rather than simply trying to make them stop. We can notice what your nervous system may be preparing for, process experiences that may still feel unfinished, and find opportunities to restore choice around when you need to be vigilant and when you can give yourself permission to soften.

When something life-changing happens, you may find yourself feeling as though the person you once were before the diagnosis is no longer within reach. Sometimes, caregivers describe this feeling as “missing themselves.” Other times, it may feel almost as though the person you were before the trauma died that day, too.

There can be grief in realizing that you cannot simply return to the person you once were. Therapy can offer a space for you to not only process this grief, but a space to discover the person you are becoming so that you can feel whole again.