Loss doesn't follow a timeline.
Depth-oriented therapy that makes room for grief without rushing it — and without asking you to have it figured out.
How I Work ↓The Japanese have a word — mono no aware — for the bittersweet awareness that beautiful things pass. There's no equivalent in English. We don't have a language for grief that honors it rather than pathologizes it. This work tries to be that language: a space where loss is allowed to be what it is, for as long as it needs to be.
The people around you are probably waiting for you to be done. That's not cruelty — it's their discomfort with something they don't know how to hold. This work is for what still needs room.
Western culture treats grief as a malfunction — something to move through quickly, recover from, put behind you. The window it allows is measured in weeks. Sometimes days.
Depth-oriented work understands grief differently. Grief doesn't resolve. It integrates. The person, the relationship, the life that was — these don't disappear from you. They find a different place to live. The work is making room for that to happen on grief's terms, not yours. What gets compressed goes underground — and surfaces later, often in ways that are harder to identify as grief.
Grief asks the deepest question: how does one continue? Not by overcoming the loss, but by allowing it to change you — slowly, on its own terms. This is the orientation of depth-oriented therapy: not to fix, manage, or optimize — but to understand what has been organized inside, and make contact with it.
There's no schedule for this. No correct sequence. No point at which grief is supposed to have resolved. What I offer is a relationship in which that's genuinely true — where nothing is being tracked, managed, or moved along.
The therapeutic relationship itself is the resource — a steady place to return to without performance or progress requirements.
Grief often carries layers: old losses that surface alongside the present one, complicated feelings toward those who died or left, the grief for unlived possibilities.
Working with what is present in the room — what stirs, what tightens, what opens. The body knows what it's carrying.
"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift."— Mary Oliver
Loss becomes something that is part of you rather than something threatening to overwhelm you. The relationship with the absence changes.
Grief is one of the most isolating experiences there is. Being genuinely witnessed — without agenda, without timeline — addresses the isolation directly.
Integration of grief frees energy that was organized around the loss. This doesn't mean replacing what was lost — it means having access to your own life again.
"In the end, just three things matter:— Jack Kornfield
How well we have lived. How well we have loved.
How well we have learned to let go."
No script. No intake form. Just a conversation — unhurried, no expectation of having it figured out.
An unhurried intake. Your history, what brings you here, how you make sense of things.
Regular 50-minute sessions, in-person in Palo Alto or via telehealth throughout California.
This is one of the areas I work with in individual therapy.
How individual therapy works →
A Good Place Therapy · Palo Alto · Supervised by Christina Miller-Martinez, LMFT #105663
I have worked with grief for deaths, divorces, estrangements, career losses, and the grief for lives not lived. I've found that the willingness to stay in the room with loss — without agenda — is what makes the work meaningful.
Full biography →A free 15-minute consultation is a low-pressure first step.
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