What No AI Algorithm Can Offer You: Lived Experience and the Heart of Grief Therapy

There are things I know about grief that I didn’t learn in a textbook, in classes or in expensive trainings.

I know what it feels like to stand at the edge of a grave and feel like this could not be reality. I know the particular devastation that follows catastrophic loss — the kind that doesn’t just take a person, but takes the version of yourself that existed before, that implodes you from the inside out.

I know what it means to lose your child.

My sweet son Benjamin died in a horrific accident in 2002. There are no words adequate to that sentence, and I won’t pretend there are. And in the rawness of that grief, before I had even begun to find my footing, I lost a pregnancy. Two losses, layered on top of each other, each one compounding the weight of the other.

Grief does not wait for you to be ready.

In 2017, I lost my dad. By then I had learned something about carrying loss, but losing a parent brings its own particular grief, its own specific silence. The person who knew you before you knew yourself and who provided strength and wisdom. Gone.

What I will tell you across all of these losses is that none of these relationships ended. They transformed. And learning to carry those transformed relationships — to honor the people I loved in the continuation of my own life and purpose rather than only feel their absence — became the foundation of everything I now bring to my work as a therapist.

But these were not my only losses.

Over the years, through my deep pain and wrestling with existential questions, especially in the face of such immense loss, I’ve lost the some of the faith community that once gave my life its structure and meaning. That kind of loss — the loss of a certain kind of belief system, of spiritual belonging, of the identity that formed inside a religious framework — is its own profound grief. It doesn’t come with a casserole or a sympathy card. It comes with silence, isolation, and often with shame.

Through multiple moves and relocations, I have lost friendships and communities — the slow grief of place and belonging that so few people name as grief at all.

And as the years have gone on, I’ve also lost parts of myself and my identity in the empty nest — the particular grief of a mother who built her days and years around her children and then watched them leave one by one, wondering who she was now that the most central role of her life had shifted. Like that line in Landslide about fear of change when you’ve built your life around someone, I realized my whole life changed when they all grew up.

Through all of it — through every iteration of loss and disorientation — I found my way not back to who I was, but forward into who I was becoming.

That is the work. Not recovery. Not return. But the slow, courageous process of making meaning from what remains.

Why Lived Experience Matters

We live in a moment where artificial intelligence (AI) can do remarkable things. It can answer questions, organize information, and even generate text that sounds like empathy. I use AI tools in my own business, and I won’t pretend they aren’t useful. Not at all.

But there is something AI cannot do, and it matters deeply when we’re talking about mental health care.

AI has no lived experience.

It has never lost a child.

It has never lost a pregnancy.

It has never lost a parent, or a life partner, or friend.

It has never felt like it was floating untethered in the universe of doubt and disillusionment.

It has never looked in the mirror after the last child left home and not recognized the person looking back.

It can process information about grief. It cannot know grief.

When you sit with me, you are not sitting with a database of clinical knowledge, though that knowledge is present through my clinical expertise and training. You are sitting with someone who has walked through the types of terrain you are navigating. Not the same path — grief is never the same path twice — but the same, isolating, often frightening wilderness.

And that changes everything about how I listen, how I respond, and how I hold what you bring into the room.

Lived experience doesn’t replace clinical training or extensive research. It deepens it.

I have a feeling you know exactly what I mean.

Clinical training gave me the tools. Lived experience gave me the wisdom to know how to use them.

I can explain continuing bonds theory — the research that tells us our relationships with those we’ve lost don’t end but transform. I can walk you through the neuroscience of trauma and traumatic grief, the stages of meaning reconstruction, the evidence base for the approaches I use. That knowledge matters, and to me, especially after the loss you’ve suffered, you deserve the best care. I bring all of it to our work.

But when you sit across from me and try to find the words for something that feels unspeakable, what meets you is not a framework or a therapy tool. It is someone who has sat in that same wordlessness.

Someone who knows what it feels like to wake up in the morning after your heart is broken and your entire world changes, and you have to realize the truth, all over again.

Someone who knows what it’s like to wonder if you’re just not getting this grief right.

But someone who also knows that grief is not a problem to be solved but a relationship to be tended.

Someone who has learned — slowly, imperfectly, and with great effort — that meaning does not announce itself.

It emerges.

And it emerges most reliably when you are truly witnessed by another person who understands the terrain.

That is what no algorithm can replicate. Not because AI lacks information — it has access to more information than any human ever could. But because being witnessed requires presence. It requires someone who has been changed by loss the way you have been changed by loss.

It requires, in the most fundamental sense, another human being.

That is what I offer you.

How We Work Together

I bring to this work everything I am — a Licensed Professional Counselor, National Certified Counselor, Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, a Level 2 Gottman-trained couples therapist, and an E-RYT 500 trauma-informed yoga professional whose years of somatic practice inform how I show up clinically. I draw on compassion-focused mindfulness and EMDR techniques, and I hold all of that training in service of one thing: being fully present with you.

Credentials matter — they tell you I know what I’m doing. But what I most want you to know is that when we sit together, you are not a case or a diagnosis. You are a person whose story deserves to be heard completely, held carefully, and honored in all of its complexity.

My approach is grounded in the belief that your bond with who or what you have lost does not end — it continues, and over time, you slowly learn to make meaning from it. The work we do together is collaborative. Using narrative therapy as one of our primary tools, we will explore your relationship with who or what you have lost — not just what is gone, but what that relationship meant, how it shaped you, and what you want to carry forward from it. We will honor the person you lost fully, including the complicated parts of their story and yours. Grief rarely comes wrapped in simplicity, and you deserve a space where the whole truth of your loss is welcome.

Our work together will be both practical and existential. Some days we will focus on how to get through the week — how to function, how to breathe, how to take the next step. Other days we will sit with the bigger questions: who are you now, what does your life mean, what does hope mean, and how do you find your way forward without abandoning the bond that still lives in you. Both kinds of work matter. Both are part of the path.

You do not have to feel lost in the wilderness alone. We will navigate it together.

Get started by clicking CONNECT and take the first step.