What happens in session?

When I meet clients for their first grief support session, they will sometimes ask me what we actually do together.

It’s such a good question because often, grief support can sound vague & undefined in a way that makes it hard to know if it's something you need, or something that would help, or something that's even meant for you.

So I want to try to answer it here because maybe it’s helpful for you too.

In session, we talk. But not the way you talk to most people about your grief.

Most people in your life, even the ones who love you most, are working very hard not to let you fall apart in front of them. They are listening for a cue that you're okay, or almost okay, or at least okay enough that they can breathe again. They are hoping you'll say something that lets them say but you're doing so well or he would be so proud of you or I think you're turning a corner. They need you to be turning a corner. Their love for you makes it hard for them to just sit in the dark with you.

I don't need you to turn a corner or to downplay what’s happened to you and how it’s shaped the very fabric of your being.

I have no agenda around where you should be in your grief or how long this is taking. I'm not keeping a tally. I'm not wondering when you'll start to seem more like yourself. When you come into session still as raw and undone as you were six months ago, I'm not disappointed. That rawness doesn't worry me. It tells me something is alive in you that needs tending. And we will do that hard work of mourning, together.

What you'll find in session isn't someone waiting neutrally to receive whatever you bring. I've spent years training in grief — formally, rigorously, under Dr. Alan Wolfelt at the Center for Loss — and I've sat with hundreds of grievers across thousands of hours of individual session and group work. That training lives in the background of every conversation. It means I can hear what's underneath what you're saying. It means I know the terrain well enough that I'm not frightened by the dark parts of it.

But formal training and experience doesn’t mean I know what your grief is like for you. You are the authority on your loss and the landscape of your grief. So even with everything I've learned, I come to you curious. I want to know what this is like for you. If you talk about loneliness, I want to learn what loneliness means for you. If you bring up guilt, I want to explore it with you and understand what you regret, even if it doesn’t “make sense” logically. A single word or an emotion can show up as a an entirely different world depending on the person carrying it. I never assume I already know which world you're in.

I'm also not going to rush us out of the hard places. A lot of grief support, even well-intentioned grief support, has a quiet agenda toward comfort. Toward getting the person to a slightly better place before the hour ends. I understand that impulse. But I've come to believe that pulling someone back from the edge of their pain too quickly, before it's finished with them, is its own kind of abandonment. So we’ll stay. We’ll stay with the hard things, together.

In session, you’ll also be able to feel what it’s like to be seen by someone who has been there too. I too, have walked through my own wilderness after the loss of my partner, A, to pancreatic cancer back in 2017. I know what it is to lose not just a person but the whole structure of a life, the future you'd assumed, the feeling and safety of being known, the particular loneliness of long-term grief (one that outlasts everyone else's patience for it).

I've been to the places you're describing. It’s not my loss that makes me a good grief support practitioner, but it does add a depth of understanding that can only be learned through living with profound loss.

So what a session looks like, in practice is that we follow what’s most alive for you in the moment. If you need to talk about the night he died, we talk about the night he died — even if we've talked about it before, even if we've talked about it many times. Grief circles back often. It returns to the same places again and again, and each time you revisit a place, it might be through a different lens or through a different version of you.

If you need to sit in silence for a moment, we sit in silence. If you need to tell me about something small, the way his coat is still on the hook by the door, the particular sound of his car in the driveway that you still sometimes think you hear, we stay there. You can bring photos and videos that we’ll watch together. We’ll talk about the small things that make grief hard, like grocery shopping and taking your first trip without them. The small things are never small. I've learned that the smallest details are usually where the deepest grief is living, tucked inside the ordinary where no one thinks to look.

Something happens when someone is truly received, when you say the thing you haven't been able to say, the thing you thought was too dark or too shameful or too much, and you watch the person across from you not rush to reassure you. Just take it in. Stay present with it. Over time, grief will soften as we give it space, witnessing and expression.

That is what this work is offering you. A space to be with your grief until it softens a little. Until your life can hold other things alongside it. Until you feel like maybe you don't need to come every week, maybe once a month is enough. And eventually, you won't feel the need to come at all.

Because you've changed. You've been shaped by this in ways you couldn't have predicted. And what you've carried so heavily for so long has become something you know how to hold, and sometimes, something that has shaped you in meaningful ways.

That's what it means to grieve well.

To go on and love well. And live well.

What I can promise you is this: for this hour, your grief will be the only thing that matters. You will not have to manage it or explain it or make it smaller so someone else can be comfortable. You will not have to perform okayness or gratitude or progress.

You can just bring it. All of it.

And we can be in it together.

With care, Marie

P.S. To explore working together, you can fill out an intake form right here. I would be honoured to walk alongside you.