Grief/Life Transitions/Loss
What ended, and what is asking to begin.
Divorce, a parent's death, a diagnosis, the end of something you thought would last longer.
At a Glance
What this page is about: Grief, loss and major life change, including the losses the world does not name as losses and the ones that came with relief.
How I think about it: Grief is the beginning of figuring out who you are now that the loss has happened. The person you are has expanded to include what you have lost, and the work is learning to live as that larger person.
Who tends to find this page: Adults carrying a death, a divorce, a diagnosis, a country, or a future they assumed they had. Also older losses that did not get to be losses at the time.
Who this is for: Adults
Therapist: Christian Molina, MA, LPC, NCC
License: Texas Licensed Professional Counselor #96254
Format: Telehealth, anywhere in Texas
Languages: English and Spanish
Fees: $135 intake, $120 individual, $175 couples. First call free, fifteen minutes.
Insurance: In-network with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, including Texas state Health Select, and with Curative. Superbills available for other plans. HSA and FSA eligible.
What this looks like in your life
Something has changed and you are not who you were on the other side of it. You can describe what happened, mostly. You can tell people the version of the story that lets them respond. What you have not quite figured out is what to do with the version of yourself that the change has left behind, and what to do with the version of yourself that is not yet here.
Sometimes the change was sudden. A death. A relationship that ended faster than you expected. Sometimes the change was slow. A marriage that became something neither of you signed up for. A parent who started disappearing into illness years before they died. Sometimes the change was something you chose, and it was still a loss. Sometimes the change happened to you, and it was also, in some quiet part of you, a relief.
You are probably carrying more than one timeline at once. The way things were before. The way things are now. The way you imagined they would be by this point. The way they might still become. They press against each other, and the pressure is part of what you are feeling.
You are doing what any person does when their life has been rearranged. The question is what to do with what you feel now that you feel it.
What I notice clients carry
Most people who come in for grief or transition work are asking how to carry what they are already feeling without losing themselves in it. The work is to make room for the loss to be what it is, while continuing to be a person who has a life to keep living.
Some are carrying losses that the world acknowledges. A parent died. A marriage ended. A diagnosis came. There is cultural permission to grieve these openly. The work, even then, is often harder than the permission suggests, because the cultural script for grief moves on a timetable that grief does not respect.
Some are carrying losses that the world does not name as losses. A friendship that dissolved without a label. A parent who was alive but unavailable. A version of your life that did not happen. The loss of a country, a language, a community you left or that left you. Loss of a future you assumed you had. These do not get the cards and the time off. The grief still happens. It just happens without witnesses, which makes it heavier.
Some are carrying losses that came with relief, and the guilt that comes with the relief. A long-awaited divorce. A parent whose dying ended long suffering, theirs and yours. The end of a job that was costing more than it was paying. The relief is real, and so is the loss.
Some are carrying older losses that did not get to be losses at the time. A death you grieved on schedule because you had to keep working. A relationship that ended when you did not have language for what you had lost. A sibling, a friend, a partner from earlier in life. The grief did not happen when it should have, and now something has surfaced it.
And some are carrying losses that were also traumatic. Some grief is the soft accumulation of weight. Some grief comes with images you cannot put down, with circumstances that were violent or sudden or wrong. The work in those cases moves more slowly, with attention to what the body is ready for and what it is not, and disclosure happens at the pace that lets it be useful. Traumatic grief is its own kind of work.
How I think about this work
I approach life transitions and grief as information.
When something major changes in your life, it usually changes because something underneath had become unsustainable or untrue. The marriage that ended was telling you something about what was missing in it, or in you, or in what you were trying to build together. The career that you walked away from was telling you something about what it could not give you. The parent who died is now in your life in a different shape, and what they were holding for you, or holding you back from, is now visible in a way it was not before.
This does not mean every loss is a gift, or every transition is a lesson. That framing is too tidy. The disruption costs something that cannot be paid back.
The cultural script treats grief as the work of closing a chapter. I think grief is the beginning of figuring out who you are now that the loss has happened. The person you are has expanded to include what you have lost, and now you have to figure out how to live as that larger person.
The work is to help you metabolize the loss and listen to what the transition has made visible.
What the work looks like
We start by making room for the loss to be what it is, including the version you have been carrying without showing. Some clients have been doing the public version of grief or transition for so long that they have lost track of the private version. We work on locating it again.
We work with what the transition or loss has made visible. What was already missing. What was being suppressed. What you have been wanting that you have not had words for. The work here is closer to listening than to analyzing.
We work bilingually when it serves the work. Some losses can only be named in the language they happened in. Some can only be grieved in the language of the people you lost. A veces solo se llora en español. The practice makes room for whichever language the work needs.
We work with the body when the body has things to carry. Grief shows up in the body in specific ways: tightness in the chest, a fatigue that sleep does not touch, a heaviness that is its own thing. We pay attention to what the body is doing, because the body often registers the loss before the mind has words for it.
We work with the people, alive and dead, who are in the room with us. The parent who is no longer here. The partner who is. The child whose growing has surfaced something. The friend whose absence is now permanent. Therapy is one of the few places where the dead can be talked to and the unfinished conversations can find a place to land.
And, when you are ready, we work toward what comes next: what you want your life to be now that this has happened. That question is part of the grief too.
Not sure if this is the right fit?
The first call is free and fifteen minutes long. We can talk about what is bringing you here and whether this practice is the right place for you.