Grief Therapy

Grief changes you. It can break your heart open, dull your senses, or steal time in ways that feel impossible to explain. Whether you’ve lost a loved one, experienced a life-altering change, or are grappling with the emotional impact of anticipatory grief, your experience is valid—and you don’t have to face it alone.

At Cognitive Behavioral Therapy & Assessment Associates (CBTAA), we specialize in helping individuals navigate grief with compassion, structure, and research-backed care. Our therapists use evidence-based approaches like CBT, ACT, and DBT to help clients move through grief while honoring what’s been lost. We meet you where you are, whether you’re newly grieving, feeling stuck months later, or overwhelmed by unresolved pain years after a loss.

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What is Grief?

Grief is a deeply personal and often life-altering response to loss. While we commonly associate grief with the death of a loved one, it can also arise from any major rupture in your sense of normalcy or identity— the end of a relationship, the loss of a job, a serious diagnosis, infertility, estrangement, or even the gradual decline of someone you care about. Sometimes, we grieve not just what we’ve lost, but what we hoped for: a future that no longer exists, a version of life that never came to be.

Grief doesn’t move in a straight line. One moment you might feel calm, and the next overwhelmed by a wave of sadness or anger that seems to come out of nowhere. You may feel numb, disconnected from the world around you, or unable to focus on even the smallest tasks. Some people find themselves withdrawing from others, while others try to stay constantly busy as a way to avoid the pain. There is no "right" way to grieve. It can show up as tears, silence, irritability, confusion, physical exhaustion, or all of the above.

What’s important to understand is that grief is not a problem to be solved. It’s a process to be supported. And that process can be incredibly isolating, especially in a culture that often rushes people to "move on" before they’re ready.

Therapy creates a space where your grief is allowed to exist fully and without judgment. You don’t have to censor what you feel, or make it easier for others to hear. Instead, you’re met with compassion, structure, and tools that can help you carry what’s happened without losing yourself in it. While therapy doesn’t take away the pain, it can help you make sense of it. You can learn to navigate the waves of grief without being knocked over by them, and begin to rebuild a life that holds space for both love and loss.

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When Grief Becomes Complicated

For many people, grief gradually shifts. The pain may still be there, but it becomes more manageable like it’s woven into the fabric of life in a way that allows for connection, growth, and even joy. But for others, grief doesn’t soften. It stays sharp, overwhelming, and ever-present, long after the initial loss.

This experience is sometimes called Complicated Grief, or Prolonged Grief Disorder, which is a condition in which the natural process of grieving becomes stalled or stuck. Instead of adjusting over time, you may feel like you're reliving the loss over and over, unable to move forward, or unsure how to reengage with life. It’s not that you’re grieving “wrong.” It’s that the pain hasn’t had the space or support it needs to heal.

You might be dealing with Complicated Grief or Prolonged Grief Disorder if:

• You feel an intense yearning or sorrow every day, many months (or even years) after the loss
• You can’t stop thinking about the person or event, and feel unable to accept what happened
• You avoid reminders of the loss, or feel haunted by guilt and “what if” thoughts you can’t let go of
• You struggle to imagine a future without the person you lost, or feel as though a part of you died with them
• You’ve withdrawn from relationships, goals, or activities that once mattered to you
• You feel numb, disconnected, or like life has lost its sense of meaning

In some cases, loss happens under traumatic circumstances—such as an accident, suicide, or violent death. This can create what’s sometimes called traumatic grief, where symptoms of grief and trauma overlap. You may experience intrusive memories, heightened anxiety, or avoidance of reminders, alongside deep sorrow and longing. In these situations, treatment often blends grief-focused therapy with modified trauma-focused approaches, such as Cognitive Processing Therapy, while placing a heavy emphasis on emotional processing and meaning-making.

Complicated or traumatic grief is not a sign of weakness. It often reflects the depth of your love, the suddenness or violence of the loss, or how unsupported you may have felt in the aftermath. Still, it can take a toll on your mental health, your relationships, and your ability to rediscover joy. With the right support, it is possible to move through grief in a way that honors your loss while allowing space for healing and life beyond it.

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How Therapy Helps with Grief

Grief therapy isn’t about closure, forgetting, or finding silver linings. It’s about making room for the reality of your loss, in all its complexity, while helping you find your footing again. At CBTAA, we offer a space where you can grieve without judgment, speak the unspeakable, and explore the impact of your loss on your identity, relationships, and sense of purpose.

In grief therapy, we help you name and process the full spectrum of emotions that may surface– not just sadness, but anger, guilt, fear, numbness, even moments of relief or resentment. These emotions often coexist and can feel confusing or contradictory. Therapy helps you make sense of them and understand that whatever you're feeling, it’s valid.

You may also find yourself questioning who you are without the person, role, or future you lost. Whether you’re navigating life after the death of a spouse, the loss of a child, a breakup, or the shattering of a long-held dream, grief often brings profound shifts in identity. Therapy can support you in that redefinition, not by erasing the past, but by helping you carry it differently.

Grief therapy at CBTAA can help you:

• Process complex emotions like guilt, anger, fear, shame, and longing, even when they seem contradictory
  
  
• Navigate identity shifts, such as becoming a widow, a bereaved parent, or a caregiver after loss
  
  
• Understand grief-related thoughts and behaviors, like rumination, avoidance, or feelings of emotional numbness
  
  
• Restore a sense of meaning in a world that may now feel unfamiliar or unfair
  
  
• Develop rituals or practices that help you remember and honor your loved one in ways that feel grounding, not overwhelming
  
  
• Rebuild connections to yourself, to others, and to your values, so that life can feel rich and full again, even with grief in the background

Our approach is warm, structured, and deeply human. We don’t rush or minimize what you’re going through. Instead, we walk with you, step by step, through the terrain of grief, helping you build the emotional flexibility and resilience to live alongside the loss, rather than feeling consumed by it.

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Key Evidence-Based Treatment Methods

Grief is not a problem to solve, but when it becomes overwhelming, isolating, or stuck, therapy can help you process it in a more adaptive and meaningful way. At CBTAA, we use a range of evidence-based methods to support clients through grief, including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). Each approach offers tools to help you understand what you’re feeling, cope with painful emotions, and reconnect with yourself.

How Does CBT Treat Grief?

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) helps you understand how your thoughts, behaviors and emotions interact, and how these patterns can shape, intensify, or soften the experience of grief. After a loss, it’s common to develop painful beliefs like “I should have done more,” or “I’ll never be able to live without them.” These thoughts can keep you in cycles of guilt, shame, or hopelessness. CBT provides the tools to gently examine and shift these beliefs while also helping you re-engage with yourself in small, manageable ways to move past the grief.

Cognitive Restructuring

Grief has a way of shaping our inner dialogue. You may find yourself replaying the past, questioning your decisions, or holding onto thoughts like “If I had done more, they’d still be here,” or “If I allow myself to laugh, it means I’ve moved on without them.” These beliefs can feel convincing, but they’re often rooted in pain, not truth.

Cognitive restructuring helps you step back and examine these thoughts with your therapist, not to judge them, but to explore where they come from and how they affect you. Through a process of guided discovery, you’ll learn how to identify cognitive distortions, like all-or-nothing thinking, guilt-based beliefs, or catastrophizing, and replace them with more balanced, compassionate alternatives.

This isn’t about “thinking positively” or trying to erase grief. CBT does not pathologize normal human emotions. Feelings of sadness, longing, and pain are expected parts of loss, and experiencing them does not mean something is wrong with you. Where therapy can help is in recognizing when grief becomes complicated by patterns of self-blame, shame, or hopelessness that make it harder to heal.

CBT creates space to honor the reality of your loss while loosening the grip of thoughts that keep you stuck, such as “I should have done more,” “I’ll never be okay again,” or “life has no meaning without them.” By examining and gently shifting these patterns, you begin to relate to your grief with more understanding and self-compassion.

Over time, you may come to see that grief and love are not in opposition. Honoring your loss does not mean you must remain in pain forever. Instead, therapy helps you carry love and sorrow side by side, allowing space for both remembrance and growth. The goal is not to eliminate grief, but to help you live with it in a way that feels less overwhelming and more aligned with the values and connections that still matter to you

Behavioral Activation

When grief takes over, the world can feel drained of color. You may stop doing the things that once gave you joy or meaning, even basic routines like eating, sleeping, or going outside can feel overwhelming. Over time, this inactivity can deepen the sense of isolation, depression, or stuckness.

Behavioral activation is about gently reversing that cycle. Together with your therapist, you’ll identify small, achievable activities that align with your values and begin to rebuild a sense of rhythm and engagement. These could be as simple as taking a walk, preparing a meal, texting a friend, or sitting with a memory rather than avoiding it.

If you have a history of depression, behavioral activation can also be a preventative measure to help reduce the risk of slipping back into a major depressive episode. By keeping you engaged in meaningful activities, this approach provides structure and stability even when motivation feels low.

Behavioral activation is also not limited to solitary activities. It often involves community building and strengthening support networks—whether that means reconnecting with family, joining a grief support group, or meeting new people who can provide encouragement and companionship. These connections can help ease the isolation of grief and remind you that you don’t have to carry the burden alone.

As you take these steps, even when you don’t feel motivated, you begin to experience small but powerful moments of connection, agency, and calm. You’re not pretending everything is fine. You’re reestablishing your ability to function and feel, even with grief in the background.

Emotional Processing

A central part of CBT for grief is making room for the natural emotions that come with loss. Therapy is not about shutting down sadness, longing, or anger, but about giving those feelings space to be acknowledged and expressed. In this way, CBT for grief includes much of what traditional grief counseling offers: opportunities to share your story, process memories, and sit with the pain of loss in a supportive environment.

What makes CBT unique is that alongside this emotional processing, you also build skills to help you cope more effectively in daily life. The balance of both, processing the grief itself while learning strategies to manage its impact, helps create a path forward that is compassionate, grounded, and sustainable.

Emotion Regulation Techniques

Grief can feel like a storm, sometimes predictable, sometimes not. You might wake up okay and dissolve into tears by noon, or swing from numbness to panic in a matter of minutes. Many people describe feeling flooded, like they’re drowning in sadness or rage they can’t control.

CBT teaches you emotion regulation strategies to help ride those emotional waves without getting pulled under. That might include grounding techniques when you feel overwhelmed, breathwork to calm your nervous system, or skills like “urge surfing,” allowing strong feelings to rise and fall without reacting impulsively.

You’ll also learn how to recognize the difference between healthy emotional processing and rumination, the kind of looping that keeps pain alive without moving it forward. The goal isn’t to suppress what you feel, but to give you tools to contain it, so you can stay present, safe, and in touch with yourself even during difficult moments.

Exposure Therapy for Grief

Grief often brings avoidance. Maybe you haven’t gone into their room, listened to a favorite song, or visited a place you shared. These avoidances are understandable. They protect you from pain in the short term. But over time, they can reinforce fear and keep you from healing.

Exposure therapy helps you slowly and safely re-approach what’s been too painful to face. With the support of your therapist, you’ll identify situations, objects, or memories you’ve been avoiding, and create a structured plan to engage with them gradually, intentionally, and at a pace that feels manageable.

This process might begin with simply talking about what you’ve been avoiding. Then it may move into real-life exposure: looking at a photograph, writing a letter to your loved one, or visiting a meaningful location. Each time, you’re not just confronting grief, you’re teaching your brain and body that you can feel pain and survive it. That there’s life on the other side of the wave.

Exposure isn’t about desensitization. It’s about reclaiming your world, one avoided corner at a time, and learning that your strength is greater than the grief.

How Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Supports Grief Processing

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) takes a different approach to grief, not by challenging your thoughts, but by changing how you relate to them. Rather than trying to push painful emotions away or “fix” the sadness, ACT helps you make room for them while staying grounded in your values.

Loss often brings an overwhelming urge to avoid— avoid memories, feelings, reminders, or even your own needs. But avoidance, while understandable, can leave you feeling more disconnected, more stuck. ACT teaches you how to sit with difficult emotions without letting them define your choices or narrow your world.

You might work on:

• Acceptance: Letting painful emotions exist without fighting them, grief hurts because you loved deeply, and ACT helps you honor that
  
  
• Cognitive defusion: Learning to see painful thoughts as thoughts, not truths, so when a thought like “I’ll never be okay again” arises, you can notice it without being consumed by it
  
  
• Values clarification: Exploring what still matters to you: relationships, creativity, spirituality, service, even if those things feel harder now
  
  
• Committed action: Taking small steps toward those values, even in the presence of grief
  
  

The goal isn’t to “move on.” It’s to move forward, with your grief beside you, not in front of you.

How DBT Helps When Emotions Feel Overwhelming

Grief doesn’t always show up as sadness alone. Sometimes it brings intense emotional swings like anger, guilt, panic, and shame that feel impossible to manage. In these cases, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) can offer tools for emotional stabilization, especially if grief is layered with trauma, identity loss, or interpersonal distress.

DBT helps you regulate emotions, tolerate distress, and communicate more effectively during times when it feels like your grief is spilling into every part of life. This approach is especially helpful for people whose grief has led to behaviors like self-isolation, lashing out, shutting down, or difficulty navigating relationships.

Your therapist may incorporate DBT skills such as:

• Distress tolerance: Tools for surviving emotional crises without making things worse
  
  
• Emotion regulation: Learning how to reduce vulnerability to emotional overwhelm and build a sense of internal control
  
  
• Mindfulness: Staying present, even in moments of pain without needing to escape or numb
  
  
• Interpersonal effectiveness: Navigating grief-related communication challenges, like feeling misunderstood by loved ones or needing to set boundaries

You don’t need to “fix” your emotions. DBT helps you understand them, and gives you a framework to move through them with skill and self-respect.

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Grief Therapy That Fits You

No two people grieve in the same way. For some, grief is loud– expressed through tears, anger, or restlessness. For others, it’s quiet and internal, showing up as numbness, detachment, or a low, constant ache. However your grief moves through you, therapy should feel like a space where you don’t have to explain or justify your experience, only be met with care and clarity.

At CBTAA, we tailor therapy to your needs, goals, and grief story. We consider the nature of your loss, how it’s affecting your daily life, and what kind of healing feels possible, even if you’re not sure yet what that looks like. Whether you’re navigating a sudden tragedy, a long-anticipated goodbye, or a more ambiguous loss, your therapist will meet you with structure, curiosity, and respect.

Together, you might:

• Focus on a specific aspect of grief, like guilt, regret, or complicated emotions about the relationship itself
  
  
• Explore how loss has shifted your sense of identity, safety, or direction
  
  
• Build coping skills for difficult moments like anniversaries, holidays, or unexpected triggers
  
  
• Reconnect with routine, meaning, and relationships that feel supportive
  
  

We work with children, teens, and adults, and grief doesn’t have an expiration date. Whether your loss is recent or long past, it’s never too late to begin healing. Grief therapy isn’t about finding closure. It’s about finding a way to live meaningfully, even with absence.

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What to Expect in Grief Therapy

Your first few sessions will focus on getting to know you, not just the details of the loss, but how it’s been showing up in your body, your thoughts, your relationships, and your daily life. This is a collaborative process. Your therapist isn’t there to interpret your pain or offer clichés. They’re there to listen carefully, track what matters, and begin to build a relationship grounded in safety, trust, and respect.

Over time, your sessions may shift between:

• Talking through memories, regrets, or questions that feel unfinished
  
  
• Sitting with difficult emotions: not to fix them, but to understand them
  
  
• Exploring how the loss is shaping your identity, roles, or worldview
  
  
• Finding small ways to reconnect with life, even when it feels unfamiliar
  
  

There may be moments of silence. Laughter. Tears. Resistance. Relief. All of it is welcome. Some weeks, you may want to speak about the person or event you’ve lost. Other weeks, you may not mention it at all, and instead focus on what it means to move forward in your new reality. There’s no “right way” to do this. What matters is that it’s real, and that it’s yours.

At CBTAA, our clinicians are deeply trained in evidence-based care, but therapy is never just about techniques. It’s about relationships. You’ll be working with someone who’s not only skilled, but emotionally present– someone who can sit with your pain, ask meaningful questions, and gently guide the process of healing without rushing it.

Most importantly, you’ll never be expected to do this alone. Whether your grief is fresh or decades old, whether it comes with clarity or conflict, your sessions are a space where you don’t have to carry the weight by yourself.

How Long Does Grief Therapy Take

There’s no set timeline for grief, and the same is true for therapy. The length of grief therapy depends on many factors: the nature of your loss, how grief is affecting your daily life, what kind of support you’ve had, and what your goals are in seeking help.

For some people, a short course of therapy (around 8–12 sessions) provides enough space to process the initial shock of loss, build coping tools, and begin reengaging with life. Others may need longer-term support, especially if the grief is complicated by trauma, identity shifts, past losses, or long-standing patterns of isolation or guilt.

At CBTAA, we take a flexible, individualized approach. There’s no rush, and no pressure to commit to a certain number of sessions. You and your therapist will regularly check in about how things are going, what feels helpful, and where you might want to focus next. As you grow stronger, sessions may taper over time or shift toward new goals.

What matters most is that therapy moves at a pace that feels sustainable. You’re not here to “get over it.” You’re here to understand your grief, carry it more gently, and eventually, find more room for connection, meaning, and possibility again.

When to Consider Seeking Therapy for Grief

Grief is a natural process, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy, or that you need to go through it alone. Many people seek grief therapy not because they’re in crisis, but because they want a space where their pain can be seen, heard, and worked through without judgment.

You might consider therapy if:

• You feel stuck in intense sorrow, guilt, or longing that isn’t softening with time
  
  
• You’re avoiding reminders of the loss, or feel haunted by them
  
  
• You’re having trouble functioning at work, in relationships, or in daily routines
  
  
• You’ve withdrawn from people and no longer feel connected to life
  
  
• You’re struggling with questions like “Who am I without them?” or “What now?”
  
  
• You’re carrying complicated feelings about the person, the loss, or the circumstances
  
  
• You’ve experienced multiple losses or traumas that are hard to untangle
  
  

Therapy can also be helpful even if your grief feels quiet or “manageable.” You don’t need to wait until things fall apart to ask for help. Sometimes, just having a dedicated space to process your loss can prevent long-term emotional distress, and support a healthier, more connected relationship with the memory of what (or who) you lost.

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Get Started with CBTAA

If you’re ready to take the next step, we’re here to help. At CBTAA, we specialize in evidence-based, compassionate grief therapy for children, teens, and adults across New York City, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

Whether your loss is recent or long ago, clear-cut or complicated, our team will take the time to understand your needs and match you with a therapist who feels like the right fit. Getting started is simple. Schedule a free 15-minute consultation with one of our Clinical Coordinators, and we’ll guide you from there. You don’t have to carry this alone.