If you are feeling completely unmoored, hollowed out, or overwhelmed by a reality you didn’t choose, you are not alone.
Many of our clients come to us carrying the suffocating weight of loss, asking agonizing questions: Am I grieving the “right” way? Will this crushing pain ever stop? How am I supposed to keep living when my world has stopped turning? Society often treats grief like a cold—something you are supposed to “get over” or move through in neat, predictable stages. At Liberated Mind Counseling and Health Center, we know that isn’t true. We don’t view your grief as a pathology, a disorder, or a problem to be solved. Grief is not a sign that you are broken; it is the natural, inevitable, and agonizing cost of love and deep connection.
The Liberated Mind Approach: ACT and Existential Psychotherapy
Our goal is never to help you “forget” or simply “move on” from your loss. Instead, we want to help you build a life that is big enough to carry your grief while still allowing you to find meaning, connection, and peace. We do this by anchoring our practice in two powerful, evidence-based frameworks: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Existential Psychotherapy.
Here is how these approaches inform our work together:
- Making Room for the Pain (ACT): Grief is exhausting because we often spend massive amounts of energy trying to avoid, suppress, or numb the pain. ACT focuses on building psychological flexibility. We help you drop the struggle against your own emotions, teaching you how to gently make space for the waves of sadness, anger, and emptiness as they come, without being completely consumed by them.
- Living Your Values Alongside Loss (ACT): We don’t wait for you to “stop grieving” before you start living again. Through ACT, we help you identify your core values—the things that truly matter to you. Together, we create a plan to help you take small, meaningful steps forward, honoring what you have lost by living a life that reflects those deeply held values.
- Rebuilding a Shattered Worldview (Existential Therapy): Catastrophic loss shatters your assumptive world—the fundamental beliefs you held about safety, fairness, and how life is “supposed” to go. Existential psychotherapy provides a grounded, unflinching space to process this profound disorientation and safely explore the terrifying reality of a changed world.
- Confronting the “Why” (Existential Therapy): Grief forces the heaviest questions upon us: Why did this happen? What is the point of anything now? Who am I without them? Rather than offering toxic positivity or empty platitudes, our existential approach leans into these questions. We help you navigate the inherent suffering of the human condition and actively construct new meaning and purpose in the aftermath of your loss.
- The Foundation of SDE: Before you can tackle existential realities, you must physically survive. Grief is incredibly taxing on the body, disrupting Sleep, Diet, and Exercise (SDE). We will help you gently tend to your physical well-being, rebuilding these foundations at a pace that feels possible.
Navigating Grief and Loss: Honoring Your Pain, Rebuilding Your Life
You do not have to carry this immense weight in isolation. With compassionate support and expert guidance, you can learn to navigate the darkness and eventually find your footing again.
Common Questions We Hear About Grief
How long will this last?
This is the most common question we hear, and the hardest to answer: there is no timeline. The acute, breathless agony of fresh grief does soften over time, but the loss itself is something you will carry forever. Our work focuses on helping you grow around the grief, so that while the loss remains, it no longer consumes the entirety of your life.
Why am I so physically exhausted?
Grief is not just an emotional experience; it is a full-body trauma response. Your brain is working overtime to process a reality that feels impossible, which drains your energy, disrupts your sleep, and impacts your appetite. Feeling bone-tired, foggy, or numb is a completely normal physiological reaction to profound loss.
Will therapy make me forget them, or mean I’m “moving on”?
Absolutely not. In our culture, “moving on” implies leaving something behind. We focus on moving forward. Therapy is about finding a way to integrate your loss into your life story. We want to help you stay connected to the love you feel for what you lost, while simultaneously reclaiming your right to a meaningful, fulfilling life.
Ready to Take the First Step?
You don’t have to navigate this heavy space alone. Let us sit with you, even if that means sitting in the dark together for a while!
Our Therapists
Our team brings a profound depth of experience in navigating acute crisis, terminal illness, and sudden loss. We are dedicated to providing individualized, compassionate care to help you survive and eventually integrate your grief.
R.C. Morris, LCSW, PhD
Co-Founder, CEO & Psychotherapist
Dr. Morris brings a unique, highly specialized perspective to grief counseling. Drawing from his clinical experience in high-acuity hospital settings and his academic background as a researcher, R.C. possesses a deep expertise in Existential Psychotherapy. He understands that significant loss is not just an emotional event, but an existential crisis that forces us to confront our mortality, freedom, and the search for meaning in an often unfair world. Using ACT to help you manage the day-to-day overwhelming emotions, and Existential Therapy to help you rebuild a shattered worldview, R.C. provides a steady, intellectually rigorous, and profoundly validating space. He will help you process the trauma of loss, untangle complex emotions like survivor’s guilt, and actively construct a life of deep meaning and value moving forward.
He is accepting new clients. → Learn more about R.C.
Julare Morris, LCSW
Co-Founder, COO & Clinical Director, Psychotherapist
Julare approaches grief with an extraordinary depth of empathy, shaped significantly by her experience as a medical social worker at Primary Children’s Hospital. While there, she worked extensively on the Rainbow Kids unit, providing palliative and end-of-life care to children and their families. This profound work gave Julare an intimate understanding of anticipatory grief, the devastation of shattered futures, and the complex ways trauma ripples through a family system. If you are navigating the unthinkable—whether it is the loss of a child, the terminal diagnosis of a loved one, or a prolonged caregiving journey—Julare offers a deeply compassionate, psychodynamic approach to help you carry the unbearable weight and find moments of grace and connection in the aftermath.
She is accepting new clients. → Learn more about Julare.
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