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Grief Therapy in Washington DC
If you are reading this, something meaningful has come to an end, and you are carrying the weight of that absence.
Grief takes many forms. Maybe you are mourning a person, a marriage, or a career. Or perhaps you are grieving the loss of a life path you fully expected to walk. Whatever the loss, you likely feel shifted off-center. Your sleep is disrupted, your fuse is short, and your emotions feel unpredictable—crying out of nowhere, or feeling strangely detached when you expect to feel deeply.
I’m Ariel VanDoren, an LPC in Washington, D.C. In my therapy practice, I hold space for people experiencing these profound transitions, guiding you through the disorientation toward a sense of grounding and healing.
Grief is not a checklist you graduate from
Here is how I think about it: it is not a five-stage checklist you graduate from. It is more like the brain trying to update a model of the world that just got permanently broken.
That matters, because it explains why grief shows up in such ordinary places. You reach for the phone before you remember. You buy the wrong amount of food. You plan around a future that no longer exists and catch yourself halfway through the thought. Every one of those moments is a small correction to a model that used to run without effort.
Told that way, grief stops looking like a personal failure of coping and starts looking like what it is: enormous work, happening mostly out of view.
I do not rush the acceptance part
A lot of people arrive apologizing. They are still angry. They still catch themselves not believing it. They have been told, sometimes gently and sometimes not, that they should be further along by now.
I do not rush the acceptance part. Denial and anger are often just the system protecting itself from overload.
So I am not going to hurry you toward a feeling you have not arrived at. We start with where you actually are, including the parts that feel unacceptable to say out loud.
What is unfinished, and what can still be finished
One angle I find genuinely useful: what still feels unfinished or unsaid, and whether any of that can be finished in the present without rewriting the past.
We cannot go back and have the conversation. But the unfinished thing usually has a present-tense form, something you are still carrying, still defending, still arguing with in your head at two in the morning. That part is reachable. That is often where the work lives.
Loss that does not come from a death
Grief is not only about funerals.
I want to work with clients who are experiencing pain caused by major life events we experience: a death, the end of a relationship, the birth of a child, a career change such as going back to school or retirement, or family of origin trauma. The way our brain and body experience these shifts causes our emotions to feel chaotic and our nervous system needs to reset.
If the loss you are carrying has no ritual attached to it, no service, no casseroles, no one asking how you are holding up, that does not make it smaller. It often makes it lonelier.
The body's version of the story
Much of how I practice ties our somatic experience to the narrative we use to process what has happened.
Grief is not only a set of thoughts. It shows up as a tight chest, a jaw that will not unclench, a stomach that turns over when you pass a particular street. Meanwhile you are also building a story about what happened, what it meant, and what it says about you.
Those two tracks, the body and the narrative, keep informing each other. We can work on that reset in therapy, and we work on both, rather than treating grief as a purely verbal problem.
Working together in Washington DC
True North Psychotherapy is a solo practice, so the person you speak with to schedule an appointment is me. My office is at 1555 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 401A, Washington DC 20036. I am a Licensed Professional Counselor in the District of Columbia (LPC #PRC 14494).
If you want to talk
There is no right amount of time to wait, and no threshold of bad enough you need to cross first. Some people call in the first raw weeks. Some call two years later, when everyone else has moved on and they quietly have not.
If you want to ask a question before deciding anything, that is a fine reason to call for a consultation.
Ariel VanDoren, LPC — True North Psychotherapy
1555 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 401A, Washington DC 20036
Phone: 202.599.0522
