A compassionate, evidence-based approach to care
Grief is one of the most universal human experiences, and one of the loneliest. People around you may not know what to say. They may say the wrong things with the best intentions. The world tends to give grief a few weeks and then quietly expect you to move on, as if loss has a schedule and healing is a matter of getting back to normal. For most people, it is not that simple, and pretending it is does not make it easier. It just makes you feel more alone in it.
At Vantage Mental Health, we work with people across Minnesota who are carrying grief in all its forms. Some come in the immediate aftermath of a loss. Others come months or years later, when something has cracked open what they thought they had processed. Some are not even sure what they are grieving, only that something has shifted and they have not been able to find their footing since. However grief has arrived for you, we are here to sit with it alongside you, without rushing you, without telling you how it should feel, and without putting a timeline on when it should be over. We offer in-person care at our clinics in Stillwater, Edina, and St. Anthony, with telehealth available throughout Minnesota.
Understanding Grief and Loss
Grief is the natural response to losing something that mattered. Most people think of it in the context of death, and that is certainly where it lives most visibly. But grief shows up in many other places too. The end of a relationship. A diagnosis that changes the life you thought you were going to have. A friendship that quietly dissolved. A pregnancy lost. A version of yourself you had to let go of. A childhood that was not what it should have been. Grief does not require a funeral to be real.
What makes grief clinically significant is not just its presence but how it moves, or does not move. For many people, grief follows a natural course. It is painful, it disrupts daily life for a period, and gradually, without disappearing entirely, it becomes something that can be held differently. For others, grief becomes stuck. It stays as sharp as it was at the beginning, or it resurfaces with unexpected force, or it slowly hollows out areas of life that once felt full. This is sometimes called prolonged grief disorder, previously referred to as complicated grief, and research shows it affects a meaningful percentage of bereaved people. It responds well to targeted therapeutic support, and it is not something people simply need to push through on their own.
Grief also rarely arrives alone. It often carries anxiety about the future, depression, disrupted sleep, physical symptoms, and a destabilized sense of identity, particularly when the person lost was central to how someone understood themselves or their daily life. Good grief support holds all of that, not just the sadness.
What Grief and Loss Can Look Like
Grief does not follow a neat progression through predictable stages, despite what many people have been told. It tends to be far more irregular than that, moving forward and backward, showing up in unexpected places, and shifting in intensity in ways that can feel confusing or even alarming.
Some of the ways grief commonly presents include:
- Profound sadness, emptiness, or a feeling that something essential is missing
- Difficulty accepting that the loss is real, even when you know cognitively that it is
- Intense longing for the person, relationship, or life that is gone
- Anger, sometimes at the person who died, sometimes at yourself, sometimes at no one in particular
- Guilt and second-guessing, replaying what you could have done differently
- Difficulty concentrating, making decisions, or caring about things that used to matter
- Physical symptoms including fatigue, appetite changes, chest tightness, or a general heaviness in the body
- Social withdrawal or difficulty being around people who did not experience the loss
- Grief that feels manageable for a while and then suddenly resurfaces with full force
- Loss of meaning, direction, or a sense of who you are now that things have changed
Grief after certain kinds of losses can be particularly complex. Losing someone to suicide, overdose, or sudden traumatic death carries its own particular weight. Losing a parent, a child, or a pregnancy. Losing someone with whom the relationship was complicated or estranged. Grieving a loss that others do not fully recognize or validate. All of these deserve space and support, and none of them are less real for being complicated.
What to Expect From Treatment
Grief therapy does not ask you to move on. That framing tends to feel like a betrayal of what was lost, and it is not clinically accurate either. What grief therapy actually does is help you move with your loss rather than being stopped by it. The distinction matters.
In the first session, your therapist will want to hear about the loss, about what happened, about who or what you are grieving, and about how things have been since. You will not be rushed through that conversation, and you will not be expected to arrive with any particular emotional presentation. Grief looks different for different people. Some people cry. Some do not. Some feel numb. Some feel everything at once. Your therapist has sat with all of it and will not be looking for you to perform grief in any particular way.
From there, treatment is shaped by what is most needed. For people in the earlier stages of acute grief, therapy often focuses on creating a safe container for the full range of what they are feeling, gently challenging the idea that grieving too much or too visibly is a problem, and supporting basic functioning while the acute phase runs its course. For people experiencing prolonged or complicated grief, there are specific therapeutic approaches with strong clinical evidence behind them, including Complicated Grief Treatment developed by Dr. Katherine Shear, which uses structured techniques to help grief become less stuck and more integrated.
Depending on what is present, your therapist might also draw on narrative therapy to help you find ways of carrying your loss as part of your story rather than as something that has stopped it. Meaning-making approaches help people reconstruct a sense of purpose and direction after a loss that has disrupted their worldview. When depression, anxiety, or trauma are layered into the grief, those are addressed as part of the same process.
There is no set length for grief therapy. Some people find what they need in a relatively short course of sessions. Others benefit from a longer, more open-ended process, particularly when the loss is layered or when grief has been accumulating for a long time without support. Your therapist will be honest with you about what seems most useful as things unfold.
The Benefits of Support During Grief
Grief is not something that needs to be fixed. But carrying it alone, or feeling like you should be further along than you are, makes it harder in ways that support can genuinely ease.
- Gives grief somewhere to go. One of the most consistent things people describe after grief therapy is the relief of having a place where they do not have to manage how they appear or protect anyone else from what they are feeling. That kind of space is harder to find than it should be, and it matters more than most people expect.
- Reduces the risk of prolonged or complicated grief. Research shows that timely therapeutic support following significant loss lowers the likelihood of grief becoming chronically stuck. For people who are already experiencing prolonged grief, targeted treatment produces meaningful improvement in the majority of cases.
- Addresses what grief does to the rest of life. Sleep, concentration, relationships, sense of self, capacity to feel hope about the future. Effective grief support tends to improve all of these, not by eliminating the grief but by helping it become something that can be held without consuming everything else.
- Supports meaning-making over the long term. The research of psychologist Robert Neimeyer and others consistently shows that finding ways to integrate loss into a continuing life narrative, rather than simply moving past it, is associated with better long-term adjustment and even post-traumatic growth. Therapy creates the conditions for that kind of meaning-making to happen.
Who This Treatment May Be Right For
- Are grieving a loss of any kind and find that the pain is not easing or is getting harder to carry over time
- Feel stuck in grief that others around you seem to expect should be further along by now
- Are grieving a loss that other people may not fully recognize or validate, and feel isolated in that experience
- Have experienced a sudden, traumatic, or complicated loss and find that ordinary grief support has not reached the depth of what you are carrying
- Notice that grief is affecting your sleep, your relationships, your ability to function, or your sense of who you are and what your life means
- Lost someone important months or years ago and find that something has recently cracked it open again in a way you were not prepared for
- Are supporting someone who is grieving and want to understand how to do that without causing more harm than help
- Are not sure whether what you are experiencing counts as grief, but know that something significant has been lost and you have not been able to fully process it
Ready to Take the Next Step?
You do not have to be at the bottom of grief to reach out. You just have to be somewhere in it and ready to not be alone in it anymore. Our team works with adults and teens across Minnesota, with in-person appointments available in Stillwater, Edina, and St. Anthony, and telehealth throughout the state including Northeast Minneapolis, Roseville, and the wider Twin Cities metro. We will meet you wherever you are in the process.