Grief Counseling in Lakewood and Longmont

There is no correct way to grieve

You may have heard about the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. That model can be useful as a loose framework, but it was never meant to be a checklist. Grief doesn’t move in a straight line. It is more like a tangled knot that you pick at from different angles on different days.

We work with clients who feel acceptance in the morning and are blindsided by rage before lunch.   We see people who stayed numb for months after a loss, only to have the full weight of it land once life got quiet again. Some clients feel guilty for laughing. Others feel guilty for not crying enough. None of that is wrong. All of it is grief doing what grief does.

Research tells us that roughly 60% of Americans will experience the death of a close family member or friend by the time they reach middle age. Loss is one of the most universal human experiences, and yet most of us were never taught how to sit with it. We were told to be strong, to stay busy, to move forward. Counseling gives you permission to stop performing your way through it and actually feel what needs to be felt.

What grief actually does to your body

Grief is not just emotional. It lives in your body. You might feel a constant tightness in your chest or a hollow ache in your stomach that won’t go away. Some people develop headaches, digestive issues, or a weakened immune system in the months after a significant loss. Chronic muscle tension is common. So is disrupted sleep.

When these physical responses don’t have a safe outlet, they can intensify over time. What started as acute grief can settle into something heavier, sometimes called complicated or prolonged grief.  We bring this up not to scare you, but because it matters. The earlier you give yourself space to process, the less likely that grief is to become a permanent resident in your nervous system.

How we work with grief at Self Care Impact

We often use an approach called Internal Family Systems, or IFS, when working with grieving clients. The basic idea is that we all carry different parts inside us, and grief hits each of those parts differently.

You might notice a part of you that insists on holding it together for your family. That part has been working overtime since the loss, making sure everyone else is okay while quietly falling apart inside. There might be another part that has gone completely numb, because feeling the full weight of this would be too much all at once. And there’s often a part that replays your last conversation with your loved one on a loop, searching for something you could have done differently.

In our sessions, we don’t try to push those parts away or power through them. We get curious about them. We ask what they need. When the part that has been holding everything together finally gets permission to set the weight down, something shifts. Your steady, grounded core, what IFS calls the Self, gets room to lead. That is where real healing starts.

What the process looks like in session

We move at your pace. Always.

In early sessions, the priority is stability. We  help you build a set of tools for managing the waves that come between appointments: grounding techniques, breathing practices, ways to stay connected to the present when the past pulls hard. You will not leave a session feeling worse than when you walked in.

Once that foundation is solid, we begin to explore the harder material together. This might mean sitting with a memory that you’ve been avoiding, or letting yourself feel something you’ve been keeping at arm’s length. We do this slowly, in small pieces, so your system can process without becoming overwhelmed.

Over time, the work shifts toward integration. Healing from grief does not mean forgetting or moving on. It means finding a way to carry your love for this person forward while also reclaiming your own life. For some clients that looks like creating new rituals. For others it simply means reaching a point where the memories bring more warmth than pain.