Therapy and coaching for divorce, grief, and life transitions.

In my experience, the sign that outside help might be useful is less about how bad you feel on a given day and more about whether the bad days are stuck on repeat: sleep that hasn’t come back after a few months, old habits that used to help you reset and don’t anymore, and relationships that are starting to suffer. You don’t have to be in crisis to reach out.

It can be both, and the line isn’t always clean. A transition produces real low moods, sleep changes, and loss of interest in things, and those can look a lot like depression on a checklist. They sometimes ease as the transition itself eases. They can also tip over into a clinical depression that’s its own thing and needs to be treated as such. Part of what an initial conversation does is sort out which one you’re dealing with so the response actually fits.

In my experience, it helps to start in the middle of it, even if the bigger questions wait until later. While things are still in motion, sessions tend to focus on the practical pieces: keeping sleep and food together, making the next decision well, and not making the change harder than it needs to be. Once things settle, there’s often more space to look at what the change brought up. Both stretches matter, and neither one is a warm-up for the other.

There’s no single right answer. With divorce, for example, some people start during the separation because they want support working through the legal and logistical parts without losing themselves. Some start after the divorce is final because that’s when the noise dies down and what’s underneath becomes visible. Some come back to it a year or two later when they notice they’ve built a new life that looks fine on paper but doesn’t quite feel like theirs yet. Any of those is reasonable.

Yes. Grief therapy is a regular part of what I do. People come in around a parent’s death, a partner’s death, a sibling, a child, a long illness that ended, a sudden loss, or a death they thought they’d processed and find themselves back in the middle of years later. Six months out, you might be crying in the grocery store. The point isn’t to get over it on a schedule. It’s to be able to live a life that includes the loss without being undone by it. I’m licensed for therapy in Michigan and Ohio.

Not being sure what you’re grieving is common, and it doesn’t mean the grief isn’t real. Sometimes the loss is layered, the person you were, the relationship you thought you had, the future you assumed would happen. Sometimes the grief is for a version of someone who’s still alive. Sometimes a positive change brings its own loss with it and you don’t have language for that yet. Sorting out what’s actually being grieved is often a useful first step.

Yes. Retirement coaching is one of the more common reasons people reach out, especially in the six-to-eighteen-month window after the last day. The vacation phase ends, the calendar opens up, and the question of what the days are actually for starts to land. For people who spent thirty years in a career, whether as a manager, a tradesperson, a teacher, a clinician, a pilot, a first responder, or an operator of their own business, the identity reshuffle after work ends is real, and it doesn’t get talked about much.

The timelines people carry in their heads about how long things should take are usually shorter than the actual experience of the adults around them would suggest. In my experience, adjusting to a divorce, a serious diagnosis, or a death often takes a year or two of real time, and sometimes longer. If you’re hard on yourself for not being done yet, that’s worth looking at too. The pace isn’t a character test.

The anniversary part is real. Grief keeps a calendar even when you don’t. The date of the loss, their birthday, the diagnosis date, the six-month mark, and the first holidays all count, and so do the second ones, which catch people off guard because everyone else has stopped checking in by then. The body often notices the date before you consciously do; people describe a rough week they can’t explain until they look at the calendar. None of that means you’ve lost ground. If the hard days start outnumbering the ordinary ones, that’s a reason to reach out.

If something significant has changed in your life and you’re not the same on the other side of it, that qualifies. Divorces, deaths, diagnoses, career changes, retirements, empty nests, moves, the end of a long-term identity, a change in who you’re caring for. Less obvious ones too: a friendship that ended, a faith community you left, a body that doesn’t do what it used to. If you’re uncertain whether your situation is the kind I work with, send a note and ask.

The wins include retirement after a long career, the last kid leaving for college, a promotion that means you’re not doing the work you actually loved, and a move to a better house in a better neighborhood that turned out to be a place where you don’t know anyone. Not everyone feels these changes as losses, and that’s fine too. For the people who do, the grief is real, and it’s also often disenfranchised, meaning the people around you don’t recognize it as grief and may even think you’re being ungrateful. That makes it harder to talk about, not less real. It’s a reasonable thing to bring in.