Depth Psychotherapy for Healthcare Professionals: Honoring the Grief No One Talks About
As a healthcare professional, you already know grief.
You’ve seen it in hospital rooms, in patients’ eyes, in the silence that follows bad news. You’ve carried it in your body, felt it in the heaviness of your breath at the end of a long shift. But not all grief is recognized. Some of it slips under the surface—quiet, unnamed, unacknowledged.
This is disenfranchised grief: the kind that doesn’t get a memorial or a day off work. The kind that’s pushed aside because there are still charts to finish, patients to tend to, and a world that keeps asking for more.
What Disenfranchised Grief Looks Like in Healthcare
Maybe it’s the patient you couldn’t save. The one you still think about months later.
Maybe it’s the moment you stopped feeling anything at all.
Maybe it’s the slow fading of the idealism that once brought you here.
This kind of grief often accumulates quietly, woven into the background of daily care. And when it’s not spoken, not witnessed, it can start to show up in other ways—burnout, exhaustion, emotional numbness, self-doubt. Not because you’re weak. But because you’ve been holding too much, for too long.
Burnout in healthcare isn’t just about being overworked. It’s about the accumulation of losses. It’s about giving so much of yourself that you no longer know what’s left.
Depth Psychotherapy: Making Space for What Hurts
So many treatments for burnout skim the surface—offering mindfulness tips, resilience trainings, or lists of things to “do.” But what most healthcare professionals need isn’t another list. It’s a place to be real. To feel what hasn’t been felt. To be human.
Depth psychotherapy offers something slower, more spacious. It invites you to turn toward the grief you’ve been carrying—not to fix it, but to honor it.
In this work, we:
• Name the losses that haven’t been spoken
• Explore why certain moments stay with you, and why others shut you down
• Uncover unconscious beliefs about worth, care, and identity
• Reconnect to the part of you that once found meaning in your work—and might still
Depth work is not about toxic positivity or pushing through. It’s about feeling your way through. With time, it can help you integrate what’s been overwhelming and reclaim the pieces of yourself that got left behind along the way.
You Don’t Have to Be Tough All the Time
The culture of healthcare often demands emotional distance. But the truth is, your grief is evidence that you care. And caring is what makes you good at what you do. It’s also what makes this work so incredibly hard.
If you’ve been running on empty, if you’re feeling disconnected, if your days are blurring together and you’re wondering how you got here—this is a place to begin again. Not with solutions, but with support.
Reclaiming Meaning, Reclaiming Self
This work is about more than recovery—it’s about remembering.
Remembering what drew you to this work.
Remembering that you are more than what you do.
Remembering that you, too, are worthy of care.
If you’re a healthcare provider in California, I offer grief counseling in Oakland and online throughout the state. My approach is intuitive, grounded, and built on the belief that healing begins with being seen—truly seen.
You don’t have to carry this alone. If you’re ready, I’d be honored to walk with you. Contact me today to get started.