Grief Therapy in Menlo Park

Everyone Keeps Asking How You're Doing and You've Stopped Telling the Truth

You say you're fine. You go to work, you answer the texts, and people tell you how strong you are. You nod because it's easier than explaining that you don't feel strong. The loss isn't new anymore, at least not to anyone else. The calls and the check-ins have slowed down, and you're expected to have moved on with everyone else.

But you haven't. You still reach for your phone to call someone who won't pick up. You still have moments where you forget, just for a second, and then it hits you all over again. Some days you're functional and some days you're going through the motions with nothing behind it. The worst part might be that no one around you sees the difference.

You've tried to process it on your own. You've talked to friends, maybe tried therapy before. But the grief didn't move. It just sat there, underneath everything, and you worked around it because that's what you know how to do.

How We'll Work on This Together

I'm Ryan Thurwachter, LCSW, a therapist in Menlo Park who specializes in grief. I've been trained in prolonged grief treatment through the Columbia Center for Prolonged Grief, one of the leading research programs for treating grief that doesn't resolve on its own. That protocol gave me a strong clinical foundation, but I found it too rigid and fast-paced for most of the people I work with. So I adapt it with Internal Family Systems therapy to provide something more flexible and human-paced.

If previous therapy felt like you were talking about the loss without anything underneath actually shifting, there's a reason for that. Most approaches treat grief as a story to process. IFS treats grief as something your whole system organized around. It works with the parts that went numb or are still carrying guilt, rather than asking you to push through faster than you're ready for. I'm a Level 2 IFS therapist through the IFS Institute. This work is personal for me. You can read more about why on my About Me page.

What Changes

One client told me she spent years trying to logic her way through grief, staying busy so she didn't have to feel it. Through our work she was able to actually sit with what she was feeling without being consumed by it, and for the first time she could let herself grieve without falling apart. Another described realizing he had been carrying guilt for years that wasn't his to carry, and slowly letting that weight shift. What clients tell me most often is that the grief doesn't disappear, but it stops running everything. They can carry it without it taking over their life.

If you've been carrying this longer than you thought you would, I'd like to talk. Book a free consultation and we'll figure out together whether this work makes sense for where you are now.

You can also reach out by calling 669-577-6800 or by email here.