Why Talk Therapy Isn't Enough for Grief

We've been told that grief is something you talk through, that if you find the right therapist, the right words, the right framework, you'll get to the other side of it. Teresa Renzetti has spent 25 years watching that not be enough.

As a full-spectrum death doula, somatic grief walker and bodywork therapist, Teresa works across the whole spectrum of loss: anticipated deaths, sudden deaths, stillbirths, suicide, and the grief that never gets named at all. The grief of years spent not being safe enough to be yourself. The grief of a complex relationship with someone who caused harm and then died. The grief that has been frozen in the body since 1997 and still has not moved.

In this conversation, Teresa talks about why grief is a body experience rather than a cognitive one, why the nervous system gets stuck in shock, and what it actually takes to thaw out.