Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between Grief Work Support and therapy?

Therapy is one of many valuable tools designed to diagnose and treat mental illnesses and disorders, but grief is neither an illness nor a disorder. It is a natural response to loss, change, and transition that deserves to be held and honored, not diagnosed or treated.

Therapists are only allowed to practice in states where they are licensed, and Grief Work Support can be offered anywhere.

While there are benefits to obtaining professional licenses and working with professionals who have them, there are also drawbacks and risks. A professional license is a contract with a governing body that influences treatment and care in ways that can compromise the safety, privacy, and freedom of both therapist and client. Similarly, licensed therapists can find themselves in relationships with insurance companies and other entities that protect their own bureaucratic and financial interests at the expense of both practitioners and clients.

While professional licensure grants access and credibility to some, it can also create barriers, enable surveillance, and otherwise undermine the nature and quality of professional relationships for others. It is helpful to ask ourselves what a license really guarantees, who or what licensure is intended to protect, who it is meant to exclude, and how the answers to these questions align with our own values.

Grief Work Support is not obligated to any interests but yours and can therefore center you and your experience at all times.

If the ability to report your practitioners to a licensing board is important to you, Grief Work Support is not the right fit for you.

Read more about nuances regarding licensure in the essay, “Therapists Are Also the Police: Sex Work, Social Work, and the Politics of Deservingness” by Ismatu Gwendolyn.

No.

The scope of Grief Work Support does include end-of-life companionship, death education and planning, ritual creation, and bereavement support, but people commonly find that the systemic, intersectional lens and embodied, non-pathologizing approach of Grief Work Support readily lend themselves to confronting and processing non-death losses, changes, and transitions, too.

Also, as a white person with no cultural, spiritual, or ancestral connection to the word doula and no membership to a community where the role, practices, and traditions of a doula originated or descend from, it feels inappropriate for me to use the term doula to describe myself. For a thoughtful examination of the linguistic and cultural significance of the word, I recommend, Why I Don’t Use The Word “Doula” by Èské Addams.

Covid-19 continues to kill and disable thousands of people each week, and it is only one of many airborne illnesses that present an existential threat to disabled, immunocompromised, chronically ill, and other medically vulnerable people. The ongoing pandemic has taught us how much better we can all do to protect ourselves and each other, and Grief Work Support is committed to practicing this kind of community care and remaining accessible to all.