Grief Counseling in Bergen County, NJ

In short: Grief is a normal human response, not a mental illness. Counseling will not make the loss smaller, but it can give you a place to put it, and help when grief starts to close down the rest of your life. We offer individual grief and loss counseling using cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and supportive therapy, in person in Bergen County or online anywhere in New Jersey.

Grief is what happens when you lose someone who mattered. It is not a disorder to be cured, and there is no correct schedule for it.

Columbia University’s Center for Prolonged Grief, based at the university’s School of Social Work, lists among the key things to know about grief that it is a natural response to loss which runs on no fixed timetable, and that grief “doesn’t go away completely, but we change our relationship to it.”

That second point is worth sitting with, because it reframes what counseling is for. The aim is not to get over the person or to finish grieving on schedule. The grief therapy tested in a randomized controlled trial published in JAMA was built on a model of coping in which rebuilding a satisfying life and adjusting to the loss run as two tracks, with attention alternating between them. That is the shape of the work here as well: making room for your own life without being asked to put the person down.

It is worth knowing that the National Institute of Mental Health does not list grief among its mental health conditions at all. Grief sits alongside the ordinary hard facts of being alive. That is exactly why so many people hesitate to ask for help with it: it can feel like you are making a medical problem out of something everyone goes through.

You are not. Counseling for grief is support, not treatment for an illness.

Most people move through grief with the help of the people already around them. Some people get stuck, and some people simply have nobody to talk to who can sit with it.

This is not a test and there is no score. It is a list of the reasons people tell us they finally called.

• Months have passed and daily life has not started to reopen
• You are avoiding places, people, photographs or dates connected to the loss
• You are functioning at work but coming apart when you are alone
• The people around you have moved on and you feel you cannot talk about it anymore
• The death was sudden, violent or one you witnessed
• You were caregiving for a long time and do not recognize life without that role
• Sleep, appetite or drinking has changed in a way that worries you
• You feel guilt about something you said, did, or did not do

If several of these sound familiar, that is reason enough to book a first session. It is not a diagnosis, and it does not commit you to anything.

We keep grief work simple and led by you. Some people want structure and skills. Some people want an hour a week where they do not have to manage anyone else’s feelings. Both are legitimate uses of the time.

CBT gives grief somewhere to go when it turns into thoughts that will not stop moving: the replay of a final conversation, the conviction that you should have noticed something sooner, the sense that letting the pain ease would be a betrayal. CBT works on those thought patterns and on the avoidance that grows around them, so that the reminders become bearable rather than off limits.

CBT is offered at Mental Care Plus by Emory Salley, LCSW, LCADC, ACS and Valeria Capozzi, LPC. Valeria’s practice includes grief work specifically, alongside CBT and solution focused approaches.

Not all grief work is a technique. Much of it is having a steady, confidential hour with someone who is not grieving the same person and who will not flinch. Supportive therapy does that, and psychoeducation fills in what almost nobody tells you: that grief comes in waves rather than stages, that it can arrive as physical exhaustion or fogginess, and that anniversaries and birthdays can undo months of progress for a week and then let go again.

A death rarely lands on one person alone. Families often grieve at different speeds and in different styles, and that mismatch can turn into conflict at the worst possible moment. Family therapy can give everyone the same room and the same rules for an hour. Individual therapy is available if you would rather start on your own.

Groups and individual sessions do different jobs, and some people use both. We also offer group therapy, though a grief specific group is not always running, so please ask what is currently available.

The first session is a conversation. You will be asked who died, when, what your life looked like before, and what is hardest right now. You will not be asked to tell the whole story in detail before you are ready. By the end you and your clinician will agree on what you want the sessions to do. You can bring a family member if that helps.

Grief often starts before the death. If you are caring for someone with a terminal illness or a dementia, you may already be mourning the person while still cooking their meals. This is called anticipatory grief, and it is real. Mayo Clinic’s overview of complicated grief notes that caregivers providing end of life care often benefit from counseling and support that helps them prepare both for the death and for the period after it.

When the illness finally ends, relief and grief often arrive together, and the relief is usually the harder of the two to admit to. Losing the caregiving role can also mean losing structure, purpose and daily contact all at once. That is a genuine second loss and it deserves attention in its own right.

An overdose, a suicide, an accident, a homicide, a death you found or witnessed. Sudden and violent losses tend to carry trauma symptoms on top of grief: intrusive images, hypervigilance, the body reacting before the mind catches up.

An unexpected or violent death is also a recognized risk factor for grief becoming complicated, which is part of why this kind of loss deserves attention early rather than late. If your loss carries trauma with it, our PTSD treatment page covers that side of the work in more detail.

Some losses are not treated as losses. A former spouse. A partner nobody knew about. A death by overdose or suicide that people avoid naming. A pregnancy loss. An estranged parent, with the grief tangled up in everything that went wrong between you. When the people around you do not recognize a loss, you grieve in private and end up apologizing for the grief itself. Counseling can be the one place where it does not have to be justified.

This distinction matters because the two are treated differently.

They overlap heavily in the first months, and that overlap is the reason people get it wrong. Sadness, loss of interest and guilt show up in both, so those symptoms will not tell them apart.

What does tell them apart is the shape and the subject of those feelings. The authors of the JAMA trial cited above set the two conditions side by side, and their comparison is worth reading closely. In depression the sad mood is pervasive; in grief the sadness attaches to missing one particular person. In depression interest and pleasure fall away broadly; in grief interest in memories of the person is usually preserved, and thinking about them can still bring pleasure. In depression the guilt is pervasive and the rumination is about your own past failures; in grief the guilt tends to settle on specific interactions with the person who died.

Those authors also state, drawing on earlier factor-analytic research, that complicated grief needs to be told apart from depression, and that its symptoms form a cluster distinct from both depression and anxiety. The trial itself then tested the practical consequence: a therapy built specifically for complicated grief produced a response rate of 51 percent, against 28 percent for interpersonal psychotherapy, which the same paper describes as an established and well studied treatment for depression. In other words, treating the depression is not automatically the same as treating the grief.

The two also genuinely co-occur, and someone can have both. If low mood has settled in and stayed, our depression treatment page may be the better starting point. Grief can also unsettle sleep and set off anxiety, and we have separate pages on insomnia, anxiety and panic attacks. Where a loss has forced a wider life upheaval, adjustment disorder may describe it more accurately.

For most people, grief slowly changes shape. For a minority it does not, and that pattern now has a name.

Columbia University’s Center for Prolonged Grief describes prolonged grief as “a persistent intense form of grief that is preoccupying and disruptive of everyday life for a prolonged period of time that is considered excessive by the bereaved person and/or their important social relationships.” Their shorthand for it is precise: prolonged grief is “when adapting is derailed.”

Mayo Clinic draws the practical line by time and function. Normal grief symptoms gradually begin to fade, while the symptoms of complicated grief linger or get worse, and it advises contacting a doctor or a mental health professional if intense grief and problems functioning have not improved at least one year after the death.

Children grieve in fragments. A ten year old can cry at breakfast and be absorbed in a game by lunchtime, and adults often read that as coping when it is simply how a younger nervous system handles something too large to hold continuously. Teenagers more often go quiet, or angry, or hurl themselves into friends and screens.

Practical signs worth attention: a slide in school performance, a return to younger behaviors, stomach aches and headaches with no medical cause, refusal to go to school, or a child taking on adult responsibility for a grieving parent.

Our clinicians work with children and adolescents. You can read more on our child and adolescent therapy and child and adolescent mental health services pages.

Later life grief carries a particular weight. Losses accumulate, a spouse of forty years takes most of a daily routine with them, and the friends who would once have helped may themselves be gone or unwell. Isolation does much of the damage here, and losing a support system is itself a recognized risk factor for grief becoming complicated.

Our senior mental health services page covers how we work with older adults, including sessions by telehealth when getting to an office is the obstacle.

Grief can bring thoughts of not wanting to be here, or of wanting to be with the person who died. That is more common than people admit, and it is worth saying out loud to someone.

• If you are in immediate danger, call 911.
• Call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
• Our emergency resources page lists further local and national options.

Please do not wait for a scheduled appointment if you are in crisis.

Grief makes leaving the house harder, and the early weeks are often the weeks you least want to drive anywhere. Telehealth sessions are available anywhere in New Jersey, which also helps if you are caregiving, if you have young children at home, or if you have moved in with family after a death. See our online therapy in New Jersey page for how it works.

Our office is at 560 Sylvan Ave, Suite 2115, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 07632, with office hours Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 18:00, and Saturday by appointment only.

We see clients from across Bergen County, in person and by telehealth:

We are in network with most major plans, so grief counseling is often covered as a standard outpatient behavioral health visit.

Coverage and out of pocket costs depend on your individual plan, so please check the details with your insurer.