Grief Counselling in Toronto Doctoral-Level Psychological Care

Grief counselling at Laksman Doell Psychology is delivered by doctoral-level registered psychologists, both in person at our office in the Annex neighbourhood of Toronto and virtually across Ontario.

What Grief Looks Like

“Grief is messy. No one can tell you what you should be feeling, there is no predictable order to the stages that we progress through, and we cannot predict how long it will take.”

Grief does not follow rules, and it does not need to. It can show up as intense sadness, as anger, as numbness, as exhaustion, as relief, and sometimes it can show up as all of those within the same hour. It can be linear for a week and circular for a year. It can hit you in the grocery store. It can lift for an afternoon and come back at three in the morning. You do not need to be experiencing grief in any particular way in order to be doing it right.

We grieve people who have died. We also grieve relationships that have ended, careers that have closed, the bodies we used to have, the futures we expected, and the people who are still alive but who no longer present as the version of themselves that we once knew and loved. Anticipatory grief, mourning someone who is still here, or a loss that is yet to come, is one of the most underrecognized forms of this work, and one of the heaviest.

Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a process to be moved through, with whatever pace and shape it takes for you. The stages that many people grew up hearing about were never meant to be a checklist. They were meant to describe a range of experiences. Most people move through grief in loops, not in lines, and that is normal. Whatever you are feeling, in whatever order, is information about what you have lost and what you loved. The key is to allow for space to both acknowledge and process the emotions that accompany all aspects of your experience of loss.

Some people come to grief counselling within weeks of a loss. Some come a year, three years, ten years later, because something cracked open, or the grief that they thought they had moved through has come back in a new form. There is no late. There is no early. There is only here.

If you are reading this

You may not be sure what you need, but something brought you here…

Someone you love has died, and the people around you expect you to be moving through it on a schedule that the grief does not recognize. You are tired of the well-meaning timelines. You need somewhere that you can be honest.
The relationship is over, or the body you used to have is gone, or the future you expected is no longer possible. The grief is real and it does not have a category. People keep telling you to focus on the bright side. You are looking for somewhere that will let you actually feel what you are feeling.
The person you love is still alive and is no longer who they were. The illness, the cognitive change, the long and slow shift. You are grieving them while still sitting next to them. No one teaches you what to call this, and no one prepares you for how lonely it is.
Someone you love died by suicide. And alongside the grief, there is a particular weight that almost no one talks about. The questions that won’t stop, the guilt, the anger. The shame that makes it hard to tell people what happened. The way the loss keeps circling back to why, and the fact that there may never be a satisfying answer. This kind of grief needs its own kind of room.

This is what has brought you here. And you are in the right place.

Grief counselling in Toronto

The facets of grief that we work with:

At Laksman Doell Psychology, we recognize that grief does not need to be solved. It needs to be witnessed, and supported, and given room. That is what this work is built to do.

Our doctoral-level psychologists work with individuals to help them move though the various facets and types of grief, including:

Acceptance and Acknowledgement of Loss

Sometimes the hardest part of grief can be acknowledging, both intellectually and emotionally, all that our losses entail. What often begins as a theoretical acceptance, can feel increasingly complicated as we encounter the loss over and over again, in unexpected ways, as we move through our daily lives.

Allowing Space to Process Pain

We may have evolved to move away from aversive experiences, but turning away from grief is not that easy. The sadness, anger, guilt, fear, regret and loneliness have a way of finding us, and unless we can allow space for them, and space to process the underlying needs that they each entail, they have a way of sticking around.

Adjusting to Life After Loss

Navigating the practical adjustments to our daily lives, the way that we move through the world, the things that we do, the way that we see ourselves and our identity, and the roles that we play for others, is a complex and ongoing part of the journey that grief entails.

Remembrance and Connection

One of the more underappreciated facets of grief involves recognition of the complex task of balancing loss with growth. That is, finding ways to carry both the memory and the emotional connection to what has been lost, while simultaneously moving ahead, living your life, and allowing space for new experiences and relationships.

Meaning Making and Growth

Grief changes us. Not always in the ways we would have chosen, and not on any timeline we can predict. But for many people, loss eventually opens questions about meaning, identity, values, and what kind of life they want to build from here. This is not about silver linings. It is about the slow, sometimes surprising process of understanding who you are now, and what you want to carry forward.

Anticipatory Grief

Anticipatory grief is the complex array of emotions that occurs when we are mourning someone who is still here, or a loss that is yet to come. It frequently marks the emotional landscape of both individuals who are facing their own decline and the caregivers and family members who are trying to stay emotionally attached to their loved one while simultaneously preparing to let them go.

Our Approach

Treatment that starts with understanding you.

We work with adults through every kind of loss, using evidence-based approaches and the depth of our clinical and health psychology training. The psychologists at our practice have spent years sitting with people in the most tender of territories. We bring the rigour and the steadiness that this work requires. We work with anticipatory grief, disenfranchised grief, and the type of complicated grief that sometimes leaves people feeling trapped in overwhelming and unending sorrow.

The work is collaborative. We follow your pace. We do not impose stages on you, and we will not tell you what you should be feeling by month three. We will help you to understand what is underneath what you are feeling, what is being asked of you by this loss, what you need to put down, what you may want to carry forward, and what kind of life can be built around the shape that this loss has left. It is about building the capacity to carry the loss without letting it carry you.

Our work is integrative and evidence-based. The psychologists at Laksman Doell draw on approaches including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT), and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), applying each with clinical judgement and attention to where a person is in their grief. We understand that grief is not one task but many, unfolding across time and across the different domains of a person’s life. We follow the work, not a protocol.

The work that individuals are looking to do often falls alongside the grief itself. In making sense of the relationship that was lost, including the parts that were complicated, the parts that were unfinished, and the parts that the world will not let you talk about. In working with the secondary losses that grief brings, the rituals that no longer fit, the holidays that have to be re-imagined, and the role that you played in someone’s life that no longer has a place to go.

OUR DIFFERENCE

Specialist training.
Private practice access.

Grief counselling at Laksman Doell Psychology is delivered by doctoral-level psychologists who are registered with, or working toward registration with, the College of Psychologists and Behaviour Analysts of Ontario (CPBAO). We work with grief in all of its forms, including the kinds that no one around you may be naming. Our team has trained at sites including, but not limited to, the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Sunnybrook Health Science Centre, Toronto General, St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), the Nova Scotia Health Authority, Alberta Health Services, North York General, Cleveland Clinic Canada, and the University of Toronto. Many of our psychologists have also completed specialized grief training, including An Integrative Approach to Working with Grief and Loss, a CPA-approved continuing education program grounded in evidence-based practice, as well as training in the Grief Recovery Method. We don’t just treat grief; we study it, train in it, and sit with it.

We also have specific clinical experience with losses that often go underrecognized or unsupported: suicide bereavement, reproductive and infant loss, grief within couples navigating loss together, grief in the context of serious illness, and loss that accumulates over time across multiple bereavements. If your loss doesn’t fit a tidy category, you are not alone, and you are not in the wrong place.

Part of what distinguishes our work is clinical rigor around assessment. We know that grief can look like depression, and that depression can hide inside grief. We know when prolonged grief has crossed into something that has a name and a treatment. We know how to tell the difference, and we know how to treat both. That precision matters when you are trying to figure out why you are not getting better.

If you are reading this in the middle of a hard chapter, we are sorry that you are, and we want you to know that you don’t have to navigate this all on your own. Sessions are available in person at 27 Prince Arthur Avenue in the Annex neighbourhood of Toronto, or virtually across Ontario via PHIPA-compliant video. All services are available virtually to any Ontario resident. No referral required.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How long does grief normally last?

It depends, and grief does not run on a clock. It does not follow the stages in order, and it does not end on a schedule. Most people move through it in spirals, not straight lines, and the spirals tend to get smaller and less frequent over time. But that is not the same as finished. What changes is not that grief disappears. What changes is that life grows around it. The loss becomes something you carry rather than something that carries you. How long that takes depends on who you are, what you lost, what support you have, and a hundred other factors that no one can predict from the outside. If you are worried that you are taking too long, you almost certainly are not. And if you feel stuck, that is worth paying attention to.

How do I get over a significant loss?

You don’t get over it. That framing sets people up to feel like they are failing when the loss is still with them months or years later. What you do instead is find a way to integrate it. The goal of grief is not to return to who you were before. That person existed in a world where this loss had not happened. The goal is to build a life that has room for the loss, that carries the memory and the connection forward, and that does not require you to pretend the loss did not reshape you. That is different work than getting over something. It is harder in some ways and more honest in others. If you are struggling to find your footing, it helps to have someone alongside you who understands what that work actually involves.

How do I support someone who is grieving?

The instinct most people have is to try to fix it. To say something that will make it better, or to redirect attention toward the positive, or to remind the person that things could be worse, or that time heals. We get it. Watching someone you love in pain is unbearable. But most of those instincts, however well-meaning, land as pressure. What grieving people need most is not to be talked out of their grief. They need to feel less alone in it. That means showing up. Sitting with the discomfort rather than filling it with words. Asking what they need rather than assuming. Saying the name of the person who died. Bringing meals. Offering to help with specific things rather than a general “let me know if I can do anything.” And doing all of it more than once, weeks and months after the loss, when most other people have moved on and the person grieving still hasn’t.

Is what I’m feeling normal?

Almost certainly. Grief shows up across every dimension of who we are. Emotionally, it can look like sadness, anger, guilt, anxiety, loneliness, shock, numbness, relief, or some combination of all of them, sometimes within the same hour. Physically, it can settle in the body as fatigue, chest tightness, disrupted sleep, appetite changes, or a lowered immune system. It can affect your concentration, your memory, and your sense of what is real. It can make you withdraw from people, or reach for them more desperately than usual. It can make you dream about the person you lost, or avoid any reminder of them. All of it is grief. None of it means you are doing it wrong. If you are questioning whether what you are experiencing is normal, that question itself is worth bringing into a room with someone who knows how to help you answer it.

What is the difference between grief and depression?

They can look very similar from the inside, and that is part of what makes this hard. Both involve deep sadness, withdrawal, difficulty functioning, and a sense that the world has lost some of its colour. But they are different in ways that matter for treatment. Grief tends to stay connected to the loss itself. The sadness comes in waves. There are still moments of relief,and even connection. The low feelings are usually tied to reminders of what you have lost, rather than a flat, unrelenting heaviness that pervades everything. Depression, on the other hand, tends to be more pervasive and persistent. It often comes with a fundamental erosion of self-worth, a sense of hopelessness that has no clear object, and an inability to be consoled. Grief can also trigger or worsen depression, which means that the two can exist at the same time. This is exactly the kind of distinction that benefits from a trained clinical eye. If you are not sure which one you are in, that is a good reason to come and talk to someone who can help you figure it out.

What is complicated grief, and how do I know if I have it?

Most people, given time and support, find a way to carry their grief. It doesn’t disappear, but it becomes integrated into their life rather than consuming it. Complicated grief, which clinicians also call Prolonged Grief Disorder, is what happens when that process gets stuck. The loss stays as raw and overwhelming as it was in the early days. Daily functioning becomes genuinely difficult. The preoccupation with the person who died doesn’t ease with time. You may find yourself avoiding anything that reminds you of them, or unable to stop thinking about the circumstances of their death. Complicated grief is not a character flaw or a sign that you loved too much. It is a clinical condition with effective treatments, and it responds well to the right kind of help. Clinically, the threshold is around a year — if you are more than twelve months out from the loss and you still feel as though you cannot move, that is worth paying attention to. You don’t have to stay there.

Do I need a referral for grief counselling in Toronto?

No. You can contact us directly. No referral from a physician or psychiatrist is required.

Is grief counselling at your practice covered by OHIP?

Private practice services are not covered by OHIP. Coverage may be available through extended health benefits, as many plans cover the services of a registered psychologist. We recommend confirming with your provider before commencing treatment.

Can I be seen virtually?

Yes. All services are available virtually via PHIPA-compliant video for any Ontario resident.

Life is complicated. We give you clarity.

The first step is a brief consultation to help understand what you are looking for. Email us at [email protected] or complete our contact form online.