Helping you find your deeper place within.
“What do I bring? In all my different forms of work, I bring an elder perspective – the understanding that the period of big loss you are managing is an opportunity for initiation into the next and higher iteration of your self. I offer a compassionate, yet strong, container in which to connect with the wisdom, guides, and tools already present in your own life and a broader range of tools to assist you in setting your feet, once again, someday in the future, on solid ground.”
Elizabeth Graves,
PhD, LCMHC-S, SD
Thank you for your interest in working with me. I look forward to learning more about you and your story.
If it helps to know a bit of my own story, I have been licensed since 2001 and worked in many settings including community counseling clinics, schools, inpatient psychiatric hospitals, and private practice. For ten years, I trained school and clinical mental health counselors as faculty at Appalachian State and WCU. My story began changing in 2012, however, when grief and loss initiated me over several painful years into the dubious band of the Bereaved. During this time, I companioned my mother through a prolonged struggle with dementia and eventually death, lost a closest friend to cancer, my father to Parkinson’s Disease, and a beloved professional colleague to violent death. Meanwhile, several of my closest friends allowed me to companion with them through their cancer journeys - and are alive and well today. Soon after followed the pandemic – more losses of friends and family – and most recently, Hurricane Helene, which has left our community broken hearted and our beloved mountains devasted. Certainly, this is a time of big collective grief.
What I am learning through this new chapter is how to ride waves of big grief and roll with the pummeling blows of varied losses by turning my face toward grief. This looks like moving grief through my body and lifestory with tears, song, breath, movement, story, art, ritual, meditation/contemplation, nature connection, and other intentional practices. Through this process, I have become an avid student, an apprentice, to grief and death – and as a result the way I live my life has transformed for the better. In fact, what I am learning in both my own life and in the lives of my clients is that turning one’s face toward loss and death much improves life – the way in which we live – indeed, it can transform a period of deep suffering into one of Initiation into new life.
Since 2020, it has been my privilege and honor to companion others in their own big life losses as they manage in an era of great collective losses too. Following completion of my death doula training, my advanced Grief Specialist certificate, and my Certificate in Thanatology, those who seek me out tend to be those who:
~are in big life transitions/initiations, or
~have lost/are losing the people most beloved to them, or
~have suffered multiple losses, or
~have lost adult children to sudden death, overdose, suicide, or
~are managing life-threatening or life-limiting illness themselves.
To see my full career vitae, click this link [embed vitae link here].
“Not only did I enjoy supervision with Elizabeth, but I've grown so much both personally and professionally that it has been an invaluable experience.”
— Clinical Supervision Client