Brandon Robbins, Counsellor

12/08/2025

Writing more about Grief. Making a potential harmful model and perhaps less harmful and more useful

12/08/2025

Got Curious about this idea of Journaling Therapy. I’ve journaled for my entire life. Why not- let’s try it. That said I may be hosting some circles where we gather and write. Exploring thoughts and emotions, while enjoying the experience of writing.

12/07/2025

The Grief of Losing a Career — Through the Six Needs of Mourning

Losing a career isn’t just losing a job.
It is losing a rhythm, a role, a way you introduced yourself at parties, a structure around your days, a source of pride, and—sometimes—your sense of self. Like any major loss, it leaves a deep vacancy that requires mourning. The Six Needs of Mourning offer a way to understand that inner terrain.

Below is how each need shows up when the loss you’re grieving is your *career*.

1. Acknowledge the Reality of the Loss

This is the moment when the truth sits down beside you and refuses to move.

Maybe you were laid off.
Maybe you burned out.
Maybe your field changed faster than you could keep up.
Maybe *you* changed.

A part of you may still wake up expecting old routines—checking emails, gearing up for meetings, slipping into the professional role you knew so well. Yet another part knows that door is closed. The first need of mourning is simply letting yourself say:

“It’s gone. This chapter really ended.”

This is where denial softens into awareness, where the imagined return fades, and where your mind starts to integrate a new reality that still feels foreign.

2. Feel the Pain of the Loss

Career grief is strangely invisible to others, so people often try to skip this step.
You might hear:

“You’ll find something better.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“You’re so talented—it’ll work out.”

None of that relieves the aching emptiness inside.

To feel the pain of losing a career is to sit with the sting of displacement—the humiliation, the fear, the sudden vacuum of purpose. It’s the sorrow of losing colleagues, routines, mastery, and the person you were inside that role.

This need invites you to stop being brave long enough to feel the hurt.
Not as weakness, but as part of healing.

3. Remember the Career That Was Lost

This means giving yourself permission to look back.

To remember the pride, the rituals, the successes.
To remember the version of you who thrived there—or struggled there.

You might revisit stories, photos, projects, achievements, even failures that shaped you.
You might grieve not just the job, but the dreams you built around it.

This isn’t dwelling. It is honoring.
It is saying: *“This mattered. I mattered in that space.”*

This is how the past is safely placed behind you rather than haunting you from the shadows.

4. Develop a New Self-Identity

Career loss often creates an identity crater.

If you always said, “I’m a nurse,” or “I’m an educator,” or “I’m an engineer,”
then who are you now?

This stage is disorienting. You’re not just adjusting your résumé—you’re adjusting your sense of self.
You’re learning who you are without the title, without the validation, without the familiar role.

This is where you begin experimenting with new identities, roles, and possibilities.
Where you mentally rearrange the rooms in your House of Wonder and ask:

“Who am I becoming?”

Identity rebuilding is slow, tender work—but it’s also the birthplace of reinvention.

5. Search for Meaning

Career loss often triggers existential questions:

Why did this happen?
What does this say about me?
What am I meant to do now?
Was that chapter preparing me for something else?

You begin searching for meaning—not necessarily answers, but meaning.
You start interpreting the loss through the lens of purpose, growth, and future alignment.

Sometimes the meaning is about boundaries you didn’t have.
Sometimes it’s about freedom you didn’t realize you needed.
Sometimes it’s about learning what you can no longer sacrifice.

Meaning-making is where the loss becomes a teacher rather than just a wound.

6. Receive Support From Others

This need is often the hardest in career grief because career losses are culturally minimized.

People understand a death.
They understand a breakup.
But the grief of losing a career often leaves you isolated—like you should be “fine” after a few days.

Receiving support here means letting others witness your transition:

Talking with a friend about your fears.
Letting a mentor help you rewrite your story.
Letting a community hold you while you rebuild confidence.
Letting yourself be seen as struggling—not as failing.

Support turns the solitary experience of loss into a shared experience of resilience.

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In Summary

Losing a career is a death of identity, routine, and imagined future.
The Six Needs of Mourning become a way to walk through that internal wreckage and rebuild with intention:

1. Reality — Accepting what ended
2. Pain — Allowing the hurt
3. Remembrance — Honoring the chapter
4. Identity — Reconstructing the self
5. Meaning — Understanding the “why”
6. Support — Letting yourself be held by others

12/07/2025

12/07/2025

The 5 Stages of Death & Dying as They Apply to Career Paths

Careers aren’t just jobs—they are identities, stories, futures we imagine into being. So when something in our career begins to die—a dream, a role, a plan, a version of who we thought we were—the emotional terrain mirrors grief. A career transition can feel like walking through the same rooms that the dying, or the grieving, pass through. Each room asks something of us. None are wrong. All are human.

Here is how those stages often unfold on the path of work.

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1. Denial — “This can’t be happening to *my* career.”

In the career house, denial looks like sitting in a dimly lit office trying to convince yourself everything is fine while the walls visibly crack.

* You tell yourself the job market will shift soon.
* You convince yourself your burnout is “just a phase.”
* You insist your role is stable, even as restructuring rumors grow louder.
* You keep a professional mask on while privately wondering how long you can keep pretending.

Denial protects you. It gives you time to adjust to the reality that something you built—a role you devoted years to—may be ending or transforming beyond recognition.

But denial also delays movement. You linger in a room that is slowly emptying.

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2. Anger — “Why is this happening? Who let this happen?”

When the truth becomes undeniable, anger cracks through.

Anger at the company.
Anger at your boss.
Anger at the system.
Anger at yourself—your choices, your loyalty, your blind spots.

In career terms, anger is the stage where you finally recognize that the story you were promised doesn’t match the one you’re living. And it feels unfair, because it *is* unfair. Hard work does not guarantee safety. Passion does not guarantee stability. Loyalty does not guarantee reciprocity.

Anger is the fire that melts the illusion that keeping your head down will protect you.
It’s uncomfortable—but it’s also mobilizing.

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3. Bargaining — “If I try harder, maybe I can save this.”

Bargaining in a career looks like scrambling to hold onto something that is already slipping away.

* You volunteer for more work you don’t want.
* You take on “stretch assignments” hoping visibility will save you.
* You accept compromises that drain you.
* You revise your résumé at 2 a.m. but don’t send it anywhere.
* You promise yourself you’ll stay just six more months… then six more.

This is the stage of trying to negotiate with the inevitable.
It’s the stage where you try to outrun the ending through sheer effort.

And yet:
Career deaths cannot be reversed by overworking.
Identity shifts cannot be postponed through people-pleasing.

Bargaining teaches you where your boundaries actually are.

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4. Depression — “I don’t know who I am if I’m not this.”

When bargaining no longer works, the weight settles.

Career depression is not weakness—it’s the collapse of a narrative you’ve lived inside for years.

Here, you might experience:

* A loss of professional confidence
* A sense of purposelessness
* Fear of starting over
* Shame for “failing” (even if you didn’t)
* Grief for the version of you that was tied to this work

This is often the quietest stage, and the most transformative.
Here, you sit with the truth you’ve been avoiding:
“The career you had is not coming back.”

But this stage also carries the seed of reinvention.
In the silence, something new begins to stir.

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5. Acceptance — “The ending is real… and so is the possibility.”**

Acceptance isn’t about liking the ending.
It’s about acknowledging reality without fighting it.

Acceptance in a career looks like:

* Updating your résumé with clarity rather than shame
* Recognizing your transferable skills
* Admitting your old path no longer fits
* Allowing curiosity to return
* Feeling a subtle peace replace the panic

Acceptance opens a door.
Not to the past, but to something new.
It’s the stage where you stop trying to resurrect the old career and begin preparing for the next chapter.

Acceptance is the moment you understand that careers, like lives, move in cycles—and that endings, painful as they are, create space for beginnings.

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A Final Note: Careers Die. Identities Evolve. You Survive.

Moving through the 5 stages of career grief is not linear. You might circle back. You might get stuck. You might sprint from denial to acceptance and then collapse into anger again.

But the truth remains:

Every career death makes room for a new professional life.

And each time you walk through these stages, your sense of purpose becomes sharper, wiser, and more your own.

12/06/2025

Here is a House of Wonder–style narrative, that weaves the “Six Needs of Mourning”(after Alan Wolfelt’s framework) into the architecture of an inner home. Each “need” becomes a room, a space of living practice rather than a stage—places you return to again and again, in no particular order, as grief reshapes the floorplan of your life.

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1. The Room of Acknowledgment

This is the first room you enter after loss—a space where reality gently echoes back to you.
The walls are bare at first, because truth needs room to breathe.
Here you speak the reality of the loss to yourself, again and again, until your voice stops shaking.
Some days the door is too heavy to open; other days you wander in without meaning to.
This room doesn’t rush you—it simply holds the fact that *something has changed that cannot be undone.*
It’s the room where denial softens into truth.

2. The Room of Feeling the Pain

Deeper in the house is a chamber where the air is thick with unspoken emotion.
Here, nothing is banished: sorrow, anger, confusion, numbness, relief, guilt—each has a place to sit.
It is not a punishment room; it is a room that demands honesty.
The floors creak under the weight of your uncried tears.
It is the least decorated room because feeling is raw, not curated.
But when you allow yourself to sit on its floor, you discover that the room is not infinite—
only deep enough to hold what must be felt so it doesn’t spill into every other room unnoticed.

3. The Memory Gallery

This room is lined with shelves, niches, soft-lit corners.
Here you tell the story of what was lost:
the good, the complicated, the unfinished.
Objects appear here on their own sometimes—
a sound, a dream, a stray scent that places itself on a shelf.
Nothing is static. The gallery rearranges itself as understanding deepens.
You return to this room not to stay in the past but to preserve the threads that tether meaning to what mattered.

4. The Conversation Chamber

Not everyone has access to this room, and that’s intentional.
This is where you speak of your grief—not to everyone, only to those you choose.
The space expands when you are witnessed
and contracts when you feel unsafe or unseen.
The acoustics are intentional:
your voice sounds exactly as it feels, unfiltered, uncorrected.
Here you learn that grief needs community
not to fix it
but to companion it.

5. The Rebuilding Workshop

Loss breaks more than hearts—it breaks systems, routines, and identities.
This room smells like sawdust and possibility.
Tools hang on the walls, most of them unfamiliar.
Here you learn how to live in a world reshaped by absence.
Some days you build only a single nail’s worth of progress.
Other days you dismantle something you once thought permanent.
This is the room where life is allowed to be redesigned—
not as a replacement for what was lost
but as an adaptation that honours it.

6. The Meaning Hearth

At the back of the house, often reached last, there is a room with a quiet fire.
This is the room where you sit with the long arc of the loss
and begin to understand what it is shaping in you.
Not the meaning *of* the loss—
but the meaning you are making *from* it.
Here, gratitude and sorrow share a table.
Here, legacy takes root.
This room is not visited every day; sometimes months pass without a flame.
But when you return, you notice the fire has never gone out—
only dimmed, waiting for you to sit beside it again.

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The Whole House of Mourning

The six rooms aren’t a sequence. They’re not a maze.
They’re a home—
one you inhabit for as long as grief insists.
The doors don’t lock. The rooms don’t disappear.
You move through them in spirals, in loops, in unexpected patterns.

Grief is not a journey with a finish line;
it is a home you learn to live in.
And over time, the house doesn’t get smaller— you grow big enough to live in all its rooms without fear.

12/06/2025

Here is a narrative-style exploration of the **dangers of the five stages of grief**—not as a psychological model, but as a *house you can get trapped in*, a place where grief’s ongoing impact can quietly begin to harm you if you stay in any room too long.

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The House of Unfinished Grief

Grief is supposed to be a journey, but sometimes it becomes a house—one you never meant to move into. Its five rooms were never meant to be lived in permanently, only walked through. Yet many people find themselves in one corner or another, long after the loss should have softened enough to set them free.

1. The Room of Denial

At first glance, it’s peaceful here. Everything looks just as it used to: familiar photographs untouched, routines preserved with museum-like precision, conversations rehearsed in your mind as if nothing has changed at all.

But denial has a cost.
Time behaves strangely in this room; it stops moving forward. You begin to forget the shape of the world outside. Life keeps calling from beyond the doorway—responsibilities, relationships, your own health—but the longer you ignore them, the dimmer that call becomes.

The danger of denial is not the pretending itself; it’s that it freezes the loss in its sharpest form. Because if you never admit what happened, the wound never even gets the chance to scar.

2. The Room of Anger

This room hums like an electrical current, buzzing under your ribs. Everything in it has edges: broken plates, slammed doors, memories that cut when you hold them.

Anger promises protection—*If I stay furious, I won’t feel the pain beneath it.*
But anger erodes.
It scorches relationships, burns trust, sets fire to the bridges you someday may need to cross back into community.

Lingering here too long can twist the loss into a weapon you turn against yourself or others. The danger of this room is how righteous it feels… and how easily it convinces you that isolation is the only safe place left.

3. The Room of Bargaining

This room is full of whispers.
*If only I had…*
*Maybe if I can just…*
*What if I undo this by becoming someone better, someone different, someone perfect?*

Bargaining is exhausting. It traps you in an endless loop of regret and negotiation with a universe that cannot answer.

The danger here is subtle: bargaining convinces you that the past is still changeable, giving you false control. But that “control” becomes a burden—one you carry long after your shoulders have given out. It turns grief inward, shaping it into guilt, and guilt is a weight that only grows heavier the longer you hold it.

4. The Room of Depression

This is the deepest room, with no windows.
It’s quiet. Too quiet.
Here, grief folds in on itself and becomes a kind of gravity—slowing your steps, dimming your curiosity, muting your appetite for anything that once made life bright.

The danger of this room is its emptiness.
Stay inside long enough and you begin to mistake it for your permanent home. You forget the sound of your own laughter. You forget that the world outside is still turning. You forget that this room was never meant to be a destination, only a place to pause and feel the heaviness you avoided earlier.

5. The Room of Acceptance

Acceptance is often painted as the exit, the triumphant “final stage.” But even this room has its shadows. Here, the danger is subtle: believing acceptance means *closure*—that you must stop missing, stop aching, stop remembering.

Accept too hard, and you may begin to minimize your own history.
Accept too quickly, and you skip the healing that comes only from slowing down and sitting with the pain.
Accept too rigidly, and you might shame yourself for moments when grief resurfaces—on anniversaries, in dreams, in unexpected flashes.

Acceptance is a doorway, not an erasure. But if you misunderstand it, you might try to bury the loss so deeply that it begins to shape your life from underground.

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The Harm of Staying Too Long

Grief becomes dangerous not because of the stages themselves, but because the stages can become *homes you never meant to inhabit*.

* Stay in **denial**, and your life stops moving.
* Stay in **anger**, and you scorch your connections.
* Stay in **bargaining**, and guilt becomes your companion.
* Stay in **depression**, and the world dims to a single color.
* Stay in **acceptance**, misunderstood, and you force yourself to “move on” rather than move forward.

The stages were meant to be stepping stones, not shackles.
And grief, when held too tightly or pushed too far away, begins to wear grooves into your life—shaping your choices, your relationships, your sense of self.

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The Way Out

There is no map for leaving this house, because no two people walk the same route. But every exit begins with the same realization:

You don’t have to live in any one room forever. You only have to keep walking.

12/04/2025

12/02/2025

It is the time of year when friends and loved ones are feeling loss, those who are loved and continues to spark in memory. Only they are not here. They continue to live in memories, happy moments living on in the past. It is a hope of mine to create ceremony, to bring those memories forward, to invites these ghosts of loved ones into present moment. Putting a candle next to their picture, and taking a moment to reflect on what they would tell me. Perhaps taking a walk on a clear winters night and looking up, finding them as the star shining as they think of me… These are just a few things I do to celebrate their memory.

12/02/2025

Ceremony

There are so many important moments in life—so many quiet shifts, subtle thresholds, and milestones that pass unnoticed. We tend to reserve ceremony for the big events: birthdays, weddings, christenings, graduations, and funerals. And while these are meaningful, I believe there are countless other moments that deserve witnessing.

Life needs ceremony.

There are moments when we could gather the people we love, moments when the simple act of naming an experience gives it weight. Moments when setting an intention, acknowledging a transition, or simply being seen—truly seen—can change everything.

I can’t decide what those moments are for you, or how they should be titled. Ceremony is personal. It belongs to the person who has lived the moment, walked the path, carried the change. But I believe deeply in celebrating the shifts we often pass by.

Perhaps you have come through a toxic marriage, and the finality of divorce is not just an ending, but a liberation—a chapter worth honoring. Perhaps you have outgrown an old version of yourself, and the shedding of that identity deserves a vigil or a small gathering to mark the transformation.

Breakups can be ceremonies.
Recoveries can be ceremonies.
A move into a new home—yes, even housewarmings that have fallen out of fashion—can be a ceremony.
The day your children leave the nest, opening a new life for them and a new kind of freedom for you, can be a ceremony.

There are so many milestones that go unnoticed. What would it be like to create a moment—to gather, to witness, to celebrate—and let it matter?

If you were to create ceremony for the thresholds in your life, what would it look like?
Would you light a candle? Burn an intention? Return to an old family tradition and reinterpret it? Take something outdated and reshape it into something modern and meaningful?

Ceremony is the art of acknowledging change. Sometimes it is grand. Sometimes it is simple. Sometimes it is a quiet moment alone, a whisper said only for yourself.

In my home, we celebrate the moons. Each full moon brings its own intention; each new moon, its own beginning. Sometimes we burn intentions, sometimes we light candles, and sometimes we simply reflect on the day, the month, the year. It is a practice of noticing—of honoring what is shifting around us and within us.

That is what we do in my house.
What you do in yours is entirely your own.

Perhaps you will find a spark of inspiration here. Perhaps you will design something that belongs uniquely to you and your family. Creating ceremony—taking time to witness the moments that matter to those under your roof—invites connection. It strengthens bonds. It reminds us that we are living, growing, changing beings, worthy of attention and care.

Ceremony is an invitation.
A pause.
A breath.
A way of saying: *This mattered. You matter. We are here together.*

12/02/2025

Cold New Moon

The Cold New Moon is the final moon of the year, and this time it arrives hand-in-hand with the winter solstice. If the full moon invites us to acknowledge our accomplishments, then perhaps this moon invites something quieter—something just as valuable. It asks us to create ceremony not only for the things we completed, but also for the intentions still unfinished. It invites us to celebrate the works in progress.

This moon asks us to look gently at what we could not get to. To bring a little light to the ideas we set down, the tasks that drifted, and the dreams that remain only half-formed. There were reasons, after all. Perhaps we lacked the energy or the interest. Perhaps life’s circumstances intervened. Perhaps some of these goals were never truly ours to begin with—expectations pressed upon us by others. This is a moment to reflect on such things, to examine the origins of our intentions. Why did these ideas exist at all? What called us to them? And what called us away?

It may be meaningful to sit with these questions, maybe even to choose one intention—a small one—to place on a mental table, acknowledging that you would like to give it more energy in the months ahead. As much as we wish to complete everything, some things inevitably fall through the cracks. Perhaps now is the time to notice them, to lift them up, and to reclaim their importance.

This pairing with the winter solstice is powerful. The solstice marks the turning of the year, a time when many of us set resolutions, quiet promises, or new directions. Together, the Cold New Moon and the solstice invite us to honor the slow work, the gradual unfolding, the long-form efforts that carry from one year into the next.

For me, I did not finish my story. It remains a draft—still rough, still unfinished. And yet, it is further along than it was last year. It moved. I moved. It may not be perfect, but there is growth in its pages, and that is worth celebrating. Works in progress deserve recognition too. We are works in progress.

So perhaps it is important to create ceremony around these unfinished accomplishments—the time, the energy, the spark of interest that keeps us returning to what matters. A simple ritual might be enough: lighting a candle for the things not yet done, offering warmth and light to the projects that are still forming. Maybe next year they will be further along. Maybe next year we will be too.

And perhaps this ceremony extends to sharing these intentions with those we love, bringing them into the circle of why our efforts matter, why these dreams are meaningful. They may choose to support us, to hold space, to offer their own warmth to our endeavors.

This is the gift of the Cold New Moon: a chance to honor not only who we have been this year, but who we are becoming—to celebrate the slow, patient work of unfolding.