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Gina Moffa, LCSW, 30 West 86th Street Suite 1F, New York, NY (2026)

04/26/2026

Many times as life moves forward… our grief can arrive as a pause.
A small, private stillness before you keep moving.
The moment between waking and remembering.
The way you almost say their name.
Showing up in ordinary moments without warning or permission.
A smell.
A season.
Someone who laughs the way they did.

This quiet private little phase of grief doesn’t get witnessed much. We carry quietly because life keeps going, because other people have moved on, because there’s no longer a clear occasion to fall apart.
So… we fold it up and take it with us everywhere.
And somehow, that becomes its own intimacy.
Our private conversation with someone the world has stopped talking about.

You are allowed to still be in this, okay?
On a random day.
Years later.
Without explanation.

Missing someone is not a phase you complete. Sometimes, it just becomes part of how you move through the world… a little more carefully, a little more aware of what can be here, and then not here.

Put a 🤍 if you’re carrying someone with you (or a missing part of yourself) today in the quiet...

04/20/2026

I can sound like a broken record sometimes when I say that grief is not only an emotional experience, it is a full body experience. It rewires the nervous system and reshapes the brain, too. And, going through traumatic experiences or living through relentless stress does the exact same.

Two of the most common, but least talked about effects of grief and trauma is brain fog and memory disruption. You might notice yourself forgetting appointments, misplacing objects, rereading the same page without being able to take in any of the information, or feeling like time itself has gone slippery. Days blur together. Moments of loss stay etched in sharp detail, while everything else seems to fade.

Though it can feel really upsetting, scary, and confusing, it is because your nervous system is, quite simply, overloaded. When loss activates the stress response, cortisol and adrenaline surge through the body.

Getting technical for a second: These chemicals heighten vigilance to keep you safe, but impair the hippocampus, the structure that helps you encode and retrieve memory. In grief, the brain is wired for survival, not for efficiency. And that certainly becomes apparent after significant loss…

The fog can feel embarrassing or scary, or worse, some people may think they have a serious medical diagnosis. Many people fear they are “going backward” or “losing themselves.” But, this altered state is an adaptive mechanism. Forgetting is the psyche’s way of sparing you from the unbearable and overwhelming re experiencing all at once. It thinks it’s doing a really good thing…

Over time, as the nervous system recalibrates, your memory begins to return. Not in this clean, linear fashion per se, and not exactly as it was before. Loss and trauma leave its fingerprint on cognition, just as it does on the heart. Certain memories may remain piercingly vivid, while others dissolve. This, too, is part of how the brain integrates trauma and attachment. What reads as fog is often the mind mid-reorganization is really sorting, shelving, and slowly making room.

The clearing comes. Not on a schedule, but it comes.

04/16/2026

C.S. Lewis said it so plainly.

If you have ever grieved a significant loss (of any kind), you know exactly what he means. You’ve felt it. That moment when someone sees you, or calls you, and you can feel this split-second calculation. “Do I say something?” “Do I look away?” “What if I make it worse?” And, you’re there, already hollowed out, hoping someone will either speak to your heart, or just show up.

Sometimes, they do. They show up with food, flowers, or the most loving intentions. They wrap their arms around you and say something careful, something kind that lands near your actual heart. And, you love them for trying. And, you may still feel utterly alone.

There are these huge gaps between being isolated, when people say nothing or don’t acknowledge our loss, being surrounded by people who may or may not really get our loss, or compare losses, and being fully met in our grief by somebody — not trying to rush or push or pressure, but simply witness. Words or not.

We are a grief-illiterate society, one that was never taught how to sit inside someone else’s pain without trying to solve it, soften it, or step around it entirely.

Most times, people mean well. They genuinely want to reach us, and we genuinely want to be reached. The miss isn’t indifference, but this gap left by what none of us were ever taught. We don’t know better, because we haven’t been shown better.

So, people reach for words they think are right, proper, when what you needed was just their presence. Their willingness to stay, and be real with you.
What grief actually asks of the people who love us is so simple and so rarely given: witness me. You don’t have to fix me. Don’t ask me look for the silver lining before I’m ready. Just stay. Pull up a chair, and please stay.

And, if you’re the one grieving, if you’re dimming yourself down so you don’t burden the people around you, carrying it quietly so no one has to be uncomfortable, I want you to know this:
Your pain deserves a room to live in..
You deserve someone who stays.
You can grieve in your own way.
You don’t have to always talk about your loss if you don’t want to, I just don’t want you to feel alone.
Pull up a chair.

04/13/2026

We often think of trauma and loss as this single devastating moment. It is also the accumulation…the thing that piles on top of what was already there, the ongoing thing you are witnessing, the slow erosion of feeling like the ground beneath you is steady. It shows up differently in each of us, individually and collectively, depending on what we’ve already been carrying.

As you know, I am a trauma and grief therapist. I have spent over two decades sitting inside other people’s hardest moments, holding the clinical (and human) language for what breaks a nervous system, and what begins to support it. And, I will tell you honestly: there are a lot of traumatized, grief-stricken people walking around right now, trying to keep going, pushing onward, without really knowing what’s happening to their nervous system.

Living in NYC, I’ve lived through some intense collective experiences, and carried my own sudden and not sudden significant losses. All of this settled in my body (before trauma therapy was more somatic). Here’s what I have come to know….my particular nervous system is soothed by the feeling of doing something. Preparing for the worst. Helping others. Of not being entirely without recourse. That is what regulation looks like for me.
It will look different for you. No one outside of you knows what lives within your body, or what will actually settle your body in heightened moments like we are living in.

The work is in acknowledging what you’re enduring, and learning to listen for what your body is asking for, and then offering it that as best you can right now. As I’ve said in my book, our grief and body has its own rhythms. It needs us to learn them.

If you care about what’s happening in the world, thank you, and struggling to carry your own grief and trauma, and also be a part of the good, can take a real toll.

So, for today, I simply wish you peace. I wish you moments of genuine safety in your body. I hope you find or have good people, whether that is a therapist, a community, a friend who gets it, someone who can sit inside the truth with you. I hope you move your body gently, in whatever way feels like yours.
You aren’t alone…

04/07/2026

I was sitting with someone recently, and we were trying to put words to this feeling we’ve both been carrying. This sensation of dropping. Of bracing. Of moving fast toward something we can’t see, and feeling exhausted and scared, and so angry, and also being expected to function just like normal.

It made me think about what I call the “griefall” in my book… that space between a before and an after, when everything that felt certain has cracked open, and you are now free falling somewhere in the middle of them.

It happens in loss. In trauma. In the dread of anticipating something painful coming. And, it happens collectively, too…when you look around at the world and try to remember what it felt like before the daily weight of war and chaos and fear and gaslighting and destruction became something you just woke up to, witnessed, and carried.

Where was your before? What did it feel like in your body? What do you miss? Sometimes, I have to work harder to remember the way it felt in my “before”…

And, so many of us are in this free-fall right now, in ways that are deeply personal, and in ways that are shared.

But, our nervous systems are working hard trying to find solid ground in the middle of something that has none yet.It takes time. It takes more energy than anyone tells you. And it can make even ordinary days feel like you’re moving through water, or feeling disconnected or languishing.

Somewhere inside the fall, even when we are hollowed out and exhausted, and have nothing left that feels like hope, something in us refuses. Refuses to stop loving. Refuses to look away from what matters. Refuses to let the weight of everything we’ve lost convince us that nothing is worth fighting for anymore.

That refusal is the part of us that has looked at so much of our own devastating losses, at a world coming apart at the seams, at the unsurvivable things we have somehow survived, and has decided, quietly, with no guarantee, to stay.
To fight.
To care.
To keep going.
And, we must.

03/31/2026

Many years ago, when I worked as a clinical director in substance use treatment, I always wondered why in the ‘Serenity Prayer’, grief was never mentioned. Most of what we endure, overcome, or accept, comes with deep grief in some way. It’s the unnamed bridge we must cross. You cannot fully accept what you’ve lost without moving through the grief of it.

This applies to all our losses.

And, there’s a very nuanced kind of grief that lives in the space between fighting and accepting. It doesn’t always come with only tears or rage, or any fanfare, really. It can move more quietly within us, like fog settling into valleys before dawn.

Sure, we call it “acceptance”, but I understand that word feels too clean, too final… because acceptance isn’t a destination you arrive at once and stay forever.
It’s something you do again and again, in different rooms of your life, on different days, wearing different versions of yourself.

The grief of accepting things you cannot change, is about the monumental strength required to stop breaking yourself against immovable things. To release your grip on the rope you’ve been pulling for months, years, maybe a lifetime. Your hands are tired. Your heart is tired.

Here’s what they don’t tell you: accepting what you cannot change doesn’t mean you stop wishing you could have. It means you’re finally brave (maybe exhausted) enough to redirect your precious energy toward what can still grow.
Toward what still asks for your attention, tending to.
Toward your own healing.
This kind of grief is sacred.
And so many of us are feeling this every day, with collective + individual losses.
It’s hard.
Some doors close.
Some situations we just can’t change.
Some people and things stay exactly who and what they are.
Some situations don’t have a resolution we may wish for.
But, it doesn’t mean you have to carry the weight, and pain of it alone.

This instagram post is only a jumping off point in exploring the possibility that you can heal/work through/understand differently, something that’s held you in a painful place for far too long. And, that’s a really powerful new path to explore, with your own pace, in your own time…

🤍, Gina

03/18/2026

I was sitting with a client this week and we were talking about the strangeness of the passing of time.
About how we don’t really have a word for what that feels like. The closest we could get was “homesickness”. Except we’re not missing a place per se.
We’re missing whole lives we used to live inside.
Whole versions of ourselves we had to leave behind just by the act of keeping going.
Whole versions of this collective world that used to feel less out of total control on a daily basis.
“Remember when…”

We both just sat with that for a moment, because sometimes, that’s all you can do when the language runs out. And the truth is, sometimes I think the feeling knows more than the words do anyway.

That’s the thing about nostalgia. We don’t have many words that can carry what it actually feels like in the body. The way it settles into our chest slowly, warm and heavy. The way it’s somehow beautiful and unbearable at the same time. The way we go quiet in the middle of a conversation, because a song came on, or the light shifted, and suddenly we’re somewhere between here and gone.

We feel it all the time, and we almost never name it for what it is. And lately, I am even feeling nostalgic for a future world that feels gone. Less hopeful. Grieving in the future tense.

Most grief announces itself.
It has a shape, a date, a reason.
But, nostalgia slips in through the back.
And we let it, because it feels too soft, too pretty, too private to call loss.
We romanticize it instead of grieving it.
We call it bittersweet, and move on.
But, we have been mourning inside of it all along.
We just never gave ourselves permission to call it that.

03/11/2026

There is so much happening inside us at any given moment. So much being carried quietly, bravely, imperfectly.
If you’re overwhelmed and exhausted by it all, please know that nothing is wrong with you for taking in what feels like too much and needing to take care of yourself.

The hardest thing sometimes. is not the pain itself. It is learning to be with the pain inside and all around us, and still come home to our body.
To rest when possible.
To find the small beautiful thing in the ordinary day.
To look away when we have to, without guilt, and look back when we are ready.
To hold reality in one hand, hope in the other,and not drop either one.

I am just here to witness how much we are all carrying. The grief and the years of horrific headlines and the anniversaries and the ordinary Wednesday, that somehow contains all of it at once.

And, inside all of that, we still have to eat something. Rest our bodies. Notice the light through the window. Step away from what is too heavy until we can hold it again.
That is the heart of it.
That is the whole complicated, exhausting, sacred work of being alive right now.

03/04/2026

We are at war externally, with a world that is increasingly volatile and fragile.
And internally, with old wounds, unfinished losses, inherited fear, and the quiet pressure to keep functioning as if none of it is happening.

We are at war…
With instability. With uncertainty. With grief that keeps shape-shifting.
With opposing facts. Differing beliefs systems and values. With headlines. With history. With the ghosts in our own nervous systems.

There is so much exhaustion. So much overwhelm.
This is what prolonged stress does to a body.
This is what layered trauma does to a psyche.
This is what chronic vigilance costs.

Trauma asks the body to brace.
Grief asks the heart to ache.
Your body is not a machine built for nonstop output in the face of nonstop threat.
It is an organism wired for cycles: activation and rest, connection and repair.

The work right now is not perfection.
It is preservation.
Rest.
It is remembering to put down the phone sometimes.
To drink water.
To unclench your hands.
To take one real breath.
To let yourself be impacted, without shaming yourself for being impacted.
We are living through a lot.

There aren’t neat answers for living in complex times.
There isn’t a five-step plan for existing inside uncertainty.

There is only endurance.
Endurance does not mean becoming hard.
It means learning how to stay steady…psychologically, emotionally, relationally, without abandoning your own humanity.

And, we must remember that loss is not just an event, it is a terrain we must navigate every moment of the day.
And, our real steadiness is built while we’re moving.

02/26/2026

I’ve been quieter here lately.
Sometimes, the work doesn’t come with the proper language attached. It just comes with the doing. With showing up. With putting one foot in front of the other in the dark.
I’ve been in that place, doing the work. Living inside it, rather than posting about it. And, for a while, there simply haven’t words.
But, I’m here, finding my way back to this community that means so much to me.

Lately more often than ever, I’ve been hearing the same question in my sessions, in my communities, and honestly, in my own heart: “What is the point?”

I want to be clear that I’m not opening this up for judgment or negative discourse.
This is one of the most vulnerable, most human, most existentially honest questions a person can ask, when they feel burnt out, outraged with no where to put it, depleted beyond language, and deeply, deeply grief stricken. The question itself reaches into the deepest part of our being, and I think it deserves to be spoken out loud rather than carried in silence.

I don’t have your specific answer to the question…though I do hope some of the information I wrote in the slides can make you feel validated and seen.

I know what I come back to, every time, in the therapy room, and in my own life, when I hear, what’s the point?

The point is… each other.

Connection is not a luxury or a nice idea.
It is biological.
It is regulatory.
It is the thing that has always gotten human beings through the unsurvivable.
We remember who we are when we are tenderly witnessed.
We find our strength when we are not alone. We can do the hardest things when we feel safe enough to fall apart in the presence of someone who will stay.
So, if you’re in that flat, heavy, “what’s-the-point” place right now, I see you. And, I am so grateful you’re here, and we are connected.

Heart to heart, Gina.

02/12/2026

Perhaps some of the deepest, most ignored grief is the one we carry for our former selves…the ones who existed before the breaking, who didn’t hold so much grief, anger, fear, exhaustion, and sorrow. The self we knew has been marked by what happened, and it can feel like we are waking up in a new world without a map.
But, we see clearer now.

The former selves who belonged to a world that no longer waits for us, or promises us that beautiful illusion that we were ok.

When the nervous system endures or witnesses what feels unbearable, parts of us are forced to reorganize.
Some parts go quiet, others rise to the surface, and we’re left wondering who we are now and how to move through life without betraying what we’re living through.

We know we cannot go back.
We can only go forward, gathering strength, shedding what or who no longer fits or works, bearing witness, and building new paths with hands that remember the old roads that got us here. We build together.

Gina Moffa, LCSW

04/26/2026

04/20/2026

04/16/2026

04/13/2026

04/07/2026

03/31/2026

03/18/2026

03/11/2026

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02/26/2026

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