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

12/30/2025

Simply put, grief rewires us.
It changes us.
It is the captain of our ship for a while.
It doesn’t wait for us to be ready. It doesn’t care that we have to go to work tomorrow, that people are watching, that we’re supposed to be holding it together by now.
It just arrives …in waves, in fragments, in the middle of ordinary moments that used to mean nothing and now mean everything.
Our brains keep reaching for someone who isn’t coming back. Our bodies keep bracing for a reunion that will never happen. And somewhere inside us, a version of ourselves that knew how to exist in their presence is still standing in the wreckage, trying to remember how the world used to make sense.

People will tell us it gets easier.
And, it does.
But not in the same ways.
It doesn’t disappear.
It doesn’t get quieter indefinitely.
It ebbs and flows.
It doesn’t stop mattering.
We just get stronger at carrying it. We learn to breathe around the ache. We discover that love doesn’t end when someone dies. It just changes and moves through us. Expresses itself through us.

And, that’s the work.
Not “moving on.”
Not “closure.”
Not finding some redemptive meaning in the unbearable.

And learning (slowly, unevenly, with more setbacks than breakthroughs) that we are strong enough to hold what we never thought we could.

The ache and the devotion.
Inseparable.
Ours to carry.

12/26/2025

Anticipating pain and discomfort can be so exhausting. We don’t talk enough about the residue that comes after holidays, and I get we still have NYE. So, it’s okay if you’re still in it, the frenetic flow of holiday energy. It’s understandable if you’re feeling exhausted, too.

Were you bracing for the impact of what these important days can remind us?

Bracing for the impact can look like:
Missing. Longing.
Shutting down.
Dread. Anxiety.
Depression.
Moving around to keep the feelings from rising to the surface.
Jumping into the deep end of re-freshed grief.
Leaning into the sadness.
Trying to honor them.
Remembering them aloud.
Rebuilding rituals in a new way.
Preserving old traditions within our new world.
(If we want, if we can).
Navigating obligations and overwhelm (& boundaries).
Hoping to make it through.
Unscathed. Undestroyed.
Trying to hold on to all we can.
And also, allow in life again.
It can be so hard.

This is grief.
And, it goes round and round a lot. It’s different for everyone in the way it visits and sits with us, sure, but it usually doesn’t miss a visit.

May the remnants of this season be gentle for you. Please don’t forget the vital parts of getting through these days, which includes your body—Rest. Movement. Hugs if you can. Sunshine. Water. Nourishment. Laughter (mine is brought on by cute animal videos these days). Getting back to basics during these times can help bring us back to feeling more connected to ourselves and our life now, a little at a time. But, it starts with our nervous system.

We can do the hard things, but that doesn’t mean those hard things didn’t nearly take everything out of us. For some, anticipating holiday grief can feel as exhausting as it did when we first endured our loss. We have to find ways to fill back up, reconnect to a sense of safety, curl up in the comfort of any love around us, or the love of our “person.” We get through these hardest days, somehow, but we have to acknowledge all it takes for us to get through….

Adding a request for a feeling of community & being in this together:
Drop a 🤍 if this has felt like any of your days recently. We are here together.

12/22/2025

Let’s be real, the holidays have a way of asking too much of us even in the best of circumstances, but when we are already carrying so much..? It’s overboard.

They ask us to be festive, while we’re absolutely exhausted and emotionally spent.
They as us to be present, while we’re missing someone and thinking of the past.
They ask us to be grateful, while our nervous systems are still bracing for all that’s happened, and the other shoes to drop, for our next huge loss, for some hard news.

If this week feels like something to endure rather than enjoy, just let it be that… just getting through.
We don’t need to wrap our grief in meaning before the year turns.
We don’t need a lesson, a silver lining, bright siding, or a version of ourselves that feels “better.”

Getting through the next week can look small.
Fewer plans. More pauses.
Stepping outside when it gets loud.
Leaving early without explaining.
Having a back up plan.
Letting the tears come without asking them to teach us anything.

As the new year approaches, remember this:
There is no deadline on healing.
No pressure to carry our loss more gracefully.
No requirement to enter January with clarity or strength.

There are times when the work is about staying alive inside a life that no longer looks the way it did.

Not every season offers renewal.
Some only ask that we remain.

Let’s remain, together. 🤍

12/19/2025

I’ve been talking a lot about the holidays this week,because so many people are struggling, or feeling overwhelmed this year, and I want you to know that you’re not alone…grief is thick in the air. Whether you have lost, are anticipating loss, or are feeling grief for countless suffering communities…

The holidays always seem to reopen the places where absence lives.
If this season feels sharp, isolating, or unbearably quiet beneath all the noise, this is grief. And, it’s allowed to breathe in this space. You’re carrying loss every single day in this world that keeps demanding positivity and cheer and celebration, even when your heart is flailing for anything to make sense, and for what will never return.
The before.

Go gently, as I will always remind you.
You’re not meant to perform cheer or gratitude or joy, just to survive the season with your tenderness intact.

And, come back here if you need a reminder that you’re not alone. 🤍

12/14/2025

Let’s talk about those mornings you wake up and your chest is already tight before you’ve opened your eyes.
Before a single thought has formed.
Before you’ve remembered what day it is or what happened years ago on a day just like it.
And you wonder why…

Your body knows before you do. It’s holding something your mind filed away, something you thought you’d processed, but grief doesn’t live only in memory. It lives in your nervous system, in the way your shoulders carry weight that has no name, in the exhaustion that no amount of sleep touches, in the irritability that appears on a Sunday, and you can’t figure out why.

Sometimes, grief comes around as a feeling you can’t locate. A heaviness. Your body bracing for impact but you don’t know what’s coming. This is implicit memory, the kind that doesn’t need you to consciously remember to make itself known.

Your body keeps time differently than your calendar does. It remembers rhythm, the particular quality of light, the shape of mornings you used to share, the hollow that December carries when someone’s missing.
This is why certain days knock you sideways before you even realize why.

When it hits without warning, in the grocery store, the middle of a meeting, sitting in traffic, here’s what you can do. Press your thumb firmly into your palm or press your feet into the floor. This gives your nervous system something solid to focus on.

Or, place one hand on your chest, one on your belly, even for just a few breaths. This tells your system someone is here, even if that someone is you. Lengthen your exhale, breathe in for four, out for six or eight. Your vagus nerve gets activated on the exhale, sending a signal that you’re not in danger right now.
Sometimes, just naming it quietly helps: “This is grief. It’s here. I’m okay.”

12/08/2025

After loss, there are times in the year that arrive already heavy and hard.
Marked not by what is happening, but by who is missing.

These are the days that ask us to slow our lives around the wound.
To simply ‘get through the day.’
To notice how memory lives in our body.
How love keeps time differently than calendars truly ever could.

Grief does not move in straight lines through the holidays (or days of meaning, or ever).
It comes in waves, pauses, swells, sudden collapses, and also, moments of steadiness.
And still, we show up.
Breath by breath.
Moment by moment.

We carry our different absences together, even when we are alone and separate. The shared weight of loss, the quiet nods between those who remember, those who “know”, the unspoken understanding of what it means to keep someone alive in memory…this connects us across time and space.

So many of us are carrying the same invisible weight, learning how to live alongside absence while honoring what mattered.

So many of us are bearing this invisible weight of grief, learning the impossible art of living beside the shape of what’s missing, while refusing to let what mattered fade.

This is what remembering truly looks like.
This is what endurance truly looks like.
This is what love sounds like in the vast and terrible quiet.
🤍

12/07/2025

Today is the day my mother left this world.
Pearl Harbor Day.
Another year gone.

I can say, the weight of her absence settles differently each year, but always settles like a stone I’ve learned to carry in my pocket. Living without her is a strange alchemy of ache and memory, of longing that lives beneath my skin, and love that refuses to fade, even as time stretches the distance between who I was when she was here, and who I’ve had to become without her.

For all of us, these hard days that arrive without their voice on the phone, the holidays with their chair empty, the death anniversaries that mark time in a way calendars never could, they ask something of us. They ask us to show up for our own breaking hearts, to honor the significance of what these dates once held, and what they hold now. We endure them not all at once, but one breath at a time, one moment survived and then the next.

We, as grievers, carry these absences together, even when we are alone. The shared weight of loss, the quiet nods between those who remember, the unspoken understanding of what it means to keep someone alive in memory- this connects us across time and space.

Each of us navigates the tender ache, the sudden grief quake, the pause that grief demands. We light candles on dates that matter. We speak their names when the calendar turns. We give ourselves permission to fall apart, and to somehow, impossibly, gather the pieces again.

There is no right way to move through these milestones, only our way, which looks like stumbling, grieving, remembering, surviving …one sacred, wistful moment at a time.

This morning, I allow myself to sit with the missing, to feel her absence, and to let memory wash over me in its raw, intricate beauty. It’s more love than sorrow In this moment …

Living without our people is learning the rhythm of missing, the gentle surrender to absence, and the quiet discovery of how deeply, impossibly, love endures, not despite the distance, but woven into every hard day that comes, every milestone that arrives changed, every moment we choose to honor what was, and still, what remains.

🤍
Gina Moffa, LCSW

12/04/2025

Hello! 👋 Allow me to re-introduce myself!

I’m Gina, the face behind this account! I am a trauma and grief therapist (LCSW), NYC-trained, NYC-rooted, and someone who has spent 21 years as very humbled traveling companion on some of the hardest emotional roads humans can travel.

🤓 A little more about my work:
I went to NYU for multiple graduate degrees, and have been a licensed therapist since 2004. My clinical work has spanned ages, cultures, identities, mental health challenges, and life stories , but trauma-informed care has always been the heartbeat of what I do.

I first specialized in trauma at the NYU International Trauma Studies Program in 2005, and very quickly realized something true and human: trauma and grief are sisters. I then began running grief groups in NYC. This began my journey into deeper clinical grief work + research. I’m so, so passionate about getting grief to be looked at differently, so grievers don’t feel so isolated, misunderstood, and so we can just do better for one another when it comes to loss.

📖 My writing:
I wrote Moving On Doesn’t Mean Letting Go: A Modern Guide to Navigating Loss (Hachette Balance, 2023). It’s part clinical guide, part personal story (including my own grief losing my mom), and my hope is that it offers warm companionship and guidance, as if you’re right across from me in my office.

And now, I’m deep in the writing of my second book, What Happened to Our Friendship? It’s a guide for navigating the grief, confusion, and powerful self-discovery that comes when a friendship ends. I’m excited about this one!

🙏🏻 My Gratitude
I always say, we are better together. And, I mean it.
I’m better because of you, too (ok, and emotional support snacks).
The experience of being witnessed and seen.
The authentic and honest caring.
Someone just ‘getting it’.
These things aren’t a given in grief.
So, when we do get that, our nervous system has the chance to find safety and a soft landing, even with pain and anxiety and exhaustion in tow.

All of that…all of YOU on various parts of your grief path, are deeply respected and valued here in this space.
Thank you SO much for being here. 🤍

📸:

12/01/2025

✨ Navigating Grief During the Holidays ✨
This coming Thursday I am co-hosting an intimate evening of conversation and community with grief specialist and great friend, Barri Leiner Grant, at the amazing in Bedford, NY.
We’d love for you to join us in person!

The holidays can be complicated. For a million reasons.
They can stir up old memories, magnify grief, and bring the ache of who or what is missing to the surface.
But, I also believe they can open space for tenderness, connection, and care when we gather together.

We’ll explore gentle, grounded ways to move through this season with presence, compassion, and honesty without forcing ourselves into the pressured ‘holiday script’.

📅 Thursday, December 4 | 6:30–8:00pm
📍 Bedford Books | 13 Court Rd, Bedford, NY
🎟️ Ticket includes light refreshments + a $20 store credit

My book will be available for sale and signing, and I’d really love to meet you.
Tickets are at the link in my stories and

Let’s hold space together. 🕯️

11/30/2025

Come close: let’s talk for real.
There is a grief we don’t seem to name.
It’s the grief of realizing you grew up without feeling like you “belonged”…
The grief of feeling like the world has room for everyone else, but not necessarily for you (not in the same way)…
The grief of wishing you had people who stayed, who showed up, who saw you, who didn’t make you earn love by disappearing parts of yourself.

And, when the holidays come, that grief just seems to get louder.
It presses against the stories we’re told about how life is ‘supposed to’ feel.
It reminds you of every moment you felt left out, silenced, or unseen.
It reminds you of the version of you who didn’t get to exist, or hid, because safety was never promised.

I hear this story a lot in my work this time of year.
A quiet achey grief of feeling like belonging feels far away.
If that’s where you are right now, I want to say this clearly:
Nothing about your grief is wrong.
Nothing about you is shameful.
I believe that your heart always knew something better was possible.

Some are grieving an unlived life.
Grieving the mother or father or family or friend or community or life never had.
Grieving the sense of “home”.

If the holidays are heavy for you, if the loneliness gets louder around everyone else’s joy, if you find yourself feeling like the outsider at every table, you’re not alone in that.

There are so many people walking around with this same quiet sadness.
So many learning to rebuild a life from the pieces given.
So many trying to imagine a future where their hearts aren’t always on the outside of everything.

So, if nobody has said it to you this season, I will.
You deserve safety.
You deserve love.
You deserve comfort.
You deserve to feel like you belong, because you do.
And, there is time to explore your inner self with compassion and build community and grow connections and become the person who chooses yourself the way others should have.

The holidays bring up so much nuance, so many layers of loss, I want to make sure everyone has a place to be seen here. Wishing a tender week ahead…if this post is not for you, do you have an encouraging word to share for someone who feels alone?🤍

11/26/2025

Hot take: I have to be honest…this week knocked me flat.
My body tapped out before my mind was willing to admit I was running on fumes. I know you’ve been there, too.

I felt sick, pulled in ten different directions, still trying to be “fine” because… life doesn’t stop for us when we need it to.

And, now this ‘holiday season’ is here, as if the world decided this was the perfect moment to hand us a script we are supposed to follow: feel grateful, feel festive, feel together. Are you feeling these things? If so, that’s good, too.

But, when grief is hitting us, when life feels too overwhelming, the holidays seem to amplify everything we’ve been trying to hold together. How they come with these unspoken expectations that if you’re not overflowing with gratitude, or hope, something must be wrong with you…like you’re missing some essential ingredient within yourself, because you see the truth of all the hard stuff around you.

In my book, I once said, “you don’t owe the world performance-level gratitude just because the calendar says it’s time to smile.”
You don’t have to pretend your body and/or soul isn’t exhausted in every possible way.
You don’t have to swallow your loneliness or your overwhelm, or anything else you feel, just to make someone else comfortable.” Enough.

Some years, the holidays collide with burnout, deep grief, hard experiences, or just feeling for the state of the world.
Some years, your body yells “stop” louder than any celebration around.
Some years, you’re just trying to catch your breath.

If you’re also feeling exhausted, grieving, fighting off something in your body (or your heart), unable to find the gratitude you’re “supposed” to have … oh man, you’re not alone. We don’t need to spend our precious energy on performative virtue…

Let this year look different if it needs to.
You don’t owe the world your gratitude.
You owe yourself care.
That’s it.

(Wishing you a gentle, tender holiday ahead whatever that looks like for you)…

11/24/2025

It’s okay if you’re not feeling grateful.
It’s okay if you’re struggling to just show up to life.
It’s okay if you just want to hide away for a little while.
I really get it.
And, you’re not alone.
You don’t have to pretend here.

I do better with real.
How about you?

Instead, how about we cut one another and ourselves a break, and just give space for all the messy to show up, too, if it needs to.
Take the pressure of a little— what is it all really for?

If you’re feeling grateful, feel it, allow it.
If you’re not, it’s okay- absolutely nothing is wrong with you.
You’re reacting to something within and around you that’s been really, really hard.
Gratitude and grief can live together sometimes, but they don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
It’s all fluid, our feelings.
I endorse authenticity— whatever it is.

I hope you are surrounded by caring and goodness.
Or, just peace.

I’m wishing you a very peaceful and gentle holiday week ahead, and hope you are surrounded with safe and loving people, pets, or a good movie that can bring some respite to your heart.

Any holiday week movies you like?
I’ll be rewatching The Family Stone this week for the millionth time.

Gina Moffa, LCSW

12/30/2025

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