Gina Moffa, LCSW

Gina Moffa, LCSW I am a NYC based trauma-informed grief therapist and author of Moving On Doesn’t Mean Letting Go

I am a NYC based psychotherapist and consultant specializing in grief and loss, situational depression and anxiety, life transitions, and complex trauma.

Perhaps some of the deepest, most ignored grief is the one we carry for our former selves…the ones who existed before th...
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.

So this is just me saying: I see you. I’m right here with you. And, on the days when you can’t show up in your own way, ...
02/10/2026

So this is just me saying: I see you. I’m right here with you. And, on the days when you can’t show up in your own way, when you can’t witness anymore pain, when you can’t even think straight, when all you can do is survive- try to rest, refill, restore. Taking care of yourself is really important… it’s how we each make it through.

We need you here, and that means you have to care for your body, mind, and spirit, along the way.
There is much grief to talk about … and we will.

These days in grief, our body becomes a house of waiting…heart keeping vigil for the next fracture, mind circling the sa...
02/05/2026

These days in grief, our body becomes a house of waiting…heart keeping vigil for the next fracture, mind circling the same impossible-to-comprehend facts.
Some days, you’re so alive to the pain you can’t stop your voice from screaming out.
Other days, you’re so far gone, you forget you have one.
And sleep, when it comes, isn’t rest, just a different kind of dark, where the loss finds new ways to say its name.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The things that once felt certain
are gone.
The floor.
The map.
The rules we thought existed.
The promise that tomorrow would resemble today
in any recognizable way.
Empathy.

Yes, everything that felt certain
is gone.
So, if we look steady,
know that steadiness is labor.
If we are momentarily silent,
it’s because there is nowhere for the sounds to go.
If we are angry,
it’s because something sacred has been taken.
If we seem distant,
it’s because we’re holding ourselves together with threads you cannot see.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

But, we are still here,
grieving, in so many layers
and, saying their names
bearing witness,
unbroken in the one place that matters most:
Our insistence
that this is not the end.
It is not the end.

That fierce, enduring hope, even when it seems weak, even when it has nowhere safe to land, refuses to go silent.

We don’t honor history by acknowledging it once a year. We honor it by letting it change how we live, how we love, and h...
02/02/2026

We don’t honor history by acknowledging it once a year. We honor it by letting it change how we live, how we love, and how we treat one another - every single day.

This month, let’s go deeper than words.

Hi all, For anybody who is feeling overwhelmed and exhausted and feeling helpless, my amazing colleagues and I are goin...
01/28/2026

Hi all,
 For anybody who is feeling overwhelmed and exhausted and feeling helpless, my amazing colleagues and I are going to be hosting a free gathering tonight to offer space, togetherness, and tools to navigate these uncertain times.

It is not to fix anything, but simply to be together and tend to our nervous system, and our hearts.

If you would like to join, it is 7 PM Eastern standard time at the link below. 🤍

Link: https://meet.google.com/xfm-hsmj-tzz

Some of you will scroll past this. And, I get it. We’re all so tired of being told how hard things are, how much we’re c...
01/27/2026

Some of you will scroll past this. And, I get it.
We’re all so tired of being told how hard things are, how much we’re carrying, how overwhelmed we must be.
Why another stupid carousel post …
I just wanna acknowledge how much is being held and carried right now, is all.

With everything happening in the world right now, everything that’s been happening in the world for a long time, with relentless bad news, senseless public losses, the significant personal losses we’re carrying privately, the grief that doesn’t have a clear shape, the fear that lives just beneath the surface of our daily functioning, I just want to say this:

Your body may be carrying a lot right now.
Maybe too much.
Fear. Numbness. Exhaustion. Rage. Irritability. Sadness. Feeling untethered — well, grief.
All of that comes with physical manifestations you may or may not be experiencing right now.

Spending our days in people’s pain, in addition to our own and the world’s, can lead to secondary trauma (the toll of witnessing others’ suffering) and compassion fatigue (the depletion that comes from caring when your capacity is already maxed out). It’s important to care, but it can be a lot.

So, I want us to just take a moment to be with our body.
To just allow space for the overwhelm to land.
This post isn’t here to gloss over the collective outrage, or to fix anything, but to witness what you might be holding.
To offer some understanding of why your body might feel so different lately, and some gentle practices that might help, if they feel safe.

Some of you will find this uncomfortable, too much, dumb, or not what you need right now. That’s okay.
But, I want to acknowledge that it’s really hard to carry the pain and weight of the world, in addition to your stress and pain. We all know that we’ve been living through immense collective trauma, collective loss, collective uncertainty. Our own stuff doesn’t go away.

I just want you to know that I see that. I’m not saying to look away, but also, we can’t have strength and endurance and fortitude to keep going, without also having rest and regulation, and some peace. I wish you that.

Grief exhaustion can lead to burn out, if we don’t remember we need care. People ask me all the time, as a grief & traum...
01/22/2026

Grief exhaustion can lead to burn out, if we don’t remember we need care.

People ask me all the time, as a grief & trauma therapist, what is the best thing to do to support ourselves following any type of significant loss or trauma?

I say the same thing I’ve said for many years now, or at least after losing my mother and realizing the extent to which the initial trauma of loss can affect us— body, mind and spirit.

Last year, wrote a book on navigating grief called, “Moving On Doesn’t Mean Letting Go”, where I describe how grief can take endurance, but it’s not something we really understand until we are in the thick of it. It can be absolutely exhausting. And, it can take a very serious toll on our nervous system.

Grief will be with us for the long haul.
In different ways emotionally and physically (and neurologically and psychologically)…
It will show up in different intensities at different times.

Some days, weeks, or months may feel like we are constantly being knocked down by our grief experience.
Some hours, days, weeks, or months we may feel okay and ‘almost normal’ (though what’s that after loss?).

But most of all, I want you to make sure that you are taking care of your body and nervous system:
💧Drink enough water.
🥙Eat nourishing food.
☀️Get fresh air and sunlight (or vit D).
🧘🏻‍♀️Move your body gently, however you can.
😴Rest your body.
🙏🏻Offer yourself compassion when you can’t do the things you used to do with ease.
🫶🏼Check in with yourself often, hand on heart, to ask what you may need. Our needs change in grief— a lot.
✋Create boundaries where it’s needed, because others won’t always change, adapt to our grief needs, or understand these needs, and they may push us towards an outcome not always possible for us in grief.
🗣️Talk with people who ‘get it.’
🤲🏼 Receive help or support from those who feel safe.

There is no right way to grieve, and we can’t get it wrong, but it’s important to be very mindful about how we take care of ourselves and move through life when we are in a state of overwhelm and long-term stress.

Go gently. One moment at a time. Leave the judgment behind. Give yourself some grace. We can do it.

There’s so much pain that comes with watching your old life fade in the rearview mirror while you’re being dragged forwa...
01/20/2026

There’s so much pain that comes with watching your old life fade in the rearview mirror while you’re being dragged forward into something you never asked for.

It’s not just grief for what you lost. It’s grief for who you were before. For the version of yourself that existed when the world still made sense. When you could plan for next year without that sinking feeling in your stomach. When safety felt like something you could count on instead of something that was taken from you.

You keep waiting to wake up back in the before. Back when things felt stable. When you knew what to expect. When you could imagine a future that didn’t feel threatening.
But that’s gone now. And the worst part is, you can’t even mourn it properly because you’re too busy trying to survive the after.

You’re mourning versions of yourself you’ll never get back, not in the same way. Because, every day you wake up and have to accept all over again that this is real, this is not going away, and that this is life now.
The ache isn’t just sadness. It’s the bone-deep knowledge that you can’t go back. That normal is gone. That certainty was a illusion. That the ground was never as solid as you thought.
And even when good things happen, when you laugh, when you feel okay for a moment…there’s this shadow over it. This quiet voice that whispers: but it’s different now. nothing will ever be the same.

You carry the before and after in your body. You feel the split every single day. And some days, the weight of that divide is almost unbearable.
And yet, you’re still here carrying it. Still moving through a world that shifted underneath you, and keeps shifting.

Yes, things have changed. Some things will never be the same. Yes, there are real losses, both personal and collective, that deserve mourning. But, there is also unexpected strength. Unexpected joys. Small moments of beauty in the midst of uncertainty. Somehow. And, they all live side by side. Not always right away, but they come.

Hope used to feel too flimsy to me. After all, how can we hold onto something that isn’t nailed down?I’ve never been a f...
01/18/2026

Hope used to feel too flimsy to me.
After all, how can we hold onto something that isn’t nailed down?
I’ve never been a fan of the word “hope.”
Not until I could feel its strength.
Until I could really see that hope isn’t a mood.
It’s not “optimism” for optimism’s sake.
It’s not denial, or pretending things don’t hurt.

I am very thoughtful with how I use the word “hope”.
It’s not cutesy and whimsical.
Hope is a practice. A discipline. A force.
It’s choosing (exhaustingly, again and again) to stay in the work of being alive, and fighting for life, even when our world feels unrecognizable. Even living in the before and after. Even when grief, trauma, burnout, or heartache make forward movement feel almost insulting.

Hope is a muscle we must keep using, especially when we’re tired.

It’s the demand to keep tending to our life, even when the future feels uncertain or scary, even when life gives us every reason to go numb. It doesn’t mean blindly believing things will turn out okay. It means believing our presence still matters, while everything is still unfolding.

Hope asks us to be clear-eyed about what is broken within and around us, and stubborn enough to believe repair is still possible.
However small.
Not because it’s easy, or guaranteed.
It’s just that giving up would cost us something even deeper.

We still have to carry what was lost, what was broken, what never came to be. We continue anyway. Speak anyway. Love anyway.

This kind of hope is demanding, yes.
It is true labor.
It’s sacred work.

But really, hope is our first act of defiance.

🤍, Gina

If you’re feeling like you don’t know what to do next, you’re not alone. There’s a lot of people in this place right now...
01/15/2026

If you’re feeling like you don’t know what to do next, you’re not alone.
There’s a lot of people in this place right now.

That stuck feeling. The fog. Shock. The Anger. The sense that we should be doing something, but can’t figure out exactly what. The fear that won’t turn off. The constant wondering what’s coming next, and how we’re supposed to prepare for it when we don’t even know what “it” is.
There’s always another shoe that can or will drop.

This is grief.

It’s an ‘edge-of-your-seat’ feeling, where you’re waiting for something to happen again, but you don’t know what. Wanting to move forward, but feeling completely immobilized by the weight of everything.
It’s so exhausting.

And, I think a lot of us are carrying this more quietly for different reasons. Scrolling through the anxiety + sadness. Absorbing uncertainty. Shutting down. Numbing. Feeling the overwhelm, but not always saying it out loud.

But, as lame as it sounds, we’re not supposed to carry this alone. That’s not how any of this works. We need to speak up and out and ask for help and give help.

There’s something that happens when we actually say it, when we tell someone “I don’t know what to do right now” or “I’m scared and I can’t stop thinking about it”.

It doesn’t fix it immediately, but it makes the load a little lighter. It reminds us we’re not the only ones feeling this way, and that connection matters.

Asking for help is important, okay?
Even if you’re not used to it. Even if you hate it.
Sharing the fear and the overwhelm - the grief, isn’t burdening people. It’s just being honest about where we are. And, sometimes that honesty is what creates space (and permission) for other people to be honest too.
To say “yeah, me too. I’m feeling it, too.”
It’s so damn hard.

Many people are trying to figure out how to keep going when nothing feels certain. When the future feels more threatening than hopeful. When every day feels like we’re just waiting for the next thing to go wrong.
But, we still have one another.
And, we only have to do the next best tiny step, whatever that is or means to you.
For right now, in this moment, that is enough.

And, this is grief work, too.
🤍

Those who know me know I say this often:Grief doesn’t live only in our thoughts, or in our emotions, but it also settles...
01/12/2026

Those who know me know I say this often:
Grief doesn’t live only in our thoughts, or in our emotions, but it also settles into our body.
It tightens, numbs, aches, goes quiet, then loud again.

This spring (March 15-18), we will return to Kripalu Retreat Center for Grief Camp for a second time together.

I am deeply grateful to sit alongside my amazing colleagues, and and walk with people through the terrain of loss with them.

Together, we’ll explore how grief shows up somatically: in our nervous systems, our muscles, our breath, our fatigue, our restlessness.

We’ll write, not to “make meaning,” but to give grief language when words feel impossible (and often, they do).

We’ll move, not to “perform healing”, but to let what’s been held finally have somewhere to go.

We’ll slow down enough together to listen to what the body and heart has been carrying for so long.

The sacred work we do together isn’t about fixing grief.
It’s about learning how to live with it, more honestly, more gently, more fully.

We are each honored to return to this sacred space where grief is not rushed, minimized, or made palatable….only met, witnessed, and allowed.

If your body has been holding what your heart hasn’t had space to feel, Grief Camp at Kripalu is for you.

It is an honor to be a part of this retreat again.
Link for more info: https://kripalu.org/experiences/grief-camp?sku=18436484

The ground keeps shifting.
01/11/2026

The ground keeps shifting.

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