Grief Treatment
Center in Scottsdale
At Redefine Wellness & Treatment, we offer grief treatment programs for prolonged grief, traumatic loss, anticipatory grief, disenfranchised grief, ambiguous loss, and grief complicated by depression or trauma.
- Joint Commission Accredited
- Daily Neurofeedback
- Root-Cause Treatment
- Body + Brain + Mind Approach
- Curated Grief Programs
Specialized Grief Treatment in Scottsdale, Arizona
- Brain-Based Treatment qEEG brain mapping reveals how grief has changed your neural patterns. We see it and build treatment around what your brain actually needs.
- Body-Focused, Not Just Talk Grief lives in your chest, your throat, your stomach. Somatic therapies work directly with the physical weight your body is carrying.
- Nervous System Regulation Loss keeps your nervous system locked between shutdown and overwhelm. Breathwork and PEMF help your body find steady ground again.
- Flexible Intensity PHP and IOP programs for grief that needs more than an hour a week. Structured support while you stay connected to your daily life.
- Levels of Care
Grief Treatment at Every Level of Care
Partial Hospitalization Program (PHP)
When grief has shut down your ability to function, get through a workday, or sleep through the night, PHP provides the daily structure to stabilize. You attend 5 days per week, 5-6 hours daily, for 4-8 weeks. Each day combines individual grief processing, somatic therapies, and nervous system regulation so your body begins to settle while you work through the loss.
Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP)
IOP works for grief that is disrupting your life but does not require full-day structure. You attend 3 days per week, 3-4 hours per session, keeping your job and responsibilities intact while getting consistent clinical support. It is also the natural step-down from PHP, when your nervous system has stabilized enough to reduce intensity without losing momentum.
Private Therapeutic Retreats
Our private retreats offer concentrated, individualized treatment for grief that needs focused, uninterrupted attention. Retreats are fully customized to your clinical needs and schedule, ranging from 3-day intensives to week-long immersions. Ideal for executives, professionals, or anyone traveling to Scottsdale specifically for accelerated grief processing.
Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD)
Everyone grieves differently and on their own timeline. But prolonged grief is different from slow grief. The loss happened months or years ago and the intensity hasn't shifted. You still can't think about the person without the same raw, day-one pain. The world moved on. You didn't. And the standard advice to "give it time" stopped making sense a while ago.
Common Symptoms
- Persistent yearning
- Disbelief about the loss
- Emotional numbness
- Feeling life has no meaning
- Difficulty moving forward
- Avoidance of reminders
- Intense loneliness
How We Treat Prolonged Grief at Redefine
Prolonged grief responds well to structured treatment. We use grief-focused cognitive behavioral therapy combined with gradual exposure to the memories and reminders you've been avoiding. That avoidance makes sense as protection, but it's also what keeps the grief locked at full intensity. Treatment helps the brain process what it hasn't been able to on its own. Most people notice the grief starts to shift within the first few weeks.
Anticipatory Grief
The person is still here, but you're already grieving. A terminal diagnosis. A parent with advancing dementia who recognizes you less each visit. You're mourning someone who hasn't died yet, and nobody around you seems to understand why you're falling apart when they're "still here." The grief is real. The loss is happening in slow motion.
Common Symptoms
- Sadness before the loss
- Guilt about grieving "early"
- Anxiety about the future
- Emotional exhaustion
- Withdrawal from others
- Difficulty being present
How We Treat Anticipatory Grief at Redefine
Anticipatory grief puts you in an impossible position: present with someone you're actively losing. We use acceptance-based approaches and values work to help you stay connected to the person and the relationship without collapsing under the weight of what's coming. Group work is especially useful here because isolation compounds anticipatory grief. Being around others who understand what "pre-loss" feels like changes the experience.
Traumatic Loss and Grief
Sudden death. Violent death. Suicide. Finding the body. Watching it happen. The grief gets tangled with traumatic images and you can't access the sadness because the horror is in the way. You replay the phone call. The hospital room. The last conversation you didn't know was the last one. And you can't figure out if you're grieving or panicking, because most days it feels like both.
Common Symptoms
- Intrusive images of the death
- Inability to access normal grief
- Guilt
- Avoidance of reminders
- Sleep disruption
- Emotional numbness
- Anger without clear target
How We Treat Traumatic Loss at Redefine
The trauma has to be cleared before the grief can move. That's the piece most grief support misses. If your nervous system is stuck on the traumatic images, no amount of processing the loss will help because your brain can't get past the horror to reach the sadness underneath. We use EMDR to clear the trauma layer first. Once that's processed, the grief becomes accessible in a way it couldn't be before. Less frantic. Still painful. But the kind of painful that actually moves somewhere instead of looping.
Learn more about our trauma treatment approachDisenfranchised Grief
This is the grief nobody validates. A miscarriage at eight weeks that people call "early." A pet you loved for fourteen years. An ex-partner. An estranged parent you hadn't spoken to in a decade. A job that defined your identity. The loss is real and the grief is real, but the world doesn't give you permission to grieve it. So you carry it alone and wonder why you can't shake it.
Common Symptoms
- Shame about grieving
- Minimizing the loss
- Isolation
- Anger at lack of support
- Feeling "crazy" for still hurting
- Difficulty naming the grief
How We Treat Disenfranchised Grief at Redefine
The first thing that has to happen is someone telling you the grief is legitimate. Not in a therapeutic platitude way. In a "this is a real loss and your reaction makes sense" way. We use parts work and IFS to help you access the grief you've been told you shouldn't feel. Group therapy is particularly effective because hearing others validate a loss the rest of the world dismissed changes something. It breaks the isolation that makes disenfranchised grief so corrosive.
Ambiguous Loss
The person is physically present but psychologically gone. Dementia. Severe addiction. A brain injury that changed who they are. Or the reverse: someone disappeared, was deported, went missing. No body. No closure. No clear endpoint. Ambiguous loss doesn't let you grieve because the loss isn't finished. You're stuck between holding on and letting go with no instructions for either.
Common Symptoms
- Confusion about what you've lost
- Guilt about grieving someone alive
- Frozen decision-making
- Relationship strain
- Chronic stress
- Hopelessness
How We Treat Ambiguous Loss at Redefine
Ambiguous loss requires learning to hold two truths at once. The person is here and the person you knew is gone. That's a dialectic, and it requires a different set of skills than standard grief work. We use DBT-informed approaches to build distress tolerance for the uncertainty and somatic work to address the chronic tension that comes from living in unresolved loss. The goal isn't closure. It's finding a way to live with a loss that has no clean ending.
Childhood and Developmental Grief
Losing a parent, sibling, or primary caregiver as a child rewires how you attach to people for the rest of your life. You may not even connect your adult patterns to that early loss. The difficulty trusting that people will stay. The panic when relationships get close. The sense that something fundamental is missing but you can't name it. Sometimes the grief surfaces decades later, triggered by your own child reaching the age you were when it happened.
Common Symptoms
- Attachment difficulties
- Fear of abandonment
- Difficulty with intimacy
- Unresolved anger
- Triggered by milestones
- Chronic sense of missing something
How We Treat Childhood Grief at Redefine
Early loss lives in the body and the attachment system, not just in conscious memory. That's why talk therapy alone often doesn't reach it. We use EMDR to reprocess the stored grief and attachment-focused work to address how the loss shaped your relational patterns. Neurofeedback helps regulate the nervous system patterns that formed around the original loss. This isn't about "getting over" a childhood death. It's about separating past loss from present relationships.
Cumulative Grief
Loss stacked on loss. A parent dies, then a friend, then a colleague. Or the pandemic took multiple people in the span of months. Healthcare workers know this one. So do people in recovery who've lost peers to overdose. Each new loss reopens the ones before it. The grief compounds and your capacity to process it doesn't scale. At some point you stop feeling it. Not because you're okay. Because the system is overloaded.
Common Symptoms
- Emotional shutdown
- Grief fatigue
- Difficulty identifying which loss hurts
- Numbness
- Irritability
- Physical exhaustion
- Cynicism or detachment
How We Treat Cumulative Grief at Redefine
When the body is holding multiple losses, you can't think your way through them one at a time. The nervous system is carrying all of it at once. Somatic experiencing helps discharge the accumulated grief your body has been storing. Breathwork and PEMF support nervous system regulation when the system is running on fumes. We don't try to process every loss separately. We work with the cumulative load and let the body decide what needs to move first.
Complicated Grief and Co-Occurring Conditions
Grief often shows up wearing another diagnosis. Depression that started after a loss and never lifted. Anxiety that spiked after a death and now runs everything. Drinking that started as coping and became its own problem. When grief and another condition are feeding each other, treating one without the other doesn't work. The grief fuels the depression. The drinking numbs the grief. Pull one thread and the other tightens.
Common Symptoms
- Depression that followed a loss
- Increased substance use
- Anxiety since the death
- Insomnia
- Suicidal thoughts
- Functional decline
How We Treat Complicated Grief at Redefine
We treat both conditions at the same time because they developed together. Integrated treatment means your grief work and your depression or substance use treatment aren't on separate tracks with separate clinicians who don't talk to each other. Neurofeedback helps stabilize the brain patterns driving both conditions while therapy addresses the grief underneath. The co-occurring piece is where intensive treatment matters most. An hour a week can't keep pace with two conditions reinforcing each other.
"Grief isn't just sadness. It's your nervous system trying to survive an absence it can't make sense of. Parts of you shut down to get through it. Until you work with the body and those protective parts, talking about the loss only reaches the surface."
Kim Miller, LCSW, LISAC, SEP
Somatic & IFS Therapist
- Our Approach
How We Treat Grief at Redefine
Grief-Focused Psychotherapy
Complicated Grief Treatment is the only therapy designed specifically for prolonged grief. It works differently from general talk therapy by directly targeting the stuck points: the part of your brain that hasn't accepted the loss, the avoidance patterns that keep you from moving through it. CBT and ACT address the thought loops and help you rebuild a life that still has meaning in it.
Trauma Processing & Parts Work
When a loss is sudden, violent, or carries unresolved guilt, the grief gets tangled with trauma. EMDR and Brainspotting process the traumatic aspects of the death without requiring you to retell the story repeatedly. IFS works with the protective parts that formed around the loss, the ones that keep you numb or stuck in caretaking mode long after the crisis has passed.
Nervous System & Somatic Work
Grief settles in the body. The heaviness in your chest, the exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix, the tension you carry without realizing it. Somatic Experiencing works directly with these physical patterns, releasing what your nervous system is holding. Breathwork and PEMF therapy support the regulation process, helping your body access states beyond collapse or hypervigilance.
Brain-Based Interventions
Prolonged grief changes how the brain processes attachment, reward, and memory. qEEG brain mapping shows these disruptions clearly. Neurofeedback then trains the brain toward patterns that support emotional regulation and restorative sleep, two things grief tends to dismantle first. Alpha-theta protocols are particularly relevant here, working at the threshold between waking and sleep where grief processing often stalls.
- Types of Grief
What Type of Grief Are You Dealing With?
The Treatment Process
Consultation
Free, confidential call to discuss your needs
Assessment
In-depth evaluation and brain mapping
Care Plan
Personalized treatment tailored to your grief
Treatment
Active work with 20+ modalities
Integration
Skills for lasting change in daily life
Real Connection, Support, & Healing
Our Scottsdale outpatient programs combine innovative neuroscience with proven therapeutic approaches.
- Living With Grief
Signs You May Benefit from Grief Treatment
- You've stopped doing things you used to care about. Hobbies, friendships, plans for the future: none of it feels worth the effort anymore.
- Your body is keeping score. Chronic fatigue, headaches, chest tightness, or getting sick more often than you used to.
- Work is slipping. Concentration is gone, deadlines pass without urgency, and you're going through the motions without actually being present.
- You're avoiding anything connected to the loss. Certain places, songs, conversations, even people who knew the person, because the reminder is too much.
- Relationships feel different now. You're withdrawing from people who care about you, or getting angry at the ones who try to help.
- Months have passed and the intensity hasn't changed. Everyone told you it would get easier with time, and it hasn't.
- Testimonials
Healing in Their Own Words
“They made me feel at ease and understood.”
Chris Stonewall
“ Love the red light therapy!!”
Christine Driscoll
“Best Red Light Therapy in my LIFE!”
Dan Selmasska
“Laura is an excellent practitioner”
Dr. Jasmine
“What a blessing to have found and participated in treatment at Redefine Wellness.”
jen cutler
“I have never experienced such a professional and caring staff.”
Hunter Bratt
“The staff is so friendly and the facility is clean. ”
Gwen Johnston
“I love this facility. I have been doing Red-light therapy here for several months. ”
Robert Blume
“I was lost, unable to stand up for myself and stuck in anxiety.”
Presley Petersen
“The wellness center is stunning and the whole team has been very kind and helpful.”
Mackenzie Korus
“I’m so happy to say I would 100% recommend this place over and over”
briana medley
“The staff here are wonderful and compassionate. I definitely recommend this clinic!”
Beaunerism
“Receiving treatments here was 100% a game changer, I strongly recommend!”
Jae Sheck
“Highly recommend if you’re looking for something focused and personal.”
Scott Forbes
“Highly recommend!”
Jenna Wolf
“The entire staff at Redefine is amazing. ”
Brittany Whitley
“The staff is incredible—super friendly”
Jon Driscoll
“A beautiful location with wonderful staff”
Matt Sheehan
“They made me feel at ease and understood.”
Chris Stonewall
“ Love the red light therapy!!”
Christine Driscoll
“Best Red Light Therapy in my LIFE!”
Dan Selmasska
“Laura is an excellent practitioner”
Dr. Jasmine
“What a blessing to have found and participated in treatment at Redefine Wellness.”
jen cutler
“I have never experienced such a professional and caring staff.”
Hunter Bratt
- Giving You The Answers You Need
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if my grief needs more than regular therapy?
What is prolonged grief disorder?
How is your program different from weekly grief counseling?
Will I have to talk about my loss in group settings?
What if my grief is connected to trauma or substance use?
Our Mission
At Redefine Wellness and Treatment, we empower healing by uniting mind, body, and spirit. Using trauma-informed therapies, neuroscience, and holistic practices, we deliver personalized care that fosters resilience, growth, and lasting transformation.
Our Vision
We aspire to create a world where access to transformative healing is available to all, empowering people to lead fulfilling, balanced lives.
Recognized by
Grief Treatment Works
Roughly 1 in 10 bereaved adults develop prolonged grief disorder. Grief-specific treatment produces measurable recovery, and the research backs it.
In a randomized trial of 151 adults with complicated grief, those receiving grief-focused therapy improved at significantly higher rates than those in standard treatment.
Complicated grief treatment produced a 51% response rate compared to 28% for standard interpersonal therapy. Grief-specific approaches nearly doubled the likelihood of meaningful improvement.
A pilot study of high-intensity grief therapy found 63-72% of participants recovered, with 83% completing the full program. Concentrated treatment kept people engaged and moving forward.
Treatment Gains That Last
A follow-up study found that treatment gains persisted more than two years after completing grief-focused therapy, with continued improvement over time. Recovery from prolonged grief is not temporary.
- Blog
