Welcome to Untethered to Rooted

Hey there! I’m excited that you landed here. This is the place where you’ll receive applicable mental health care tips and helpful resources, reflections and musings from a mental health practitioner on mental health concepts and themes I’m researching and learning more about.

What is Untethered to Rooted®?
Untethered to Rooted® is a company that offers trauma-informed consulting and mental health support in the form of psychotherapy, coaching, and workshop presentations that help organizations and individuals move from feeling untethered to rooted.

The name for my business honors my own grief experience while reflecting much of what I have seen in my role as a psychotherapist for my clients. When I lost my mother three years ago, the most pervasive feeling I experienced was feeling untethered and completely unmoored. I described grief as “feeling everything and nothing, all at once” — overwhelmed by all emotions while feeling the deep pain of a large gaping hole that kept growing. It was only through intentionally talking about my grief and its impact on me that I began to feel rooted again but in a newer version of myself integrating this loss.

Honestly, I hear the same thing when I help clients through their own pain, loss, and grief—where everything initially gets uprooted, feels confusing, and has immediately changed all areas of their lives. The journey I wish to facilitate in people’s grief and healing gives them the space to be heard so that they can have their loss witnessed, their feelings around their grief validated, and their values highlighted. That way, people can be reminded of, or even discover, who they are.

For some of you, the holidays, these past couple of months, or even this past year may have stirred up some of these feelings—but I want to let you know, you’re not alone. If you are experiencing these grief feelings for the first time, I want to share a few reminders about grief that helped me:

Here are some reminders about grief:

It’s so much harder processing grief by yourself.
One thing I was told by my own therapist that remains in my mind is:

“When you lose someone or experience a loss, oftentimes multiple people experience that loss. So it makes sense to grieve that loss collectively, not just individually.”

Realizing that connecting with other people who have experienced something similar and processing it in a group with like-minded people who shared similar grief circumstances was really helpful.

Grief affects your whole body, mind, and spirit, so it makes sense to allow your whole body to process it.
Move your body—whether it’s dancing, spinning, or lifting weights. My whole body was experiencing grief, not just my mind and spirit. Challenging my body enough to sweat helped me notice a calming and uplifting shift in myself and my nervous system. Try something out that honors your body and abilities while also giving your body a little challenge.

Changing your environment can also shift how you feel.
Allowing myself to have the space to feel all of my feelings was really important. I’ve even spoken about how no space felt big enough until I found the Grand Canyon. But my feelings also needed a temporary container to allow me to try to get work done, care for myself, or consider if any other feelings aside from the overwhelming pain of grief were there.

Sometimes I would allow myself to feel all the grief feelings before and during my shower in the morning and then consider if I felt anything else when I stepped out. I found grief was still present but somehow it felt like the water seemed to carry the weight of some of those feelings down the drain. The shower was a catalyst for shifting how I felt. It was the same when I moved my body after sitting for a while and could feel a change in my mood as a result. I rediscovered other feelings that had been present in my body but were overshadowed by the overwhelming nature of grief.

Give one of these a try and let me know how it goes for you. If there’s something else that’s worked for you, I’d love to hear from you about it!