Episode 20 – Sibling Loss & Talking to Kids About Grief w/ Melissa Braunworth

In this episode, Dana Daugherty invites my guest Melissa Braunworth, a licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT) in California (lic # 129701), to explore sibling loss and how to talk about grief with kids. Melissa brings both professional and personal experience to this conversation, having lost her younger brother to a two-year journey with advanced stage cancer, just two weeks before her own engagement. In the years since, she’s navigated major life milestones, such as growing her family and continuing her clinical work, all while carrying that grief, impacting how she now supports children and families and builds a language for loss.

With over a decade of experience supporting kids, teens, parents, and school staff, Melissa specializes in grief and loss, trauma, ADHD, perinatal/postpartum mental health, and faith deconstruction/reconstruction. We talk about what it really looks like to support a child through loss, how creative expression opens doors that words can’t, and how Melissa brings grief language into conversations with her own kids.

Melissa is a mom to three children, a spouse, a sister, a Native to the Bay Area, an eldest daughter, and a first generation Asian-American U.S.-dweller. Also a note that anything that Melissa says today is for educational purposes and does not constitute therapy or therapeutic advice.

For more information or for the best way to contact Melissa is through her website where you also find a link to her Substack: www.lithopsandbloomtherapy.com