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.

The world does not pause when you are broken open.It just keeps going. People return to their routines. Conversations mo...
06/01/2026

The world does not pause when you are broken open.

It just keeps going. People return to their routines. Conversations move on to other things. And you are standing there, in the same body, in the same town, maybe even at the same table, and everything feels like it is happening on the other side of glass. You are distant from others, and distant from you.

And, underneath that (quieter, and maybe harder to name), is the loss of the person you used to be. The one who moved through the world with an ease you didn’t even know you had until it was gone. The one who walked into rooms without scanning them. Who trusted without the long internal negotiation. Who felt at home in their own skin in a way that now feels like a memory of someone else. People around you still relate to that person. They reference her, expect her, wait for her to come back. And there is a grief in that, in being known as someone you can no longer find in yourself.

Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do, holding onto something real that happened, staying alert so it doesn’t happen again, trying to keep you safe from a world that already proved it could break open without warning.

The hard part is that the people around you don’t always see it. You look fine. You showed up. Maybe you laughed at something last Tuesday. So, yeah, the assumption is that you’re okay, that you’ve moved on, that
your pain has passed. And there you are, translating yourself into a language that doesn’t match the way it feels, trying to explain a kind of pain that lives below words.

Healing from loss and trauma is never just a straight line back to who you were, but a slow, nonlinear, sometimes very painstaking process of teaching your nervous system that safety is possible again. That not every room is a threat. That not every person will leave or hurt or disappear or betray. That your own instincts can be trusted again …or maybe for the first time.

That takes time. It takes the right people. It takes small repeated moments of feeling okay, and then okay again, and then okay again, until the body starts to believe it.
One slow moment at a time.

What we never learn while we are grieving, is that our losses are not just about the person or thing we lost, but about ...
05/19/2026

What we never learn while we are grieving, is that our losses are not just about the person or thing we lost, but about the version of ourself that feels like it disappeared along with that loss. When someone important is gone, parts of our identity, our roles, our routines, our dreams, and our sense of who we are can shift or even feel lost.

This can also come with non-death losses, diagnoses, illness, job loss, moving or losing a home, a friendship, empty-nesting, or any huge life transition that feels like a part of you is no longer there.

This is called “identity grief”.
A secondary loss that can leave you feeling disconnected from yourself, like you are not the person you used to be and maybe not sure who you are now.
That feeling is real, and it has a basis in how grief affects the brain and your sense of self.
The truth is, you won’t go back to exactly who you were before in the same way.
But…you are not totally lost either.

You are becoming someone new, shaped by what you have been through. Healing happens in this space of transformation - it takes time and patience, and it requires gentle curiosity about who you were and who you are now.

If you recognize this in yourself, know that you are not alone. I feel it, too. Your experience is important here, and there is space to grieve all parts of this loss, including the parts of you that feel changed.

What are some ways you have noticed yourself change since your loss/life change?

Or 🤍if you have felt this way, too…

There are so many ways a person can be betrayed.By a partner. A parent. A sibling. A dear friend. A mentor who held powe...
05/14/2026

There are so many ways a person can be betrayed.

By a partner.
A parent.
A sibling.
A dear friend.
A mentor who held power over something that mattered. A community that looked away.
A version of someone we cared about so much that the losing of them felt, at first, impossible to even name.

I wrote this for the grief that comes after trust itself, becomes the wound. But, I also know it can’t hold every single story.

Maybe your experience of this doesn’t appear anywhere in these slides, or the relationship was complicated in ways that make it hard to say what you lost.
Perhaps, the betrayal is still too close, or still being denied by people around you, or still ongoing in ways that makes healing feel like something that happens to other people.

Or maybe on the surface, none of it felt like it was you specifically, but there was a familiar feeling inside of it.

That feeling of it, that specific scent of devastation that comes when something/someone you trusted, becomes the source of your harm, that is valid whether or not your story fits the version anyone else is telling.

Betrayal grief (like all grief) is not linear, and it is not so quiet. It lives in the body before it lives in words. In the jaw that won’t unclench. In the sleep that won’t come. In the way you flinch inside relationships that have given you no reason to. In the way, that real trust is hard to come by. In the months that pass and the way it can still find you, unexpectedly, in the middle of an ordinary day, just back to that feeling and experience..

Experiencing betrayal can feel all consuming, which makes sense, because betrayal reaches into the places where we stored our sense of safety, our sense of self, our belief in what we thought we understood.
Rebuilding those things is slow, and quiet, and invisible to almost everyone around you.

Though I am here only to give more attention to this kind of grief, I want you to know that
whatever shape this has taken in your life, however long you have been carrying it, however complicated or unresolved or ongoing it still feels, that you are witnessed in it right now.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

And if it resonates, I’d love to hear.
🤍

I go inward on Mother’s Day. I love to see everybody’s shares though— the love, the photos, and memories and wishes and ...
05/10/2026

I go inward on Mother’s Day.
I love to see everybody’s shares though— the love, the photos, and memories and wishes and celebrations and gratitude, and also…all the layers of ‘what if’s’, regrets, resentment, and grief alive in the layers of what may be a complicated living loss.

For some, posting doesn’t capture the essence of the love.
Or, it hurts too much.
Or, being on socials, seeing all the mothering experiences you wish you had, feels like torture.

It’s impossible to capture the multitude of experiences we each have when it comes to a mother/child relationship. It could be warm and loving, safe, everything you could ever imagine. It can also be the exact opposite…it could also lie somewhere in between.
Maybe, if you’re like me, you’ve been lucky enough to have some different maternal figures step in and love you whole again. A blessing beyond language.

So, I wish you what you need.
No beautiful, poetic language.
Just a simple wish my heart to yours.
I wish you peace, love, strength, comfort.
I wish you celebration in whatever ways are meaningful to you.
And if you’re inward, too…
From this little inner emotional place I’m in right now, I see you. 🤍

05/08/2026

Kind of an intimate (read: kinda embarrassing) little video, but because colon cancer took my mom, it feels important to say something to a community that I care about.

Truth is, I have spent the better part of the last six months really unwell. I needed more answers. So, this is how I spent my morning — getting a colonoscopy. 🥳

Did you know that 1 in 5 people diagnosed with colon cancer right now is under 55? It is the leading cause of cancer death in young adults. And, so many of them had symptoms that got written off, including by doctors, including by themselves, because nobody thought it could be that.

The stats are really scary, and hard to sit with.
But, what’s harder is knowing that so many of these cancers are caught too late, because people didn’t get screened.

It’s important for all ages!
If you are 45 or older, please, please get your colonoscopy.
If you have a family history, talk to your doctor about starting screenings earlier.
If something feels off in your body, like bleeding, changes in your bowel habits, unexplained fatigue, please don’t wait for it to become undeniable before you get it checked out.

I know it feels uncomfortable to think about (and talk about). I know it’s easy to put off. But, catching this early changes everything.

Please, if you can, make an appointment. We have to be our own advocates! I’m here if you wanna chat about it.

05/07/2026

I put my AirPods in and take my mom on walks through Central Park.
Interstellar mother-daughter walks, I called it in my book. The kind where I talk out loud and hope the signal finds her somewhere between here…and wherever she is now.

I tell her the things I couldn’t say when she was alive. The things I’m still figuring out how to say now.

I narrate my life to her like she’s missed a few episodes, and I’m catching her up. Sometimes, I cry in front of strangers while I’m talking to her, who may think I’m just a weirdo on a tough phone call. I am, kind of.

Here’s the thing: we never really hang up the phone.
There’s still static on the line.
A frequency that doesn’t go silent just because someone stops answering. The relationship doesn’t end when a life does.
It keeps moving. It grows and shifts and grieves alongside you. It shows up in dreams and in the way you make coffee and in what you reach for when something breaks you open.

Sometimes, in the park, I swear I feel her. Not like a ghost. More like a thread. One of those barely-there silk ones that catches the light for just a second and then you lose it again, but you know it’s there because you saw it.

You felt it. The sunlight showed you.

We are not severed from the people we love when they leave. The thread doesn’t break. We just have to learn to follow it differently.
In silence.
In walks.
In words sent out like a frequency we can’t fully trace, but keep transmitting anyway.

And, maybe that’s what grief really is. Not an ending, but a conversation that just changes form. One where you do most of the talking now. Where the silence on the other end somehow still feels like an answer. One you keep showing up for anyway, AirPods in, face tilted toward the sky, waiting for the thread to catch the light again.

(Thank you, for this beautiful narration)

Let’s be real- we were never really taught to tend to our mental health. What we were taught was to push through. To sta...
05/04/2026

Let’s be real- we were never really taught to tend to our mental health. What we were taught was to push through. To stay productive. To keep showing up. And if the pain got loud enough that it couldn’t be ignored, to find a way to make it useful. Turn it into art. Turn it into a story. Turn it into something that serves someone else or earns something back.

And, when we couldn’t do that, when we couldn’t shove it down or make it productive or pretty, we were removed.
Pushed to the margins.
Left to manage it alone, in private, out of sight.
So, we learned to hide it. We learned to isolate ourselves, to go quiet, to lick our own wounds in corners where no one could see. Or it came out another way entirely, as rage, as destruction, as pain that had nowhere else to go and so it went outward, onto the people nearest to us.

All of it was what happens when an entire society never learns to tend. We were never taught that our inner lives deserved gentleness. That looking inward with compassion was not self-indulgence but survival. That we could, and should, care for one another in that way.

So…my hope, the one I am still holding onto, is that we find our way there. That we become people who tend to ourselves, and to each other. That it becomes something we pass down.

That is what I want to offer this Mental Health Awareness Month. Not a challenge. Not a practice to optimize. Not something to produce or perform or give. Just this: put your hand on your heart right now. Feel it beating. And ask it, quietly and without urgency, what it needs. 🤍

Swipe through slowly. There is a check-in waiting for you at the end. It’s a tiny starting point for finding our way back to ourselves…

So, how are you actually doing?!

Many times as life moves forward… our grief can arrive as a pause. A small, private stillness before you keep moving. Th...
04/26/2026

Many times as life moves forward… our grief can arrive as a pause.
A small, private stillness before you keep moving.
The moment between waking and remembering.
The way you almost say their name.
Showing up in ordinary moments without warning or permission.
A smell.
A season.
Someone who laughs the way they did.

This quiet private little phase of grief doesn’t get witnessed much. We carry quietly because life keeps going, because other people have moved on, because there’s no longer a clear occasion to fall apart.
So… we fold it up and take it with us everywhere.
And somehow, that becomes its own intimacy.
Our private conversation with someone the world has stopped talking about.

You are allowed to still be in this, okay?
On a random day.
Years later.
Without explanation.

Missing someone is not a phase you complete. Sometimes, it just becomes part of how you move through the world… a little more carefully, a little more aware of what can be here, and then not here.

Put a 🤍 if you’re carrying someone with you (or a missing part of yourself) today in the quiet...

I can sound like a broken record sometimes when I say that grief is not only an emotional experience, it is a full body ...
04/20/2026

I can sound like a broken record sometimes when I say that grief is not only an emotional experience, it is a full body experience. It rewires the nervous system and reshapes the brain, too. And, going through traumatic experiences or living through relentless stress does the exact same.

Two of the most common, but least talked about effects of grief and trauma is brain fog and memory disruption. You might notice yourself forgetting appointments, misplacing objects, rereading the same page without being able to take in any of the information, or feeling like time itself has gone slippery. Days blur together. Moments of loss stay etched in sharp detail, while everything else seems to fade.

Though it can feel really upsetting, scary, and confusing, it is because your nervous system is, quite simply, overloaded. When loss activates the stress response, cortisol and adrenaline surge through the body.

Getting technical for a second: These chemicals heighten vigilance to keep you safe, but impair the hippocampus, the structure that helps you encode and retrieve memory. In grief, the brain is wired for survival, not for efficiency. And that certainly becomes apparent after significant loss…

The fog can feel embarrassing or scary, or worse, some people may think they have a serious medical diagnosis. Many people fear they are “going backward” or “losing themselves.” But, this altered state is an adaptive mechanism. Forgetting is the psyche’s way of sparing you from the unbearable and overwhelming re experiencing all at once. It thinks it’s doing a really good thing…

Over time, as the nervous system recalibrates, your memory begins to return. Not in this clean, linear fashion per se, and not exactly as it was before. Loss and trauma leave its fingerprint on cognition, just as it does on the heart. Certain memories may remain piercingly vivid, while others dissolve. This, too, is part of how the brain integrates trauma and attachment. What reads as fog is often the mind mid-reorganization is really sorting, shelving, and slowly making room.

The clearing comes. Not on a schedule, but it comes.

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