Angela Schellenberg Counseling/ Coaching

Angela Schellenberg Counseling/ Coaching Angela is a mental health Trauma, Grief, and Loss Therapist , LMHC. Mother Hunger Facilitator

It’s OK if you don’t feel it in your body.Somatic work has become the default answer for almost everything in mental hea...
06/01/2026

It’s OK if you don’t feel it in your body.

Somatic work has become the default answer for almost everything in mental health right now, grief included. Calm the nervous system, release it from the body, and the loss is supposed to move. Some of grief does respond to that. The clenched jaw, the flat exhaustion, the alarm that goes off at a familiar smell. Calming that is real work and it brings relief.

But relief is not the same as a grief that has actually been processed. And the research on what moves grief points somewhere other than sensation.

The body-based trauma methods that dominate the conversation carry a thinner evidence base than their popularity suggests. A review of Somatic Experiencing found the results promising but rated the overall quality of the studies as mixed, calling for more rigorous trials.  In veterans, it has been described as having few rigorous studies and a limited evidence base. 

What has strong evidence in grief is the work of the story and the relationship. The first empirically validated treatment for complicated grief came out of Katherine Shear’s research,  and in the original trial about half of patients responded, compared with roughly a quarter in the comparison therapy.  A 2025 review of 30 randomized trials found cognitive behavioral approaches to be the most effective for prolonged grief, with trauma-focused methods like EMDR showing promise alongside them. 

There is a reason for this. Losing someone you were attached to disrupts the self-narrative you live inside,  and research on meaning reconstruction links the inability to make sense of a loss with more intense and prolonged grief.   The relationship has to be named and the story has to be told.

This is where body-only work stalls. The alarm goes quiet. The story stays frozen. And frozen grief does not stay quiet for long.

The grief that regulation cannot reach is almost always the grief you have never said out loud. A quieter body is a good start. It is not the end of the work.

Comment “worthy” for my free emotional healing kit.

Grief gets talked about like an emotion you move through. It’s also a physiological event.When you lose someone you were...
05/28/2026

Grief gets talked about like an emotion you move through. It’s also a physiological event.

When you lose someone you were attached to, you lose a person your nervous system relied on to feel safe. Neuroscience calls this co-regulation. For years their presence helped your body stay regulated. Their voice, their nearness, the rhythm of them. So when they’re gone, your system keeps searching for the input that used to steady it.

The insomnia. The racing heart. The hollow ache that has no words for it. Research links these to the brain’s stress and attachment systems, not to grieving wrong. This is also why distraction never resolves it. You cannot keep-busy your way out of a ruptured attachment bond.

Grief eases as your nervous system builds new anchors. Safe people. Steady routines. Places that hold a sense of ground for you.

You are not failing at grief. Your body is doing exactly what attachment was built to do.

Save this for a day you need the reminder.

griefjourney losingaparent traumahealing emdr griefandloss

I had the most incredible conversation with the amazing Lisa Keefauver on her podcast Grief is a Sneaky Bitch — and we w...
05/27/2026

I had the most incredible conversation with the amazing Lisa Keefauver on her podcast Grief is a Sneaky Bitch — and we went DEEP. 🖤

We talked about attachment, trauma, and grief — how our early wounds quietly shape everything: our relationships, our nervous systems, and how we show up in the world.

I shared my own personal journey and the transformative tools that have helped me (and my clients) move from surviving to truly healing. 💛

If any of this resonates with you, I'd love for you to give it a listen. 🎧

👇 DM me the word PODCAST and I'll send you the link directly!

had the most incredible conversation with the amazing Lisa Keefauver on her podcast Grief is a Sneaky Bitch — and we went DEEP. 🖤

We talked about attachment, trauma, and grief — how our early wounds quietly shape everything: our relationships, our nervous systems, and how we show up in the world.

I shared my own personal journey and the transformative tools that have helped me (and my clients) move from surviving to truly healing. 💛

If any of this resonates with you, I'd love for you to give it a listen. 🎧

👇 DM me the word PODCAST and I'll send you the link directly!

✨

The reason you feel like you’re doing grief wrong isn’t because you’re broken or stuck. It’s because grief is an attachm...
05/25/2026

The reason you feel like you’re doing grief wrong isn’t because you’re broken or stuck. It’s because grief is an attachment rupture, and our culture has no framework for what that actually means. You’re not too sensitive. You’re not behind. You’re grieving without the support that loss this big requires.

When you lose someone who was supposed to nurture, protect, and guide you, you don’t just lose a person. You lose the developmental ground you were supposed to stand on. The grief keeps reopening because every new chapter, a wedding, a baby, a hard year, a Tuesday, asks her to be there. And she’s not. That isn’t pathology. That’s the shape of the loss.

The people around you start telling you it’s been long enough. They wonder why you’re still “this way.” So you hide the grief. You perform okayness. You start managing their comfort instead of your own loss. The disconnect between what you’re carrying and what you’re allowed to show becomes its own second grief.

This is how shame becomes the lid on frozen grief. The loss doesn’t go anywhere. It goes underground, where it shows up as anxiety, exhaustion, irritability, numbness, or that quiet sense that you’re failing at something you can’t name.

The shift happens when you stop trying to finish grief and start building a life that includes it. Your job isn’t to get over her. Your job is to stop abandoning yourself inside the missing. The people around you have their own work too: learning that loving you means tolerating what you carry, not asking you to put it down.

Until that shifts, people grieving developmental loss will keep feeling like they’re doing it wrong. They aren’t. The timeline is.

Comment “CIRCLE” for more about my grief support community, where your grief doesn’t have to perform okayness to belong.

Save this for the day you need it, and share it with someone grieving without support.

grief

There is a kind of guilt nobody warns you about in grief.The guilt that shows up when you laugh.When you taste your coff...
05/23/2026

There is a kind of guilt nobody warns you about in grief.

The guilt that shows up when you laugh.

When you taste your coffee and notice it’s good.

When you forget for forty seconds, and then remember, and the remembering feels like a small betrayal.

The guilt that whispers: if I am okay for one minute, I must not have loved them enough.

Nobody tells you that the moments of relief are not the problem.

Nobody tells you that the laughing, the eating, the answering of ordinary emails, is your body keeping you alive while it does the slow work of reorganizing around their absence.

Researchers named this oscillation in 1999. They call it the dual process model. Your body has been doing it since the moment you found out.

You are not betraying your loved one when you live.

You are doing the only thing a body knows how to do when love and loss live at the same address.

Comment “tools” if your grieving and could use some things to help.

This is my mom, Golda Rae. She was gone at 47.Nobody ever asked her what happened. They only asked what was wrong with h...
05/22/2026

This is my mom, Golda Rae. She was gone at 47.

Nobody ever asked her what happened. They only asked what was wrong with her. There is a difference between those two questions, and that difference is the entire foundation of trauma-informed care.

She survived childhood harm at the hands of her sheriff stepfather. The system answered with prescriptions, hospital walls, and a label that erased her. Then she was pulled into a high-control religion that demanded her silence and called it salvation. That combination is what took her from us.

Trauma is not only what happened. It is also what did not happen. The love she did not receive. The people who did not show up. The law enforcement that did not step in. The protection that never came.

I think often about how differently her life might have turned out if even one person had asked the right question. If she had been given proper trauma care instead of being pathologized. If she had been believed instead of dismissed. If she had been treated as a survivor instead of a problem.

I became a trauma therapist partly because some part of me wanted to save her, and some part of me needed to save myself. And now, every day in my practice, I get to do for other people what nobody ever did for her. I get to ask the question. I get to sit with the answer. I get to help people recognize that what they have been carrying was never their fault, never a defect, never something wrong with them. It was something that happened to them.

That is the work. That is the whole work.

I did not learn nervous system regulation from my mom. How could I. She was not okay. But she loved me with everything she had, and that love is the reason I am still here doing this work.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Your mental health is no different than your physical health. Please take care of it. And if someone you love is struggling, ask them what happened. Not what is wrong.

It changes everything.

For Golda Rae. For every mother whose pain went unnamed. For every person still being asked the wrong question.

If any of this resonated, comment the word 15MIN below for a free consult call. Let’s talk.

Join me and wishing this incredible human a happy birthday today! She lights up every room she’s in. Grief brought us ...
05/21/2026

Join me and wishing this incredible human a happy birthday today! She lights up every room she’s in. Grief brought us together and I’m filled full of gratitude for this. Sending you big love!

Our hearts are with and Bobbi. Brian you are going to be so missed. We feel lucky enough to have witnessed first ha...
05/15/2026

Our hearts are with and Bobbi.
Brian you are going to be so missed. We feel lucky enough to have witnessed first hand your kind heart and soul in Patmos Greece and the times we saw you in Portland. The way you love Cheryl and your family is ever present. The world lost one of the good ones today and our hearts are with you all. Sending so much love. Rest in love Brian.

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