Deftly navigate
life changes
grief and loss
personal and professional caregiving.
Strengthen your emotional freedom.
Find and maintain your flow state.
Have you been the one to hold it together but now find yourself hitting a wall in your ability to weather the newest storms? Maybe you have a good understanding of yourself already but it isn't fully translating into a different lived experience. Or maybe your whole life is changing due to a major loss and you must find a way to re-create a life.
Righting the ship becomes even more difficult when you are going through a loss of a person, family or community because your relationships literally co-regulate your nervous system. Whether the fading or lost relationship was uplifting or not, your whole nervous system has to make major changes to navigate life in a different way and your brain literally has to grow new brain cells to accommodate this reality.
The question is, when you come out the other side, what do you want that to look like? Do you want to leave that outcome to happenstance or be more deliberate in the cultivation of your future experience?
Over time, stress chemicals from TRAUMA, CHRONIC STRESS and/or GRIEF eat away at neuronal (brain) connections. It becomes more and more difficult to have a whole-brained approach to new challenges. We find ourselves oscillating between a mostly rational problem-solving part of the brain and the part of the brain preoccupied with survival (responsible for fight/flight/freeze/fawn). When we are in that more survival part, it is hard to access what we know to be true and what skills to use--panic and/or brain fog takes over. This explains why it is difficult to think our way into a calm nervous system when that nervous system knows exactly how badly things can go wrong.
Having worked for hospice as a medical social worker and bereavement therapist (even during the height of the COVID crisis), I learned from my own personal and professional caregiving experience and that of my coworkers' and clients' just how much nervous system strength it takes to show up day after day. Many of us hit a wall and deep fatigue and/or panic eventually settled in--preventing us from recognizing ourselves as the functional humans we once were. That doesn't mean we are weak or have lost our way. That means we have been holding a heavy cast iron pot full of chili for too long and our muscles are starting to shake. We are trying so hard not to drop it and make mess but things cannot continue the way they are.
As a master's professor of social work specializing in grief, loss, life transitions and panic disorders, we will have access to the latest research on what interventions can integrate the brain back into a whole. As a part-time resident of a meditation center and a former philosophy professor, we can also make use of Eastern and Western approaches to well-being. Did you know that while the West considers the brain to be the driving force behind nervous system regulation, the East considers the heart to be its driving force? Scientific research using biofeedback proves harmony in the heart matters just as much as harmony of the mind. We will explore balancing the nervous system with the brain and heart and employ our innate existential and spiritual depths to create a fuller, more meaningful life.
Clinical researchers studying trauma provide us with an understanding of how important the body-mind connection really is to healing. We will work with trauma-informed therapy, including brain-spotting and somatic nervous system regulation techniques. In addition, we will make use research on awe to heal our relationships with ourselves and with others in our complex world. At the same time, we will craft new ways of thinking and experiencing our challenges and sustainable ways to accessing your strengths. In this work together, clients have proven we CAN live a sustainable life with a compassionate, open heart and empathetic mind.
"Anne has an incredibly warm and welcoming presence, which I think is extremely important when going through something as vulnerable as therapy. She's also intuitive, asks thought-provoking questions, and any homework or tips she gave me were always spot on."
"Warm, accepting and wise. She is extremely supportive and at the same time encourages me to consider alternative views. She has a way of offering questions that help me get right to the heart of the matter. I have left each session with some new coping strategy or insight. Her support has helped me feel like I can breathe easily again."
"Anne Grenchus has helped me re-examine events from my past under new light. She is very empathetic and she employs that quality combined with diverse and integrated training. I'm often surprised at the insights she unveils in our sessions."
A multi-faceted, wrap-around therapeutic approach
Improve your relationship with yourself and others while navigating significant life changes, providing caregiving (professional or personal) & processing grief. This trauma-informed therapist uses researched techniques that can change how sensitive your nervous system is to stress.
After years of working for hospice home care, Anne opened her private practice to help people find ways to invest in life again despite challenges posed by life transitions of all kinds.
Sessions employ:
brainspotting
to process trauma held in the body that keeps kicking the nervous system into fight, flight, freeze or fawn
trauma-informed interventions
like HeartMath to enhance connection, increase mindfulness, access intuition, and increase emotion regulation within oneself and in relationships
existential and/or spirituality-based psychotherapy
to enhance meaning-creation, value expression, and decision-making
Continue to make progress even after the session by employing homework assignments tailored to your specific way of understanding the world and your needs.
In addition to 1:1 therapy, Anne teaches seasoned social workers & master's students trauma-informed death, dying, and grief therapy skills. She provides professional supervision to other clinical social workers. She trained in gerontology, hospice care/palliative, existential phenomenology, and childhood neglect/abuse/social stigmas that shape attachment and coping styles.
Podcast Interview with Anne Grenchus LCSW
Anne teaches continuing education credit webinars to colleagues and master’s level social work classes on loss and grief. Here is an interview of Anne discussing her webinar Creating Meaning out of Grief: How to Holistically Create Answers to 15 Common Grief Questions.
Living in New York, New Jersey or Vermont?
Private Pay Rates
30 min individual therapy — $60
45 min individual therapy — $120
60 min individual therapy — $180
90 min group therapy — $60
60 min professional supervision — $120
all session are online at this time
Let’s work together.
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What does it look like to
strengthen your
emotional freedom & wisdom
with science + intuition + compassion + philosophy?
Science
There are proven body-based nervous system “hacks” that help with emotional regulation in the short term. There are robust interventions that can even change your nervous system baseline over time. Humans are complex survival machines that coordinate responses to our internal and external environments based on information fed to the mid-brain. These signals include ones from the heart, lungs, muscles and other parts of the brain. By learning to modify how one part of the body is experiencing and responding to stress, you are going to necessarily shift the whole system towards a more regulated state. HeartMath techniques, for example, can shift heart rate variability in such a way that the entire nervous system responds with a more relaxed and expansive way of being in the world.
In order to employ your whole brain to improve your experience of yourself and others, that brain must be “integrated.” In other words, each part of the brain specializes in its own way of processing information and then those parts work together to create a coordinated approach. However, when you have been stressed for a long time, stress chemicals like cortisol actually eat away at the bridges between the different parts of the brain. Communication between the parts breaks down. You may find yourself feeling like a ping pong ball that is moving from highly emotional to hyper rational with no experiences in between. Brainspotting is one technique that helps facilitate brain communication repair/neural integration. Clients report an improvement not only within session but over time. Brainspotting uses the way the brain accesses sensory, behavioral and emotional information in the service of repairing the brain’s communication system.
Even more, parts of the brain responsible for attachment can be brought back into conversation with more adult parts of the brain that literally developed later in your brain’s maturation process. The adult part of the brain isn’t done being formed until the age of 28! Internal family systems and attachment theory facilitate a repair in the relationship between younger and older parts of our brain. This communication is integral to sorting out how to approach a challenge. We may find that different parts of us call the shots at different times—maybe one part of you wants freedom while another wants deep connection and even still another part wants to know it is on the “right” path. Instead of having to choose one or another, internal family systems provides the possibility of coordination between all these dimensions of the self.
Intuition
To bring your whole coordinated self to a challenge means to bring not only your rational and emotional dimensions but also your intuitive dimension. Intuition includes your awareness of how the inside of your body feels in response to changes in your world. Maybe your stomach just dropped or your heart fluttered in response to a change in your environment. However, if your nervous system has been trained over time to go into freeze or fawn to maintain safety, your perception of your own bodily internal states may be very difficult to access. Intuition is needed for a whole approach to challenges. Thinking, thinking, thinking can only get you so far before you are thinking yourself in circles. Emotional depth can only get you so far before you feel trapped in a constrictive emotional reality. Intuition is a dimension of experience that can contribute another way of knowing to the mix. There are therapeutic exercises that can strengthen your felt sense of self including mindfulness practices.
Another way people use the word intuition is to talk about their sense of their own possible futures. Although we could intuit that something bad is going to happen, we need to keep in mind that nervous system state (flight, fight, freeze and fawn) shapes the stories we end up telling ourselves about what has happened and what is possible. Our brains have a negative thought basis which has kept us as a species alive for millennia. However, if you don’t want to keep replaying what has come before, exacerbate it, or project it into the future, a more aspirational approach to life is needed. Intuitive knowing can help identify what you feel drawn to, what is in alignment with your deepest virtues and values and what you want for yourself/your life. Maybe this is quite difficult right now. Well, brainspotting and existential psychoanalysis can facilitate identifying where you might want to go. Brainspotting might also help to grow the brain cells that will make it more possible to head in that more positive direction.
Without our intuition, we get stuck on a treadmill of rationality and/or are stuck in emotional lock down.
Philosophy
The quality of the questions we ask determine the quality of the answers we find. Not only have we been socially taught what questions matter by our ancestors, we have also inherited biological strategies of survival in our DNA expression that are a response to those survival questions.
Remaining actively curious and open to the mysteries of being human help us live a full rather than fearful life. Exploring your orientation toward your world existentially or spiritually helps to contextualize and refine your approach to life. Our lives will always be more than we can possibly understand. A philosophical approach can provide a method by which we can maintain a more expansive and experimental attitude toward the challenges and growth opportunities we face. It can even offer inroads to joy.
In this time of oppression and unprecedented existential anxiety, models of knowledge that help us survive and deftly navigate these challenges prove valuable to clients. We might consult with Viktor Frankl who explored what it looks like to truly live rather than merely survive in situations where we have very few choices and a suppressed expression of one’s identity. We might consult with Aristotle in our exploration of what flourishing looks like for you. We might consult spiritual philosophers of your faith tradition that hold the memory of what it looked like for our ancestors to survive all kinds of threats to our lives—lack of meaning/apathy being one of them. Or perhaps you are spiritual by being aware of your own electromagnetic energy that of those electromagnetic energies around you and we would explore models of healing related to this approach
As a deeply social and oriented being meaning-maker, how do you relate to something greater than yourself?
Compassion
The expression of your compassion is also a skill you carry with you wherever you go. Compassion is not just an innate ability. The wise expression of compassion for self and others can be cultivated. Minimize risk of self-abandonment/neglect, co-dependence, caregiver burnout and compassion fatigue. These skills can be developed, for example, through the use of traditional meditation techniques such as tonglen. Processing trauma that overwhelms your nervous system leading to emotional self-isolation and healing complex PTSD created by repeated adverse experiences in childhood can also be key. As a professional caregiver, there are studied techniques on how to effectively communicate with people who have serious mental health issues and dementia. It also helps to employ exercises that increase your lived gratitude for the strengths contained in your emotional intelligence. Feel more empowered, rather than dogged, by your compassion.
