I use initials. I prefer it that way.
I'm not a practitioner. I don't guide people through grief circles. I don't run workshops or lead ceremonies. What I do is read — carefully, extensively, and with a specific question in mind: what does the behavioral science actually say about why ritual works for grief, and why does it seem to work whether or not the person believes in anything?
My background is in behavioral science. I spent years studying how humans make decisions under uncertainty, why certain behaviors persist across generations and cultures, and what conditions allow people to change deeply embedded emotional patterns. Grief kept showing up as a special case — a state that seemed to resist the normal tools of behavioral change, and yet that also, in certain circumstances, yielded to very specific kinds of structured action. That specificity interested me.
The question I kept returning to: why do contemplative traditions that developed independently — Buddhist mourning practices, West African ancestral ceremonies, ancient Greek death rituals, Indigenous North American grief protocols — converge on such similar elements? Physical objects. Specific movements. The involvement of water or fire or earth. Repetition. Witnesses. The thing that surprised me, looking at them comparatively, was not the surface diversity. It was the structural similarity.
Polyvagal theory gave me a partial answer. If the nervous system needs to feel safe before it can process stored emotion, then rituals that involve grounded touch, rhythmic movement, and a contained social environment aren't arbitrary. They're providing the physiological conditions that grief processing requires. The ancestors who designed these rituals didn't have Porges' framework. But they figured out, over centuries of observation, what worked.
IFS offered another piece. The model of parts — the idea that we hold grief in discrete, compartmentalized ways that can be approached, not forced — explains something I had observed in the behavioral literature about why some people can't complete grief even with sustained effort. It's not a lack of will. It's that a part of the system is holding something that feels too threatening to release. The mechanism is behavioral, not mystical.
I write for people who want to understand the mechanism. Not because the mechanism is the whole story — it isn't — but because for some people, understanding why something works is what allows them to trust it enough to try it. I am one of those people. I am not someone who was ever going to take something on faith. I needed the research first.
I cite sources obsessively. I link to primary literature. I say when I don't know something. I say when the evidence is preliminary versus well-established. I don't exaggerate what the research shows to make it sound more compelling. It's compelling enough on its own.
I keep to initials because I am a private person writing about sensitive topics. The research I cite is real. The observations I make about that research are mine. That's what I'm offering here.