About Gisèle:

Some people find their way to grief work through a textbook. I found mine through my father.

I was in my twenties — still figuring out who I was and what I wanted — when I stepped into the role of caregiver for him. I didn't have a roadmap. What I had was love, and the sudden, disorienting weight of watching someone I depended on become someone who depended on me.

Decades later, grief came back for me in a different shape. I was in my late forties, a mother myself, when my mom's health declined. This time I was holding her needs and my children's needs at the same time — and underneath all of it, my marriage was breaking apart. Grief doesn't wait for a convenient moment. It arrives in the middle of everything else, layering itself over the losses you haven't finished processing yet.

I'm sharing this not because my story is the point — but because yours is. I believe we can only venture into difficult territory when we trust that the person holding the space has themselves been somewhere hard. This work asks you to wade into some of the deepest waters a human being can enter. I want you to know the pond has been tested. I didn't just study grief from a distance. I know this territory from the inside — which is why I can walk beside you in it.

I am a clinical social worker and grief therapist practicing telehealth across Vermont. I specialize in grief related to terminal illness, end-of-life care, caregiver burnout, and the losses that begin long before anyone dies — watching a parent disappear into dementia, receiving a diagnosis that changes everything, holding someone you love as they move toward death.

My clinical approach is science-based, drawing from Acceptance & Commitment Therapy for Grief, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, and Motivational Interviewing. I have over twenty years of mindfulness and yoga practice and am also trained in Brass Ring for dementia. I bring all of that — the research, the frameworks, the embodied practice — into work that is ultimately about one thing: helping you find a way to carry what you're carrying, with more support and less isolation.

Before becoming a therapist, I was a care coordinator for older adults, a group facilitator in senior living communities, a yoga teacher, and a journalist. I'm bilingual in French and English. I grew up in Québec and have made my home in Burlington, Vermont.

I completed my Master of Social Work with a Certificate in Mental Health Practice at Simmons University in 2025, and I am currently working toward licensure as an independent clinical social worker (LICSW). I am rostered in Vermont as an Allied Mental Health Practitioner.

If you're here, something hard is happening.

Maybe you're watching someone you love decline, and no one around you quite understands the particular weight of that. Maybe you've been told your own life is shorter than you expected. Maybe someone died, and the world moved on before you were ready.

You don't have to have it together to reach out. You just have to be willing.

I'm here.

"Francophone? Je suis là. Contactez-moi en français."