Ep. 23 The Invisible Grief: Honoring Perinatal Loss & Learning to Grieve Together with Jessica Malmberg LMFT

In this deeply moving episode, Dr. Patty and Lizzie sit down with Jessica Malmberg, LMFT, a licensed marriage and family therapist who brings both professional expertise and lived experience to supporting families through miscarriage, stillbirth, infant loss, and fertility struggles.

This conversation is medicine for anyone navigating perinatal loss, supporting someone who is, or healing from childhood grief that was never fully witnessed. We explore how grief lives in the body, how it shapes our parenting, why rituals matter, and how nature, community, and attachment all play vital roles in metabolizing loss.

In This Episode We Explore:

1. Why perinatal loss is uniquely painful: the invisibility of grief when others never met your baby
2. How to support children through sibling loss
3. The power of play therapy and sand tray work for kids processing death
4. Why anniversaries are so potent — and how to plan rituals around them
5. How attachment styles shape the way we grieve
6. The difference between isolating and intentional solitude in grief work
7. The myth that "being fine" is the goal — and why metabolizing grief requires both constriction and expansion

Favorite Episode Ideas

"Grief needs to be digested, like compost! It mixes with everything. We're starving from those nutrients. Composting grief can actually feed us."

"Our DNA is made for a village. That's how we're supposed to heal."

About Our Guest

Jessica Malmberg, LMFT, is a trauma-informed psychotherapist with over 25 years in the healing arts and extensive training in grief work with Francis Weller. She specializes in supporting women and families through miscarriage, stillbirth, infant loss, and fertility challenges. An infant loss survivor herself, Jessica integrates brain spotting, co-created grief rituals, and depth-oriented approaches to help clients restore grounding, meaning, and presence. She offers therapy, grief retreats, and professional trainings in Northern California and online.

Links & Resources

→ Jessica's website: https://jessicamalmberg.com

→ Follow Jessica on Instagram: @jessicamalmbergtherapy

→ Francis Weller's work on communal grief rituals

→ Sacred Treehouse programs: https://sacredtreehouse.org

If this episode spoke to you, please leave a review and share it with someone who might need to hear that their grief is valid, their baby mattered, and healing is possible — not by rushing through, but by allowing the depth.