Why & How To Become A Grief Counselor

Most people find their way to grief work through a loss of their own. Bonnie Herrmann found it at home. Her mom was a hospice nurse when Bonnie was growing up, and watching that daily, unshaken compassion for people at the end of life left a mark she has never tried to shake.. She calls it something she has "proudly absorbed." While she is fortunate to still have her mom with her, she has since counseled many who cannot say the same, and she credits that early example for a career she describes as the only one she ever wanted.

The path started before the credentials did. As a teenager in Texas, she spent six summers volunteering at grief camps for children ages six to thirteen, sitting with kids who were carrying losses far too big for their age. By the time she enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, the direction was already set. She earned her Bachelor of Social Work there in 2011 and stayed to complete her Master of Science in Social Work in 2013, then took her training into the places where grief actually lives: a dementia care community near Chicago, six years as a hospice social worker and bereavement specialist in Denver, oncology at a Colorado cancer center, and palliative care teams along the way. She became a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Colorado in 2016, and later earned the Advanced Certified Hospice and Palliative Social Worker credential, a recognition reserved for clinicians who have made end-of-life care their specialty rather than a sideline.

More than a decade in, she says she enjoys leaning into some of the toughest conversations most of us will ever have. That is not something a person learns in graduate school. It started with a hospice nurse who came home every night still caring, and a daughter who was paying attention.

Debi Jenkins Frankle's understanding of grief did not begin in a graduate classroom or a clinical supervision session. It began when she was seven years old, when her newborn sister died. The loss settled into her family in ways that would take decades to fully surface and name the quiet kind of grief that rearranges a household without anyone calling it what it is. Years later, while she was in the final semester of her graduate program, preparing to become a therapist, her mother was diagnosed with liver cancer. Two weeks after the diagnosis, her mother was gone. She has described that period as the event that turned her world upside down. It was after that loss that something shifted in how she saw her clients: she began noticing grief woven into almost every story she encountered in the patients she worked with in hospital settings, in the anxiety and relational distress people brought into her private practice. Loss was everywhere, and most of it was going unnamed. That recognition that unrecognized grief underlies so much of what people struggle with became the foundation of everything she built afterward. But what shaped her most deeply was not simply what happened to her. It was what she learned to carry because of it. She has spoken directly about a belief that runs through her entire approach: a therapist should not ask clients to do work they have not done themselves. That conviction did not come from a training manual. It came from knowing what it actually feels like to be standing in the middle of loss with no clear path forward and from choosing, over the following decades, to stay honest about that experience rather than set it aside.

Debi Jenkins Frankle was raised in Scarsdale, New York, in an environment shaped by structure, education, routine, and the quiet expectation that life would unfold in relatively predictable ways. It was the kind of suburban upbringing where stability was assumed rather than questioned, where families built their lives around schools, schedules, neighborhoods, and the ordinary rhythms of daily life. But even within that atmosphere of order, grief entered early. When Debi was seven years old, her newborn sister died, a loss that settled into the family in ways she would only fully understand many years later. What stands out in the way she reflects on that experience is not dramatic tragedy, but emotional silence, the recognition that grief often changes a household quietly, altering relationships and emotional patterns without always being openly acknowledged. That contrast seems important in understanding who she became. She grew up in a world that valued steadiness and emotional composure, yet some of the most formative experiences of her life involved loss that could not simply be organized away. Long before she became a therapist, she was already learning how grief can exist beneath otherwise functional lives, how pain often moves quietly through families, shaping people even when nobody quite names it directly. Her later move from New York to California did not erase that formation. The groundedness, attentiveness, and emotional steadiness people now associate with her work appear connected to those early years. In many ways, the person who now sits with grieving families professionally still carries the emotional architecture of the world she was raised in: structured on the surface, but deeply aware of what people may be carrying underneath it.