Debi Jenkins Frankle

Get To Know Calabasas Grief Therapist Debi Jenkins Frankle, a grief therapist, educator, and lifelong gardener whose personal experience with loss shaped a career devoted to helping people feel seen in their most difficult moments. Raised in Scarsdale, New York, she later moved to California, where she and her husband Mark co-founded the Calabasas Counseling and Grief Center in 1995, built around the belief that grief is too often overlooked, mislabeled, or rushed in clinical work. For more than thirty years, she has worked with individuals, couples, families, and older adults navigating loss in all its forms. She also serves as an adjunct professor at Pepperdine University, where she teaches the next generation of therapists to recognize grief as a thread running through almost every client's story. If you ask those who know her, they will tell you she is warm, grounded, and deeply present, someone who embodies what she teaches and who makes people feel seen and safe.

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.

Debi Jenkins Frankle has spent more than thirty years sitting with people in one of the most disorienting experiences a human being can go through, and the practice she built with her husband Mark reflects a very specific belief about what that work actually requires. The Calabasas Counseling and Grief Center was not designed as a general therapy practice that happens to include grief. It was founded around it, in direct response to what Debi kept seeing in her clinical work: grief that was being missed, mislabeled, rushed, or minimized by systems that did not quite know what to do with it. Her approach does not follow stage-based models. She does not promise closure. Instead, she works with individuals, couples, families, and older adults through narrative therapy, meaning reconstruction, EMDR, Accelerated Resolution Therapy, and structured writing exercises, helping people tend to what remains unfinished in their relationships. She talks about grief not only as something that follows death, but as something that lives in estrangement, illness, identity loss, and life transitions, especially when it shows up disguised as anxiety, trauma responses, or relational distress. She uses rituals as part of that process: letters written and then burned or buried, timelines drawn, loss maps created, physical practices that help people tell the truth of what they have been through. The center also offers bilingual services in Spanish and American Sign Language, and includes a golden retriever named Dottie who sits quietly with grieving clients each day, moving toward sadness before anyone speaks a word. Debi has described her philosophy simply: grief does not need to be fixed or rushed. It needs to be witnessed with compassion, honored at its own pace, and given enough room to be exactly what it is.

Debi Jenkins Frankle is a gardener, and that detail connects to something deeper than a hobby. Her father was a gardener, and she and her brother both carried that forward, continuing a family tradition of amateur gardening that links her to the people who raised her and to a particular way of being in the world that has nothing to do with words. She gardens in Los Angeles, often found with dirt under her fingernails. She does this despite living with chronic nerve damage that affects her mobility in other areas of daily life. The garden is notably one of the places where that limitation recedes, where her body cooperates in ways it does not always elsewhere. It is a quiet but significant detail about where she finds restoration. For someone whose professional life is built around language, listening carefully, choosing words with precision, sitting with the weight of other people's pain, there is something revealing about a person who goes home and puts her hands in the soil. Gardening does not ask for processing or reflection. It simply asks you to show up, tend to what is growing, and trust that something will come of it in its own time. That rhythm, patient, physical, grounded in what a parent passed down, appears to be one of the places where Debi is most simply and quietly herself.

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.