Mira Masukawa

Mira Masukawa decided to become a therapist at fifty, in the middle of a divorce, raising two children with no family anywhere near San Diego to lean on. She does not look back on that stretch as the hard part. She says it made her a stronger person and a better therapist.

Warm, unhurried, and genuinely without judgment, Mira has a way of making people feel met exactly where they are. She is half Mexican-American and half Asian-Indian, and she carries a deep respect for the way culture, spirituality, and family shape how each of us grieves. Whether someone heals through ritual, faith, storytelling, or simply being heard, she meets them there. She has brought that same steady presence to every season of this work, and it is the reason that people who have known her for years describe her not just by her titles or her credentials, but by a genuine heart, a free spirit, and a gift for healing. She is also the first to laugh at herself, quick to admit that her love of gardening is still a work in progress, green thumb or not. But there is nothing distant about the way she works. Therapy with her, she likes to say, does not mean sitting in silence while she nods mysteriously. After all of it, she is still someone who would rather sit beside you than across from you.

Her path into grief work began at the bedside. Before private practice, Mira worked as a bereavement counselor at a hospice, sitting with patients through their final days and then staying close to the families they left behind. What she kept noticing was how often people could not find the words, so she started giving them some, writing a series of small workbooks people could fill in between sessions. She even coined a name for the doubled feeling she saw in the room again and again: love-grieving, the deep affection and the sharp sorrow arriving at the same time. Everything she has built since has come from that same instinct. She grew a group practice, so grieving people would not have to carry it alone, and founded a nonprofit so the ones who could not afford therapy could still find help. She has said the hardest years of her own life did not leave her with regret. They made her stronger, and they taught her how to sit with everyone else's grief.

Yet there is more to Mira than the practice and the workbooks she is known for. Before any of it, she was a mother, and she raised her two children largely on her own while building everything else, something she counts among the things she is proudest of. She loves old movies, and among her peers, she is a natural connector, quietly holding together a community of hundreds of Southern California therapists. She has spent years close to other people's grief, and through all of it, she has stayed warm, funny, and easy to be around.

Most people who become grief counselors set out to become therapists. Mira Masukawa got there the long way around. She came to the work as a second career, going back to school as she neared fifty, after a divorce and while raising two children largely on her own. She already held a bachelor's in psychology from San Francisco State University, earned years earlier with a minor in World Religion, a quiet early sign of the respect for faith and ritual that now shapes how she sits with the grieving. The rest she built the hard way, logging her clinical hours while working and parenting, graduating Summa Cum Laude from Touro University Worldwide, training in EMDR, and later returning for a doctorate in marriage and family therapy.

It was at a hospice that the work found its focus. Mira did the majority of her field training sitting bedside with patients in their final days, then staying close to the families they left behind. That is where grief stopped being one subject among many and became the center of everything. She kept noticing how often people could not find the words, for their loved ones or for themselves, so she started giving them some, writing a series of small workbooks clients could fill in between sessions. She even named the feeling she saw in the room again and again, love-grieving, the deep affection and the sharp sorrow arriving at once.

She became licensed during the pandemic, and rather than wait, she opened her own practice almost immediately, needing hours flexible enough to stay home with her children. Other working mothers in the field asked to join her, and a solo practice quietly grew into a group practice. When the calls kept coming from people who needed grief therapy but could not afford it, she founded a nonprofit, California Grief Therapy Center, so the work could reach them too.

Mira came to grief work later than most, after her own upheaval and the slow work of starting over, and that may be exactly why she is so at home in it. She knows what it is to have a life come apart and to rebuild it piece by piece, and she has spent close to a decade now sitting with other people while they do the same.