Ron Gray

Ron Gray had spent years as a therapist, sitting with other people through the worst days of their lives, before he learned what it was to be one of them. All of his training, it turned out, did little to soften his own loss.

Warm, faith-centered, and honest about his own hardest stretch, Ron is a Christian counselor who folds a person's faith and values into the work rather than setting them aside. He does not pretend that being a therapist made him immune to grief. For a while after his wife died, he settled for just existing, not really living, putting on a brave face for others while trying to convince himself he was okay, and he was not. He tells that part plainly, because he believes grieving people deserve to hear it from someone who has been there rather than someone who has only read about it. He has carried that honesty through years of grief and trauma work, and it is the reason people tend to describe him less by his credentials than by the sense that he genuinely understands. He is a licensed marriage and family therapist, the founder of The Haven, a spiritual retreat center in Orange, California, and a husband again after meeting his wife Anne-Marie through their shared work with the grieving. And he is still, after all of it, someone who believes a broken heart can be mended.

His path into this work began with the loss he never saw coming. Ron and his wife had been married thirty years when cancer took her, far too young, after a four-year fight they threw everything into. Even as a skilled therapist, he was stunned that she was gone and not coming back. Deep in that loss, doing the usual things to numb and distract himself, he finally went looking for help. He read about grief, joined a grief group, and worked with a therapist, and then a friend pointed him toward a grief specialist, a kind of help he had not even known existed. She handed him a few tools that actually made a difference, and that small shift changed everything. Working on his own grief led him to seek more training so he could do the same for others, and eventually he rebuilt his entire practice around loss, grief, and the trauma that comes with them. Along the way he met Anne-Marie Lockmyer, another grief specialist with a story much like his own, and their shared work quietly became a shared life. To anyone in the middle of it now, Ron offers the thing he once could not believe himself. Life can be good again, he says. There is hope and healing for a broken heart, and your heart can be mended.

Ron Gray had been a therapist for years before grief became his life's work, and back then grief was not the center of it. He built his practice around couples and families, the distressed marriages hoping to repair what had frayed, the parents and teenagers trying to understand each other, the individuals working through the hard transitions of a life. He did his graduate work at Chapman University, earned his license as a marriage and family therapist, and logged thousands of hours across a wide range of settings, with college students, the homeless, adolescents, blended families, and people in residential treatment. In 2014 he co-founded The Haven, a spiritual retreat center in Orange, California, built for people who wanted their faith woven into their healing rather than left at the door.

Then came the loss that redirected everything. When his wife of thirty years died of cancer after a four-year fight, Ron discovered what no amount of training had taught him, that knowing grief professionally is not the same as surviving it. His own way through began with a referral to a grief specialist whose tools made a real difference, and that experience pulled him toward deeper training in loss and trauma. Slowly he came to see that his whole practice needed to change, and he decided to specialize in grief, loss, and the related trauma that lingers long after a death, folding it into the Christian counseling he had always practiced.

That decision reshaped everything about how he worked. Grief and trauma became the center of his practice through Christian Grief & Trauma Counseling and the retreats he now hosts on the grounds of The Haven, where he facilitates recovery groups, leads healing retreats for widows and families, including The Next Chapter Retreat for Widows, speaks openly on grief and loss, and trains other therapists to offer the kind of help he once had to go looking for. It was this work that brought Anne-Marie Lockmyer into his life, a grief specialist whose story mirrored his own so closely that their collaboration became a marriage in 2020. Together they run the Grief & Trauma Healing Network, and out of the same conviction that drew them both to the work, they built MyGriefCare, a free online program for the people they kept meeting who could not find or afford grief support anywhere else.

Ron did not plan to specialize in grief. He was a skilled therapist who believed he understood loss, until it happened to him. What he learned climbing out of it became the work he now spends his days on, handing the same way out to the people who come after him.