Perinatal Grief Counselor
Pascale Vermont, PhD
"We did not want to have his loss define
us as broken people for the rest of our lives." S
Pascale Vermont is a licensed clinical psychologist based in San Francisco, CA. Pascale's main professional activity is as a grief counselor to bereaved parents after a pregnancy or infancy loss.
About
Those first days, sorrow's pain
was tangible:
an amputation, a dismemberment,
the gap so great, no sobs,
children, friends
would fill its space:
a broken heart is body's pain indeed.
Days pass, and nights, flowing into weeks;
milk no longer spills
with my tears.
Hours once spent weeping
now weave into patterns,
our words of grief and love
now reach for friendship's clasp,
now look ahead...
-Lois Lake Church
"You have stood strongly next to J and me as we took baby steps forward, which then progressed into strides from one milestone to the next. Those steps were facilitated by your guidance and dedication to helping us find ourselves -- something that we had thought we had lost when we lost our baby girl. You gave us hope, allowed us to hear our own voices, and taught us that we are not alone during these painful and trying times. It is with your help that J and I stand tall, now holding D, into the light that we believed had vanished from our lives."
Anonymous client
Pregnancy & Infancy Loss Grief Counseling
Pascale offers bereavement counseling to parents who lose a child during pregnancy, at birth or in early infancy. At a time of great pain and loneliness, she provides emotional support as well as education about the grief process and how to handle the many consequences of the loss, such as:
-
How to guide family and friends to support the couple.
-
How to cope with different grieving styles.
-
How to manage the anxiety of a pregnancy after a loss.
-
How to memorialize the baby.
Listen to a recent interview (starts at 1:30) with Pascale about her work with pregnancy and infancy loss.
How do you survive the unimaginable loss of a baby during pregnancy or infancy? From the early days of shock and devastation through the following phases of grief over time, Pascale Vermont, PhD, offers insight and recommendations for bereaved parents, their family and friends, as well as medical providers. Vermont, a clinical psychologist with a specialty in grief counseling, has guided over a hundred couples who have lost a baby during pregnancy by termination or fetal demise, by stillbirth, or by death in the first few weeks or months of life.
Surviving the Unimaginable Book
What Pascale provided in her grief counseling practice to bereaved adults: A safe place to express the multitude of feelings experienced by the bereaved - sadness, doubts, guilt, anger, moodiness...
Over time small victories build upon each other until they tend to dominate, and the moments of respite between the waves of pain lengthen. Pascale meets clients in her home office in San Francisco and has worked over Skype with people as far away as India, Pakistan and South Sudan.
Read a summary and listen to an interview with Pascale by the Half Hour Intern podcast.
Adult Grief Counseling
"Truly our conversations over time scraped me off the emotional depth of despair and helped me start to look up."
Anonymous client
NGO Crisis Counseling
For 11 years Pascale offered crisis counseling to expatriate staff of Relief International based in 16 countries over Skype when they experienced a traumatic experience while in the field or suffered a personal crisis. She was deployed to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake to provide grief counseling to civilians and hospital staff who had lost many family members and friends, and did similar work in Tacloban, Philippines, after the 2013 Typhoon Haiyan devastated the area.
In 2019 she served as a psychologist to West African refugees on Samos Island, Greece, who had fled their home countries because of extreme violence and threats of death. She also trained local staff in Bangladesh who work with Rohingya refugees in Stress Management, Resilience and Self-Care, and met with them individually for counseling. She provided similar training and counseling to local staff in Juba and Maban, South Sudan, and in Nairobi Kenya.
Read more about Pascale's grief counseling work for the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
For 10 years Pascale served as a disaster mental health volunteer and lead of the San Francisco mental health team for the American Red Cross. She provided crisis and grief counseling to survivors of tornadoes, hurricanes and floods in Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas and to the victims and families of the Asiana Airlines plane crash at San Francisco International Airport.
Read about Pascale's experience helping a young boy during the aftermath of a tornado in Arkansas.
Disaster Mental Health
"I want to thank you for your amazing emotional support. What impressed me was not only your professional expertise but, more importantly, your natural care, attention and compassion."
K
Palliative Care Support
Some highlights of Pascale's work in Palliative Care:
-
Volunteer with No One Dies Alone program at Laguna Honda Rehabilitation Center, San Francisco. Led bereavement groups and sat with actively dying patients.
-
Palliative care counselor at Kaiser Permanente Hospitals in Vallejo and San Francisco.
-
Volunteer and instructor for San Francisco Crisis Care working in partnership with law enforcement officials and providing emotional support and practical assistance to families after a sudden death.