I’m Angela. A licensed trauma therapist and a trusted voice on grief and mother loss, dedicated to helping you heal the wounds mother loss leaves behind.
Angela Schellenberg is a licensed grief and trauma therapist and coach based in the Los Angeles area, specializing in mother loss, the mother wound, and attachment trauma.
Verified on Psychology Today →
Through the Grief, Trauma & Your Mama™ podcast and community, grief and trauma coaching, therapy for clients in California, Washington, Arizona, and Florida, and EMDR intensives and equine retreats at Shakti Ranch in Malibu, I help women face the grief they set aside because life didn’t stop.
In fact, here are a few ways I might be able to help.
I wasn’t born knowing how to hold any of this. It wasn’t credentials or a tidy, healed life that brought me here. In fact, my own grief arrived long before any of my training did.
I began losing my mother when I was seven, long before she died. I knew she loved me deeply. The trauma she lived through in her own childhood made it hard for her, and some of what she never got to process grew heavier over time. By the time I was 22, both of my parents were gone. Nobody handed me a map for that kind of loss, so I did what so many women do. I stayed busy, I stayed strong, and I kept going because life didn’t stop.
What I learned, slowly and personally, is that grief doesn’t wait forever. It returns, gently or loudly, until it is finally witnessed. And when it finally was, I learned the truth that now sits at the center of everything I do.
My mom’s love taught me what a mother’s presence means. Losing her taught me what its absence does. My mission is to help you believe your wounds are healable too, and to give you the training, the tools, and the steady company that healing asks for.
my mama and me
People often ask, “Angela, how did you end up doing this work?”
The honest answer is that the work found me first. Losing my parents young left me with questions that followed me into adulthood. Why do some losses echo for decades? Why does the body remember what the mind works so hard to set aside?
Before I became a therapist, I was an early childhood teacher educator, so I came to this work already understanding how children grow and develop.
Those questions led me to attachment theory, to nervous system work, and eventually to a license and a practice. I have sat with more than 500 women as a licensed therapist, trained in EMDR and grounded in attachment-focused care.
Along the way the work grew bigger than the therapy room. It became a podcast, a community, equine assisted intensives at a ranch in Malibu, and courses that reach women I will never meet in person.
I have taught at the Omega Institute, and today I co-lead grief retreats with Claire Bidwell Smith. I have co-facilitated early mother loss retreats with Hope Edelman, and I have spoken at SAG-AFTRA’s mental health forum for performers, and shared my story on podcasts including Senseless with Erika Mahoney, Beyond Well with Sheila Hamilton, Grief Is a Sneaky Bitch, and The Art of Losing. My work with survivors of traumatic loss has also been featured in The Trace. I am a trained Mother Hunger® Facilitator, taught by Kelly McDaniel.
One more thing, so you are not surprised. If we work together online, you will probably meet Steve, Ruby and Scarlett, my three pugs. They are usually snoring somewhere in the background of my Zoom sessions.
Maybe your loss is recent, or maybe it is older and harder to name. Maybe you never had the mother you needed in the first place. Either way, you have probably been strong for a very long time, and some part of you is tired of carrying this alone.
From the therapy room, to EMDR intensives and equine assisted work at Shakti Ranch in Malibu, to a podcast and a community of women healing mother loss together, everything I have lived and learned keeps pointing to one truth…
Some grief lives deeper than words can reach. Horses meet you there. They read the nervous system underneath your composure and respond to what is true, not what is performed. In the round pen at Shakti Ranch, women feel their guard drop in ways that talk alone rarely touches.
Explore Equine Sessions
A full day in the Malibu hills to give your grief the room it has been waiting for. EMDR, somatic work, and time with the horses, woven into one unhurried day. For the woman who is done circling the same wound an hour at a time.
Learn About Intensives
Healing alongside women who carry the same kind of loss changes something solo work cannot. Retreats weave group work, rest, and time with the horses into days that ask nothing of you except honesty, at whatever pace your grief allows.
Ask About RetreatsAs seen on CBS Sunday Morning
A national conversation about mother loss, with the author of Motherless Daughters. It is the work of my life, on a morning show couch. Read the CBS News feature.
I’m here to walk with you. My practice is built on warmth, steadiness, and a deep respect for what your story has asked of you.
Through therapy, the podcast, and everything else we share here, the intention is the same. To help you carry what happened without it carrying you.
Whether your loss is recent or has been waiting quietly for years, this is a place where it can finally be witnessed.
Yes, this is also my livelihood. Therapy is how I keep the lights on, and I am proud to earn a living doing work I believe in. But so much of what I make is offered free: the podcast, the community, the guide, these words.
Take whatever serves you, at whatever pace your grief allows. There are no timelines here.
If you have read this far, thank you. I hope this is just the beginning.
Thank you for being here. Truly. Whatever brought you to this page, I am glad your path crossed mine, and I would be honored to walk part of it with you.
With love, AngelaGrounding practices, honest words about grief and healing, and gentle reminders you can actually use, delivered to your inbox every week.
Hi, I’m here to help.
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This is a simple guide, not a person. For anything personal, Angela would love to hear from you directly.