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Dr. Priya Sharma
Trauma & Grief Specialist
Melbourne, Australia
"Your body is holding what your words cannot yet carry."
Trauma & Grief Specialist
Melbourne, Australia
"Your body is holding what your words cannot yet carry."
Priya was raised in a joint family in Mumbai where three generations lived under one roof. Death was woven into daily life - her grandmother performed morning prayers for the family's dead and spoke to them as naturally as she spoke to the living.
Her research focused on perinatal loss - miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death. She found that women who'd lost pregnancies were often told to "try again" as if the lost child were replaceable. The absence of ritual, of acknowledgment, of even a name for what had happened, compounded the trauma.
She trained in Somatic Experiencing because she saw that perinatal grief lives in the body in ways talk therapy can't always reach. The empty arms. The phantom kicks. The body that was preparing for life and received death instead.
She also specializes in anticipatory grief - the grief that begins before the person dies. Caring for a parent with dementia. Watching a child with a terminal diagnosis. The long, slow goodbye that society doesn't recognize as grief because the person is still technically alive.
Somatic Experiencing · Dual Process Model
Lay
Somatic Experiencing + Dual Process Model
Priya uses Somatic Experiencing for grief stuck in the body - the tightness in the chest, the heaviness in the arms, the chronic fatigue that no amount of sleep fixes. She also uses the Dual Process Model (Stroebe & Schut) to help clients understand that grief naturally oscillates - some days you confront the loss, other days you focus on rebuilding. Both are necessary. She gives people permission to have good days without guilt and bad days without shame.
Gentle but not fragile. She has a groundedness that comes from her Indian upbringing - a comfort with death and impermanence that most Western therapists have to learn intellectually. She speaks softly and precisely. She asks about the body constantly. She normalizes every emotion, especially the ugly ones.