Upcoming Grief Workshops
2nd Annual Mother's Day Gathering, Grief Support for All
Location: Blue Door Theater, Culver City
Date: Sunday, May 11
Time: 1:00 - 4:30 PM PT
Facilitator: Brian Stefan, LCSW
Learn more about this event, head towards the bottom of this page.
Facing Financial Fear, a Journey through Work, Worth & Wreckage
Location: Blue Door Theater, Culver City
Date: Sunday, May 18
Time: 1:00 - 4:30 PM PT
Facilitator: Brian Stefan, LCSW
Featuring: Nikki Lewis (Sage Haven Therapy), Suzy Taylor, trauma-informed financial planner offering tools, insight & post-event support
We use Green Bottle Pricing to reflect different realities—financial strain, stability, and surplus
Because healing shouldn’t be a luxury:
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$85 – Community Rate (For those under financial strain.)
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$150 – Sustainable Rate (This helps cover the true cost and keeps CGC going strong.)
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$225 – Supporter Rate (This helps subsidize others' healing journeys while funding more community offerings
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$350 – Patron Rate (This generous rate sustains our mission and makes you a quiet hero behind the scenes.)
This is not talk therapy.
There’s no clipboard between us—just heart, truth, and a circle that holds what hurts and what heals.
🎭 The Catharsis Theater — Community Events
Grief Deserves a Stage... And So Do You
At the California Grief Center, we don’t ask people to “move on.” We invite them to move through. Together. Tenderly. Truthfully.
Catharsis Theater is our signature experience. Not a performance, but a release. Not therapy, but a kind of soul medicine.
Rooted in the practice of psychodrama techniques and shaped by decades of collective grief work, it’s a space where pain becomes presence, silence becomes speech, and stories—long held in the body—finally find breath.
What Is Catharsis Theater?
Long before therapy offices and diagnostic codes, people gathered in circles. They sang, moved, wept, and told stories—not to perform, but to survive. To heal. To find one another in the dark.
Catharsis Theater revives this ancient, communal practice. It blends the raw honesty of improvisational storytelling with the deep wisdom of ritual and group healing.
You won’t be asked to memorize lines or play a role. Instead, you’ll be gently guided into shared, spontaneous expressions—using voice, movement, metaphor, and memory to loosen what’s been locked inside.
Since 2023, we’ve hosted over 30 sessions in the U.S. and abroad—from quiet living rooms and university classrooms to hotel ballrooms and black box theaters. Each one has been unique.
Each one is sacred.
Each one reminds us of something ancient and essential:
Grief was never meant to be carried in isolation.
Who Is It For?
If you’re navigating heartbreak, identity shifts, major life transitions, or just carrying a quiet ache—this is for you.
Whether you're:
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Grieving a person, relationship, role, or version of yourself
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Living in the in-between—no longer who you were, not yet sure who you’re becoming
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A helper or healer who holds space for others but rarely for yourself
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Longing for connection, expression, and something that feels like real relief
You’re welcome here. Truly.
What You Can Expect
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A trauma-informed space where no one is forced, and everyone is honored
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No “acting” required—just honest expression in whatever form feels true
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Real community—where witnessing makes grief more bearable, and maybe even beautiful
What People Say
“This wasn’t just cathartic. It was clarifying.”
– Participant
“As a therapist, I didn’t expect to need this. But it met something in me I didn’t have words for.”
– Mental Health Professional
“Three hours here did more for me than months of talking.”
– Participant
How to Join
These events are intimate, and spots fill fast.
To register, email: brian@caligrief.com
Not sure yet? Curious but hesitant?
Reach out at emma@caligrief.com and we’ll walk you through it.
Come as you are.
Come even if you don’t know what you need.
Come with your grief, your voice, your whole unfinished self.
Catharsis Theater is ready when you are.
And we’ll be right here, waiting.
To stay informed about all upcoming events, sign up for our newsletter using the form below and be sure to check the box labeled: Yes, sign me up for the weekly newsletter.
Mother’s Day Was Born in Grief
Join Us Sunday
A day of grief, love, and radical tenderness for everyone
Grief doesn’t wait for the right moment. It shows up uninvited, on holidays, in grocery aisles, during phone calls, or when a familiar scent knocks the wind out of us. It isn’t limited to death.
It lives in what we longed for and never had.
What we lost too soon.
What we still ache to receive.
On Mother’s Day, this grief can be deafening.
For those missing a mother.
For those who are mothers, but not how they imagined.
For those who lost a child, or never had one.
For those estranged, exhausted, or carrying invisible wounds.
For those grieving the mothering they never received.
You are warmly invited to Catharsis Theater
A Mother’s Day Gathering for Grief Support
An afternoon where sorrow is not a shadow to be hidden, but a truth to be honored. A space where grief, in all its forms, is not hurried or hushed, but held—together.
Whatever your grief—loss of a parent, a child, a dream, a homeland, or a version of yourself—you belong here.
This is not therapy. This is humanity.
And it may be the relief you've been longing for.
