From Science to Support: Helping Clients Understand Grief in the Brain and Body

Genna F. Reeves, Ph.D., is an Executive Program Director, grief educator, grief and loss support provider, curriculum developer, adult learning specialist, speaker, author, and scholar whose work focuses on making grief research understandable, practical, and deeply human. She is the founder of Invictus by Genna: Grief & Loss Services and the founder and Executive Program Director of The Compassionate Compass Grief Support Community, a community-based initiative she developed to expand opportunities for grief education, peer support, meaningful connection, and compassionate community after loss.

Reeves also serves as a program developer, support group facilitator, and grief educator with Grouper, a startup developing grief-support programming, and as a support group facilitator with the Family Caregiver Center of New Mexico. She previously served for nearly four years as Community Liaison for HeartLight Center, where her work included community outreach and partnership development, grief education, support-group facilitation, program development, and expanding access to bereavement programming throughout New Mexico. She is also Chair of the Grief Networking Alliance of New Mexico, bringing together professionals and organizations working across the state to support grieving individuals and families.

Her work centers on grief neuroscience and the grieving brain, sudden and traumatic loss, suicide bereavement, caregiver and serious-illness grief, continuing bonds and meaning-making, grief-informed healthcare, workplace and community grief, ritual and memorialization, and the design of effective learning experiences for both grievers and helping professionals. She develops support groups, educational programs, professional trainings, workshops, curricula, and reflective resources that translate complex grief research into language and practices people can actually use. Her approach blends scholarship, storytelling, experiential learning, and compassionate conversation while recognizing that grief does not follow a single prescribed path.

Before specializing in grief and loss, Reeves spent more than 15 years in higher education as an educator and researcher in historic and cultural dress, fashion studies, and museum studies. Her scholarship examined how dress and textile objects function as expressions of memory, identity, memorialization, and cultural meaning—work that continues to inform her interest in objects, ritual, continuing bonds, and the ways people make meaning after loss. She taught at Colorado State University, Oregon State University, and Kansas State University.

Reeves earned a Ph.D. in Historic and Cultural Dress from Oregon State University, an M.Ed. in Educational Leadership and Policy from Portland State University, an M.S. in Apparel Design and Merchandising from Colorado State University, and a B.A. in Family and Consumer Sciences from New Mexico State University. She is an INELDA-trained death doula, a Certified Grief Educator through David Kessler’s grief education program, and a Certified Grief Support Provider through Claire Bidwell Smith’s Grief and Loss: A Comprehensive Training.

She is also the developer of the Mycelial Model of Grief™ and the Compass Approach to Grief Support™, conceptual and educational frameworks designed to help people better understand the complexity, interconnectedness, and highly individual nature of grief. Through her speaking, teaching, writing, community programming, and direct support work, Reeves helps individuals and organizations move beyond simplified ideas about grief toward a more nuanced, compassionate, and evidence-informed understanding of life after loss.