I am not on the other side of grief. I am further down the same road.

 About Karen Rothstein, Founder, Transformation by Design, Inc.

There are seasons in a woman’s life when something inside her begins to shift.

Sometimes it arrives quietly. A whisper. A restlessness she cannot name. Sometimes it comes as a threshold moment with children leaving home, a marriage evolving, or dissolving, a long-held dream refusing to stay buried. And sometimes it arrives as loss. The kind that splits time into before and after.

Whatever brought you here, you are standing at one of those thresholds now.

Transformation has always been my language.

For years, I walked beside women in midlife. Women standing in empty nests wondering who they were without the constant weight of caretaking, women who had built successful lives and felt an ache for something more true. I helped them design change intentionally. We examined beliefs. We told the truth about what was no longer working. We built what came next with courage and care.

I was good at this work. I believed in it completely.

And then my own life cracked open.

When my husband died, I did not need more information about grief. I had the training. I had the modalities. I had spent years walking beside women in transition. What I needed and what I could not find anywhere was someone who could be completely steady while I was not. Someone who understood that the fog was not a symptom. It was the landscape.

Navigating after loss is like driving in a perpetual fog. You can see just far enough ahead to keep moving, but nothing beyond that. The landmarks you relied on are gone. The fixed point, everything else moved around, is simply no longer there. And into that disorientation pours everyone else’s noise: their timelines, their opinions, their discomfort with your grief that lands in your body as your own failure.

I know what it is to read the same sentence four times and retain nothing. To stand in a grocery store and feel suddenly, overwhelmingly alien to your own life. To have someone say you seem better and feel something close to grief about that, too, because better is not the right word, and you are not sure the right word exists yet.

That experience did not change my work. It sharpened it down to the bone.

Today I work in the sacred terrain where grief and identity meet.

I guide women through the shock of fresh loss, through the fog of disorientation, through the slow and nonlinear reassembly of self. Some are in raw, acute grief. Some are years beyond the funeral and still feel suspended between worlds. Some are facing profound life transitions that carry the particular weight of a quieter, unnamed loss.

Wherever you are, the work begins where you actually are — not where you think you should be, not where anyone else thinks you should be.

Grief may be the doorway. But the work is about becoming.

I bring both lived experience and disciplined skill to this work. Grief companionship and bereavement support. EFT tapping for the grief that lives in the body and won’t release through talking alone. Clinical hypnotherapy and QHHT for the deeper excavation work — the subconscious patterns, the old identities, the places where past loss and present loss have become tangled together. Spiritual coaching for the identity reconstruction that grief makes necessary. Divination tools — tarot, Lenormand, astrology, Human Design- are woven in not as decoration but as genuine frameworks for understanding what is happening and what it might be asking of you. And Celebration of Life planning for the families who want to honor what has been lost with the care and intention it deserves.

Not all of this is for everyone. We begin where you are and let the work tell us where it needs to go.

In our work together, you are not rushed. You are not fixed. You are not pitied.

You are witnessed. You are steadied. You are strengthened.

Clients often tell me they feel both softer and stronger. More anchored. More honest. More able to make decisions that align with who they are now rather than who they used to be.

I believe loss can initiate a depth we would never choose but would not trade. I believe identity can be reauthored without erasing what has been loved. I believe transformation can be shaped with intention.

If you are standing at a threshold, whether it arrived quietly or shattered the air around you, there is a way forward that honors both your grief and your becoming.

You are not finished. You are unfolding.

And this next chapter can be designed with wisdom, intention, and care.

If you feel ready to begin, I would be honored to walk beside you.