Mary Beth is a clinical social worker, consultant, coach, and educator who helps individuals, groups, organizations and communities grow after traumatic loss.
“Everyone Grieves Differently.
There is no timeline, there are no stages. Your grief becomes a part of who you are, but it never goes away.”
WHO IS MARY BETH LEE?
Mary Beth Lee, LCSW, LSCSW is a mother, clinical social worker, consultant, researcher, and advocate. For more than twenty-five years she has specialized in grief, traumatic loss, brain injury, behavioral health, and post-traumatic growth. She is licensed in multiple states, including Texas, Kansas, and Missouri.
On August 8, 1998, Mary Beth and her four children were in a rollover accident on the drive home from a family vacation in Colorado. Her oldest son, Johnny, died. His younger brother, Christopher, suffered a severe traumatic brain injury.
The loss set her on a new path: to help others through their darkest passages and to reshape the conversation around grief, trauma, and behavioral health across the lifespan. She has spent the years since studying, practicing, and living what traumatic loss does to a person and a family. In 2011 she created a grief timeline, a map of what tends to happen at one month, six months, a year, and long after everyone else has moved on. She teaches it to the family and friends who want to help and do not know how.
The timeline anchors a mobile app now in development for grievers and the behavioral health professionals who support them. It pairs the timeline with psychoeducational modules on common grief myths and evidence-based practices, along with movement-based guided meditations, journaling prompts, curated resources, and self-assessment tools.
For sixteen years she held a fellowship under Dr. Bruce Perry, MD, PhD, at the ChildTrauma Academy. Dr. Perry is Principal of the Neurosequential Network and co-author with Oprah Winfrey of What Happened to You? His Neurosequential Model, a developmentally sensitive, neurobiology-informed approach to clinical problem-solving, shaped how she understands the way traumatic loss and grief affect people across the lifespan. That framework informs her work with individuals, children, families, and communities, and it guided her development of community integration resources for schools, faith communities, businesses, and other organizations coping with traumatic loss.
Communities, organizations, corporations, and families call Mary Beth when the unthinkable happens and no one knows what to do. She has served as a counselor in some of the country's most visible tragedies.That work with survivors of mass tragedy produced tools and frameworks she continues to refine in her clinical practice and community work.
She speaks and writes on behavioral health, integrating grief, hope, resilience, post-traumatic growth, and advocacy, with love at the foundation.
