Tre'Vell Brooks

I am a licensed counselor in Houston specializing in men's grief. My father died when I was twelve. I sat in waiting rooms for a year after his death with my mother, who was trying to find someone in our small Texas town who would take us as clients. The counselors she could find were not for us. Some were kind. Some were trained. None had the specific framework for what a Black boy whose father had just died was carrying. I am, in some ways, the counselor I needed at twelve. I have built my practice around that absence.

I work with Black men in grief. The losses span the spectrum. Parents, siblings, spouses, children, friends, mentors, the community elders whose deaths felt like personal losses. I work with brothers in the first ninety days of a loss and brothers who are twenty years out and have only recently come to a place where the grief can be sat with rather than endured around. The work is different in each phase of grief, and I have built skill in each.

My clinical approach is grounded in the contemporary research on grief, including the move away from the stages-of-grief framework that has been popularized and was never quite what the original research supported. The current best understanding is that grief is not a linear process moving through defined stages but a complex, oscillating engagement with the loss that takes shape over years. Some brothers do most of the work of grief in the first year. Some do not begin the work seriously until years after. There is no schedule. My work is to meet you where you are.

The specific work I do with Black men is the work that takes the cultural context into account without treating it as the whole story. Many of the brothers I work with were raised in households where grief was managed by men through silence, work, and the appropriate stoicism in front of family. There is real strength in those traditions. There are also real costs, particularly when the grief is held underground for so long that it shapes a brother's life without his knowing what is shaping it. I help brothers find the language for what they are carrying, in ways that respect the tradition they came up in.

I work in arcs of twelve to twenty-four sessions for most brothers, with the understanding that some patients need longer engagement and some need only a few sessions to consolidate work they have already done on their own. My approach uses talk therapy primarily, with elements of writing-based therapy that I have found especially useful for men. The brothers who do the writing exercises consistently tend to do the deepest work in our sessions; the writing surfaces what the conversation cannot always reach.

My rate is one hundred and ten dollars per hour. I take some insurance directly and provide superbills for out-of-network reimbursement. I keep a small sliding-scale list for patients who would otherwise not be able to afford care. I see clients in person in Houston and via video for clients elsewhere in Texas and other states where I hold licensure.

I will refer out for what is not in my scope. Severe mental-health conditions, active suicidality requiring crisis-level care, severe substance use co-occurring with grief — for these I will refer to colleagues with the specialized training. I will stay involved when that makes sense.

If you are considering this work, write to me about the loss and what you are looking for. There is no right way to grieve. There is also no requirement that you grieve alone. The brothers I have worked with longest are the brothers who showed up willing to sit with what they had been avoiding. That is the work. I will be here.