Dr. Duval has over thirty years of experience working with adults across the lifespan, including older adults navigating the transitions, losses, and questions of meaning that come with later life. She brings an existential and psychodynamic lens to this work, tending to immediate grief, practical challenges, and the larger questions of mortality and purpose.

Meaning, mortality, and the days we have

An existential awareness runs through Dr. Duval's work with people at every age, and it comes into particular focus in later life. The work explores the limits you face in particular, and the limits all of us share: our mortality and the impossibility of any life without loss.

The aim isn't to look away from those truths, but to let them enhance our days rather than fill them with fear, sadness, and hopelessness. That shift, from dread to a fuller appreciation of the life still being lived, is at the center of this work.

Room to mourn, before moving forward

Later life brings a distinctive landscape of loss: the deaths of friends and contemporaries, physical change, shifting family roles, and possible worries about memory and cognition.

When someone is carrying a loss — recent or long ago and still raw — therapy is first a place to grieve. A place to mourn, to cry, to feel the sheer unfairness of it, without being rushed past any of it. Only from there does the work turn, gently, toward how to move forward.

Connection across the years — and what's still possible

There's an assumption, even among some therapists, that older patients aren't suited to deep, insight-oriented work — that it's somehow too late for real change. Dr. Duval's experience says otherwise.

Just as she connects deeply with children and teenagers though she is no longer young herself, she connects deeply with people later in life though she has not yet arrived there. What bridges the distance is a genuine understanding of loss and human limitation and, alongside it, a real belief in hope, psychological growth, and new wonder at any age.

If you're looking for someone who understands both the losses and transitions you're facing later in life and also the larger questions of meaning underneath them, and who believes, as you may, that growth and discovery don't have an expiration date — this is the path Dr. Duval offers.