Healthy Ways to Capture Memories
In the end, grief is about how we remember. Memory is powerful. It shapes our lives in many ways. Memory impacts our emotions. Memory shapes the significance we give to current events. Memory influences what we expect from the future. So the effort to grieve well could be reframed as learning to remember in healthy ways. Too often we try to define “getting over grief” as “moving past” our loss, which implies forgetting or not thinking about our loved one. We rightly resist this conception of grief. But unless we have a healthy alternative, we avoid one error and get trapped in painful...
Read MoreApplying the Grief Seminar to Losses Not Caused by Death
Often it can be hard to recognize grief as grief, because of the absence of a death. Major losses can be caused by many other life changes than someone dying. But this difficulty goes well beyond the challenge of rightly labeling an experience. When we do not recognize the grief element in a major loss or life transition, we begin to try to make sense of that experience and overcome its fallout in ways that are not suited for the difficulties that lie ahead. That is the purpose of this appendix – to prepare you to apply the materials contained in this study to grief experiences that are not...
Read MoreMemorial Ceremony for an Unborn Child
Grieving the loss of an unborn child can be particularly difficult. No one else had the privilege of knowing your baby and, therefore, many of the rituals of grief (i.e., sharing pictures or stories of how the lost loved one touched other’s lives) cannot be engaged. Because no one else knew their baby, parents often try to take this journey of grief alone. What follows are suggestions for how to honor your lost child and facilitate your own grieving process. Do not consider this appendix to be a recipe to be followed directly, but as a collection of ideas to take what best applies to your...
Read MoreGrief Evaluation
Below is an evaluation to help you see (acknowledge) how you are doing with the different challenging experiences that grief brings. At this stage in the journey, it is tempting to begin comparing your loss with others. Inevitably, we begin to think, “Others have it so much worse than me. Why am I down?” Resist the urge to compare your loss with the loss of others. Just because Person A got hit by a truck does not mean that Person B’s knee surgery hurt any less. The purpose of acknowledging the history and realness of your grief is not to give you a tool to downplay your loss (that would be...
Read MoreTaking the Journey of Grief with Hope
Grief is more than sadness. It is losing someone or something that was a part of you and then trying to answer, “Who am I now?” If we love, we will grieve. If we want to love one-another well, we must know how to offer care during times of grief. The goal of this seminar is to give you guidance for the journey of grief, whether you are the one walking this road or whether you are walking with a friend who is grieving. This is a free seminar (please RVSP below). We hope that many people in our community come and learn how to process this powerful emotions we will all face many...
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