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 MoreThoughts on “Shame Interrupted: How God Lifts the Pain of Worthlessness and Rejection”
Your dad says he’ll pick you up Friday afternoon and the two of you will go camping for the weekend. You don’t see him much because your parents are divorced and you live with your mom. The thought of your dad taking you camping feels so great. In fact, it makes you feel normal because your friend’s parents aren’t divorced and their dad does things with them all the time. So you tell them that you and your dad are going camping this weekend. You pack your things and get your sleeping bag out. Friday is here and you sit on the doorstep waiting for your dad. He never shows. He never...
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 MoreThe Absence of Providence
Bill & Connie were devastated by the miscarriage on their first pregnancy. It was especially hard sense their closest friends were pregnant at the same time. In fact, the loss was devastating to both of them. But now that Connie was pregnant again the painful memory had faded. The sheer delight of now having a newborn was amazing. But it quickly faded when the doctor came into the hospital room the day after the birth and said that they needed to get their new son to the Children’s Hospital. Questions began flowing and the answers were all open-ended and unanswered. “What was...
Read More
Recent Comments