Help for your grieving heart
Welcome to Waves of Grief
Waves of Grief will introduce you to a number of new approaches and will encourage you to try them out. These new ways have the potential to put you in charge of your own grieving in a way that will create greater effectiveness, peace of mind, and wisdom. At the same time, they can reduce unnecessary suffering, feelings of failure and despair.
It says that you must design your grieving style yourself to fit your needs, and that it need not look like anyone else’s. It includes forming a team of guides and companions to travel with you, and fresh ideas that challenge old ways of viewing grief.
You will find that relationships don’t have to end, but can continue close to your heart, though beyond your hands’ reach.
Its destination is a revised life shaped by newly-gained wisdom and the many unexpected, if unwanted, gifts that such active grieving can bring.
New thinking about grief imagines a healing journey that includes suffering and joy and all the emotions in between. It says that grief is full of discovery and decisions and actions.
Grief is powerful and inevitable. The best tools to answer it shouldn’t be locked away in a researcher’s reports or a therapist’s office. They should be in your hands, right now.
Grief is a stubborn thing. Once it descends on you, it insinuates itself into every corner of your life, and tampers with your energy, your optimism, your security. It can even call into question your most dearly-held beliefs. And it always stays longer than you expected.
Ideas about how to deal with grief are equally stubborn. Oddly, with all the discoveries by researchers and grief therapists of new ideas and practices, the conventional wisdom about grief hasn’t budged since 1969 when the 5 Stages of Grief model was born.
You Have a Choice
We can go our own way to engage with our grief, decide on daily practices that sustain us, and choose ongoing actions of healing and remembrance that meet our needs for comfort and meaning.
What is Grief?
Grief is the whole-person response – emotional, physical, behavioral, and spiritual – to the loss of someone or something important.
It is unavoidable, powerful and sometimes overwhelming, but it is the cost of living in a connected and loving way.
The ultimate goal of grieving is to integrate the loss into your ongoing life story, recognizing the reality of the loss while claiming the gifts it left with you.
The Many Types of Losses
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