Understanding Grief
If you make good choices, bad things won’t happen
One of the more insidious parts of our culture is a tendency to view almost everything as a result of our choices. For example, when good things happen to you, it means you made good choices… but when bad things happen, it’s your fault too. Everyone knows that bad choices can sometimes have consequences. But…
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Grief and the Overachiever
One of the hardest things when writing about grief is that everyone’s experience of grief is so different, and depend on everything from the person’s temperament, life situation and their relationship with the person who died. If you’re used to excelling in life, however, grief can pose some specific challenges might not be as troubling…
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Experiencing Grief for the First Time
Although most people will, at some point in their lives, experience the death of someone they love, the first major loss happens at a different time for everyone. Grief is still a taboo subject in our society, and many people have trouble finding someone to offer wisdom or advice about the grieving process. You might…
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When Grief is Anger, not Tears
Grief is not really an emotion—for most people, it’s a complicated package of emotions, some ra-tional, others less so. We think of grief as being synonymous with sadness… and thus think of tears as the most appropriate response. Sadness is definitely part of the grief package, but it’s far from the whole deal. Some people…
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Why Most People Don’t Understand Grief
One of the most common complaints from people who have lost a loved one is that others in their life don’t get it. Friends and family have a tendency to make comments that range from awkward to downright cruel, and just don’t seem to understand either the emotional responses to the death of a close…
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Who Am I Now?
Those who haven’t lost someone close to them might find it melodramatic when you say you feel like a part of you died with your loved one—but it’s not an exaggeration. When a loved one dies, we lose part of our identity, as a husband or wife, as a son or daughter or as a…
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How Long Does Grief Last? Managing Expectations Around the First Couple Years Post Loss
When someone you love dies, the most obvious and devastating thing in your mind is permanence. I will never see him or her again. My children will never know their grandmother, or their father or aunt. Given the permanence of death, it makes sense to question whether the intense grief that makes it hard to…
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How Grief Changes Over Time (AKA Grief Theories)
There’s nothing new about grief—it’s been part of the human experience since our beginnings, and there’s even plenty of evidence that animals grieve, too. As long as humans have been experiencing death and grief, we have also been trying to make sense of both death and the grieving process. In my practice, I find there…
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Developing Resilience through Grief
If you’re in the depths of grief, it’s probably hard to imagine that anything good will come out of it. In fact, post-traumatic growth is at least as common as post-traumatic stress—there’s evidence that many people really do become stronger and more resilient after experiencing a tragedy like the death of a loved one. Not…
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Understanding The Grief Journey
If you’ve recently had a loved one die, it might feel like your life will never go “back to normal” or that you’ll never be able to live a happy, fulfilling life again. Indeed, it’s normal to feel completely overwhelmed by grief in the immediate aftermath of a loved one’s death. Grief is a natural…
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