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Healing (Page 3)

So Much More Than A Diamond

After someone we love has died, life continues to move forward. And as odd as it seems sometimes, both our grief and our love come along as we move forward. Sometimes you might think — I need life to pause, even for a little while, so I can make sense of my loss and gather my thoughts and feelings. But it doesn’t. Life keeps moving forward.

If you’re grieving, you probably know that it’s not easy to go on when you’re feeling the pain of loss and the absence of your loved one. Yet, that is the challenge of grieving: To heal as you go forward. At the same time, it is our task to find ways to carry the love for our loved ones and their story with us.

Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are quickly approaching. Summer weddings, babies being born, birthdays, anniversaries… they’re all beautiful events and yet they can feel conflicted and painful for you who are grieving. So, what do you do?  How do you negotiate the holidays and milestones? Do you ignore them, or do you find ways to have your deceased loved one be present, remembered, and honored? It softens the edges of pain to have their spirit and memories present, almost like they are still here.

The following story was written by a widower whose beloved wife died nine years ago. It beautifully illustrates how he and his adult children are moving forward with Life while finding ways to honor her, love her and share an important story of her life.

Transcending Grief Through Self Care, Self Compassion & Self Love

When you’re living your life, you go about your normal routine as usual. Then when someone you love dies, surviving grief can feel like you’ve been transported onto a Ferris wheel in the middle of a lake. When you’re up high, you feel like you’re on top of things and have some measure of control. As you descend, your view and perspective changes. So do your emotions and your coping strategies. As you gain momentum plunging downward, you can feel an unraveling dread and a rise in panic. Suddenly, you’re totally submerged  in deep water, much longer than you care to be, struggling for your very breath. Then the realization hits you. You’re drowning and you don’t know what to do. You don’t even know how to breathe anymore… You are at a total loss.

Your Personal Eclipse — Journey From Darkness To Light

When your loved one dies, it may literally feel like it takes your breath away. You begin an odyssey that you don’t how know to navigate.

Shock and numbness prepare you for the journey as you plummet into a swirling dense fog of despair, an unfamiliar reality. The life you shared is no more. This is a forever loss and so begins… the eclipse into darkness.

The Way Of Gratitude

If you’re mourning the loss of your spouse or another loved one, you may have already discovered the extraordinary way in which a moment of gratitude seems to temporarily ease your pain. This is not merely your imagination. The latest scientific research — along with your intuitive sense of things — draws a strong correlation between gratitude and healing.

Stepping Behind The Waterfall

The many emotions we may experience under the umbrella of grief can feel incredibly heavy, intrusive, and uncontrollable. Imagine you are standing under a waterfall. The pressure of the water falling on your neck, shoulders, and back is intense, strong — even painful. All you can see, feel, hear, smell or taste is the waterfall. When the intensity of an emotion is like standing under a waterfall, start by taking a step behind the waterfall. 

The World In-Between

When your spouse dies, you will most likely embark upon a difficult and lonely journey of grieving. Somewhere on that journey of grieving and healing, you will move through the “world in-between.” You might be thinking, “What is this world in-between?”

The King’s Diamond – A Parable

There is so much pain and sorrow in our world and lives. Finding some thread of hope and inspiration often seems unreachable. It’s so important that we reach out to each other and create that thread… see each other through. From the beginning of time, hurting souls would sit around fires, tell stories and create connection and hope. We’ve strayed from those rituals and too often feel alone. We need those stories, those parables and metaphors to hold onto, a touchstone to hope.

So, we offer you a “touchstone” to hold onto… the story of The King’s Diamond, an old Jewish folk story. This version is included in the Introduction of Living Through Mourning: Finding Comfort and Hope When a Loved One Has Died, by Harriet Sarnoff Schiff. May it bring you a sense of connection to all of us and your deceased loved one.

Grieving Is Healing

When a loved one dies, we are faced with the stark reality that life is indelibly changed.  It is a hard reality to accept, and it launches us into the grieving process. We mostly think of grief as a journey through sadness, fraught with a myriad of struggles along the way – with feelings of helplessness, exhaustion, stress, anxiety or loneliness as our travel companions. We wonder how long it will take until the pain subsides and if we can ever get on with our lives.  It is helpful to remember that grieving is a healthy process, one we are wired to go through after a profound loss. Sometimes people think of grieving only as something to get over. But, unlike an illness, we don’t get over it — we go through it, resolving our feelings about the loss gradually.