The holidays are too often a painful reminder of your changed life and the death of your loved one. They may force you to realize how much your life has changed. Holidays certainly may not feel festive — they may feel more like a spotlight painfully illuminating your sense of emptiness, aloneness and broken heart. How can you move from hiding or…
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Grief Support Groups Serving West Los Angeles, Encino and Agoura Hills
Grief Support Groups Serving West Los Angeles, Encino and Agoura Hills
Posts by HOPE Connection
After your husband, wife or partner dies, you embark on a journey to a foreign land. Exploring this territory is the process of grieving. To support you on your journey, HOPE group therapists offer suggestions to help you grieve, including ideas for healing, keeping the memory of your loved one alive and honoring them. One way to begin healing is by simply talking or writing to your loved one. Telling stories about them and reliving cherished events are wonderful ways to keep them alive in your heart. Honoring them can involve creating rituals such as lighting a candle for them at a holiday dinner or playing their favorite music at family get-togethers.
By Jeff Kober Jeff Kober has spent much of the last 30 years studying metaphysics and meditation, traveling extensively in India. In 2007 he began to teach Vedic meditation, and writes a daily Vedic Meditation. Visit his website Jeff Kober Meditation. The pain that we feel at the loss of someone in our life is a given. Where once there was another human…
Book Review
Grief is such a complex subject and process that there are countless valid and valuable perspectives on it. Many people have explored these perspectives and gone on to write books that offer comfort and healing to people who are grieving.
Watch this short TedX talk by Molly Carroll about the power of human connection.
This trip to Italy was my first real test of myself: to see if I could still travel, without my husband Marvin, and still enjoy traveling on my own. Since Marvin died, I had traveled abroad to see family but not as a tourist, and this was going to be “it.”
Grief can best be described as an unpredictable weather condition. For anyone who’s visited the Caribbean, it’s like one of those storms that comes out of nowhere. Imagine lying out on the beach, letting the sun rays penetrate your melanin with a cocktail in one hand, eyes closed, and head tilted toward the sun. Then you open your eyes and see the storm clouds. Before you can collect your vacation read and beach bag, there’s a downpour. There’s no way to escape it, you’re in the storm. While you don’t know when it will end, it’s a common enough occurrence that you know it will pass. This scenario encapsulates my relationship with grief. I often don’t know when it’s coming. I’m suddenly hit with a wave of emotion – sometimes, it knocks me down, but I always get back up.
I miss you. You gave me my life. You were my protector, my teacher, my moral compass, my comfort. I feel so alone without you. No one worries about me the way you did. No one loves me the way you did.
Jill Smolowe, an author who has written about her own experience with grieving, reflected on what pain meant to her following the death of four of her loved ones in quick succession when she was in her thirties. In her article, The Value of Sitting With Your Pain, she says, “While grappling with that pile-on of losses, I discovered that something a therapist had told me years earlier was true: my pain would be more tolerable if I could ‘just sit with it.’ “
If you are grieving for a spouse or anyone else you loved who has died, you have probably found yourself talking to them at times. Late at night, holding a pillow next to you, perhaps, or alone as you walk along a trail. More than likely, you have found this comforting, to simply talk to your loved one… ask questions… reminisce… or…