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Grief Support Groups Serving West Los Angeles, Encino and Agoura Hills

Grief

Change After Loss Is Inevitable. Here’s How To Embrace It.

Change is hard. For anybody. Especially someone who has been presented with life’s biggest change, the death of their significant other. As time passes, the griever is left to endure life’s challenges… with paperwork, figuring out day-to-day tasks, taking on more responsibilities and no longer having a partner to share them with. Changing a light bulb, paying taxes, doing laundry or other shared tasks, now all fall on you. Change is hard, so now what?

No Right Or Wrong Way To Deal With Loss

There is no right or wrong way to deal with the loss of a loved one. The grieving process is not only unique for each individual — it’s just plain tough. Primarily, you have to deal with the death of your loved one. But secondarily you have to cope with change. That doesn’t happen overnight. Your journey through grief takes time, the…

A Holiday Unlike Any Other

Time can seem to pass in the blink of an eye. Here it is, minute by minute, day by day… almost 2025! The problem is that this year, it’s very, very different because your loved one is no longer here to celebrate with you. The holidays feel lonely without them. It’s all changed. We’re told that the holidays are about cheer and connection, right? Oh boy, when you’re grieving and sad, you may not feel very cheerful or connected. You may just feel like hiding until the holidays are over. Just let them be over! Can you do that? Can you just hide away? You may struggle with that idea because friends and family are reaching out and inviting you to join them. They don’t want you to be alone… although wanting to be alone might be exactly how you feel.

Living Through The Holidays

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…

At the Intersection Of Anxiety and Grief

As you might know, anxiety can be inextricably connected to grief and is considered a normal part of the grieving process. For some, it can become a constant companion in the grieving process. What is anxiety? Basically, it’s feeling a sense of worry, nervousness, unease and excessive apprehension. Honestly, it can just feel plain terrifying and awful, as though you’re going crazy…

Stitching

Take a moment and imagine your life as a tapestry.

What you see depends upon which side you’re looking at.

Sometimes, you only see what looks like the back side of the fabric, with broken threads and uneven and missed stitches, the difficult painful events.

If you take a breath, give it time to unfold and hold onto faith/hope/love, you may be able to imagine the top side of the tapestry and begin to believe that your life will become upright and okay again, maybe even beautiful in its own unique, changed way. It won’t always feel upside down the way the loss of loved one can throw it.

What Is That Mask All About?

October, and Halloween — oh what memories! Wearing costumes with a mask that you wanted to fool a friend with. In those days that was a fun kind of mask.

Now, as a grieving adult, you discover that masks take on a different purpose. Such as the metaphorical mask to avoid the sadness of grief with family and friends, when you don’t want them to know how you really feel.

The Grief Fog

Like a thick veil slowly descending, blanketing itself over you and obscuring your vision, you can’t help but give in to the weight of its powerful effect. These are times when you cannot think, cannot feel, cannot see or eat or speak. The death of a spouse, child or anyone that you love dearly can leave you in this experience. No one wants to be in this place, especially not you.

I Want To Be Alone

There is a famous line in the 1932 classic movie, Grand Hotel, where Greta Garbo says… “I want to be alone.” That phrase says so much. Alone… is it healthy or unhealthy? Well, that depends upon many factors and circumstances, especially when you are grieving the death of a loved one.

Animals, when wounded, seek isolation to lick their wounds and hopefully heal. It’s a self-soothing behavior that occurs naturally. Is it normal for human beings, when emotionally wounded from loss, to want to isolate and be alone?