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Grief (Page 4)

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?

The Power of Friendship

The award-winning song “You’ve Got A Friend in Me” is blaring as the drama group sings out with wild enthusiasm. Flying arms reach out to as many others as possible with fist bumps. The song ends with hugs, laughter — the joy of being together. These are the Born To Act Players, a non-profit group of young adults with challenges — Down syndrome, autism, seizure disorders and more. Some of the participants have dealt with illness, surgery, death of a parent or sibling. Their lives have had times of struggle but not in this moment of togetherness.  

Talking To God

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.

Grief Suffered In Silence

Disenfranchised Grief

Have you ever experienced a loss so heartbreaking and no one was there to console you, to hold you, to hear you, to listen to your story, to cry with you, to help mend your broken heart? There was no Rabbi or Pastor to turn to, no group to give you a safe and non-judgmental place to mourn your loss, to heal your broken heart. This is what Disenfranchised Grief looks like. You feel utterly alone and silenced.

The Implacable Haunting Of Unresolved Grief

It’s an interesting conundrum to consider feeling your grief when that’s the very last feeling you want.  It’s those feelings that make the loss of your loved one feel too real. So, for some, the answer is — just be busy, thinking, maybe if I don’t give those feelings my attention, I won’t have to feel them.  

What happens then? Grief feelings not acknowledged do not go away; they may hide for a while, sometimes even a long time. But grief is still there and will eventually show up when least expected.

The story of how Scrooge became Scrooge may shed some light on what happens when feelings are pushed aside for too long.

Comfort Beyond Words

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.”

Embracing The Transformation That Accompanies Grieving A Parent

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.