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    Healing Grief, Finding Peace: Daily Strategies for Grieving and Growing
    Healing Grief, Finding Peace: Daily Strategies for Grieving and Growing
    Healing Grief, Finding Peace: Daily Strategies for Grieving and Growing
    Ebook267 pages4 hours

    Healing Grief, Finding Peace: Daily Strategies for Grieving and Growing

    By Louis LaGrand

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Discover a path to inner peace and resilience in times of loss.

    Losing a loved one can leave us feeling overwhelmed, lost, and heartbroken. In Healing Grief, Finding Peace, grief counseling expert Louis LaGrand tenderly explores the intricacies of grief and presents a collection of empowering daily strategies to help you find solace and peace during this difficult time.

    Inside, you'll find heartfelt guidance on how to navigate the grieving journey, discovering ways to honor your emotions while nurturing your emotional well-being. Drawing from extensive research and his own experiences, LaGrand addresses the unique challenges of bereavement with profound wisdom and understanding.

    • Daily Strategies: Thoughtfully crafted techniques to help you cope with grief, one day at a time.
    • Resilience Building: Discover ways to grow stronger and find inner peace despite the pain of loss.
    • Supportive Guidance: A compassionate companion to lean on during your healing journey.
    • Emotional Wellness: Learn to embrace your emotions and find healing in the process.

    If you're seeking a heartfelt and empowering resource to navigate grief while fostering personal growth, Healing Grief, Finding Peace is your guiding light toward healing and finding peace once again.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSourcebooks
    Release dateOct 1, 2011
    ISBN9781402260407
    Healing Grief, Finding Peace: Daily Strategies for Grieving and Growing

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    Reviews for Healing Grief, Finding Peace

    3.5/5

    17 ratings8 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I have been dealing with the loss of my Aunt who passed away three years ago. This book gave me a few ideas on how to cope with my loss and to continue to live without her. Thank you.
    • 4/5
      Healing Grief, Finding Peace is a well written guide to dealing with the death of a loved one. The author's most significant credential is his own grief experience, but he is also a researcher, writer and counselor in the field. I treasure his statements early in the book that validate the differences in grief reactions and grant (much needed at the time) permission to grieve and heal at your own pace. The fact that he used my very favorite Turkish proverb as he described moving forward, garnered my curiosity about what was to come. Out of the 101 easy to cope with a love one's death, the reader is likely to find many that will be helpful.Only one caution, and it is related to timing. I think this book will be most useful after some healing has already occurred. There are lines in the book that I would not have wanted to read during the first year after my husband's death, but are very helpful in the years after that. As long as you are not put off by his "do's and don'ts," the advice he offers is solid and life-giving. I will share this book with those who are grieving, particularly men.
    • 5/5
      This is a comforting book, which I would highly recommend to anyone who has lost a loved one, even if it's been years. It offers reassurance that there's no "right" way to grieve. Everyone is different and that's okay. I like that this book offers multiple strategies for coping, in which the reader is afforded the opportunity to pick and choose which works best for him/her. This book is also a good too for anyone who is just looking for some type of coping strategy, period. Very insightful, well written, well thought out, and very vaulable. Highly recommended. My thanks to the author for taking the time to create this work so that it may benefit others.
    • 5/5
      This is a comforting book, which I would highly recommend to anyone who has lost a loved one, even if it's been years. It offers reassurance that there's no "right" way to grieve. Everyone is different and that's okay. I like that this book offers multiple strategies for coping, in which the reader is afforded the opportunity to pick and choose which works best for him/her. This book is also a good too for anyone who is just looking for some type of coping strategy, period. Very insightful, well written, well thought out, and very vaulable. Highly recommended. My thanks to the author for taking the time to create this work so that it may benefit others.
    • 2/5
      This title seems best read and used as a reference book in dealing not with just a loved ones death but with any kind of life change in general. I was happy to see that it did not have heavily religious tones and that it explores a few alternative practices in dealing with emotional issues. I would have liked to see more examples from real life situations included. The parts that include quotes from actual people are the most telling for me. Without context some of the suggestions for coping are too vague.
    • 5/5
      This little book is hands down the single best resource anyone could have for working their way through the grieving process. It's structure and uncomplicated language would be easy to absorb no matter what your state of mind. The author's encouragement to flip through and read it in whatever order most speaks to you makes it a book you pick up with joy, not something that feels like a dreadful chore to get through. It's would be perfect for grief groups as well as individual use. Should be standard issue to anyone faced with loss.
    • 3/5
      "Healing Grief, Finding Peace: 101 Ways to Cope with the Death of Your Loved One" is filled with a lot of potentially helpful ideas on coping effectively with the loss of a close loved one. The author divides the ideas into seven main sections: How You can Ease Hurt and Heartache; What you need to know about Grief and Healing; Five Gifts that will get you Through any Loss; The Critical Overlooked Factor: Resilience; Inner Strength Healing Strategies; Powerful Long-term Healing Strategies; and Little-used but Highly Effective Healing Strategies.As a facilitator of a grief support group, I was hopeful that this might be a book I could recommend to attendees. Some may find it helpful as far as a source for ideas and strategies for coping with grief and loss. The section I found most relevant and potentially helpful to my clients was on resilience. As a whole, however, the book, while chocked full of "101 ways to cope..." does not sufficiently develop any of these "ways" to make it worthy of cover-to-cover reading, nor does it seem the book was intended as such. The other factor is that the information contained in the book is widely available elsewhere including websites and advice columns.What I find most often in my work with bereaved clients is that they want and need several things above all: to be heard, to be validated in their feelings, gain a basic understanding of the dynamics of grief, connect with others journeying through loss as fellow travelers, and to find supportive friends and caring professionals who can help them find their way. This book offers supportive ideas, but, again, does not fully develop any of them in a satisfying way.It is almost like the author is trying to force feed anecdotal advice that lacks adequate referencing (over half the recommended works are articles on "near-death studies" or "after death communication") or reflection. I was very hopeful about the book when I saw the glowing recommendation of Kenneth J. Doka, whose writings on grief I deeply respect and have found very helpful and relevant. Dr. LaGrand is evidently quite a widely published writer in this field of grief and a respected therapist. This book, however, while containing many good ideas, does little to add to the conversation in my opinion. I have seen and read this information presented much more effectively in other books. This is not a bad book, but it is far from a great, must-have book on the subject of coping with grief and loss.
    • 3/5
      An interesting book, but the material in it has been covered before, by so many others. Some good ideas in it, however, that I will pass along to a friend who is going through this right now with her mother, who is in hospice. Well written as well, but some new ideas/material would have been even better and a more thorough read for me. I appreciate the time the author took to come up with these type of preparations.

    Book preview

    Healing Grief, Finding Peace - Louis LaGrand

    experiences.

    ONE

    What You Need to Know about Grief and Healing

    When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.

    —HELEN KELLER

    Since loss is a condition of existence, the grief that follows it is automatic as well. But let me tell you this: you can eventually camouflage it, as many do, in hopes that you won’t be avoided by people whom you normally interact with. However, loads of research studies show that keeping these feelings of loss within has a major detrimental effect on the physical body and lengthens the time it takes to adapt.

    WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GRIEVING AND HEALING?

    Everyone grieves—there is no escape—but not everyone heals; they believe they can’t adapt to or share the pain. Many relive their grief on a continuous basis. Yet, grief is the normal inner response to the loss of a valued person or object. It usually, though not always, includes a host of emotions like anger, guilt, depression or despair, denial, feelings of failure, and feeling misunderstood by friends and family. You might think that you are falling apart and that nothing will help. You are out of control. Waves of total insecurity seem to sweep over you, and you question if you will be able to make it. And there may be occasions when you feel nothing at all. You are numb. Or you may panic, caught in an emotional swamp.

    What is important to realize is that the appearance of some or all of these emotions (and many more), at various times, is entirely normal. We expect these emotions to surface when someone loved is suddenly absent from our surroundings and we feel unfairly deprived. The feelings of confusion or frustration may be overwhelming, yet everyone has emotional wounds in life. Everyone. They can be worked through if you recognize them for what they are: signals to reassess the direction of your grief work and thoughts on your new life without your loved one.

    Healing centers on opening yourself to the support of others and sharing what is happening inside with them. Telling your story to trusted others is a major part of healing and adapting to change. In the process, the meaning of your story becomes clearer. Healing always involves interpersonal relationships that are vehicles for absorbing emotion. Others may influence the way we perceive our grief, sometimes having a negative effect. The right support persons give us needed emotional safety. Seek out those who gently encourage, support, give freedom, and assist you at the right time and in the right place.

    What You Should Know about Grief that Heals

    I want to take a moment to introduce a few basic facts about the grief response that will help you deal with your loss. Keeping in mind that your learning is an ongoing process, what follows is one of many beginnings.

    • Grief is your response to deep love—an essential of life. Whenever you choose to love, as we all do, you automatically choose to grieve. It’s a given, the other side of the coin of love. So look at your grief as something that anyone should expect following the death of a loved one. It feels horrible, but it is an expected human response to universal loss and change. It always works naturally and with precision, if you get out of the way and allow it to flow. In short, grief is good; it’s the road of light through the darkness.

    • Grief is not merely universal—it is exclusively individual. It can be strong or weak, brief or prolonged, immediate or delayed, distorted or erratic. Everyone grieves in their own style. Forget about so-called stages you are supposed to go through; they really only exist in theory. There is nothing wrong with you because you feel so sad, hopeless, despaired, fearful, angry, and alone. Or that you cry constantly, or can’t cry at all—and yet someone else deeply affected by the loss is responding differently. The upside is, it does get better. You will survive and grow; that is the factual history of loss. It has been proven over and over again.

    • Emotional wounds heal if we don’t keep them raw and flowing by refusing to release them. Try giving yourself permission to heal and gradually let go of repetitive, hurtful thoughts. Yes, your sadness is deep and real, and you believe it will never end. Yet you must not use it as reason to shun reinvesting in life. Force yourself to do what you dislike doing by allowing the pain to flow out of you. That is what leads to healing.

    • There is such a condition as legitimate suffering. It is inevitable, an innate part of the human condition, and comes from the unavoidable changes of life. Life is hard, and suffering is part of the package. No one is happy all the time. So go with the present conditions of life and try not to fight them.

    • As you mourn, it is critical to remember that your past does not determine your future, unless you allow it to. Letting go of such a belief is the beginning of reinvesting in life. Grief is not only a necessary, ongoing process, a release, and repositioning—but it causes us to pause and learn. Be open to the new and unfamiliar. Be open to mystery and the unexpected. There is no greater challenge in grieving than to let the grief process play out.

    • What we really do in the mourning process is to start a transition, in effect to build a new persona and way of life. You work toward a different normal, an unusual normal, a new normal, and at first no one likes it. Sometimes the identity changes are subtle; sometimes they stick out like a sore thumb. Yet they are a positive part of adapting to change, embracing the unfamiliar.

    • Healing grief is a natural process; the emphasis is on natural , although healing can feel foreign and without merit. This means you can’t rush it along in any way or push it aside; from out of nowhere, it will pop back up in discouraging ways. Healing is highly influenced by expectations of or resistance to the process. Its results are measured in a shift in the way we see the world and the way we live.

    • We can choose to learn to love in separation. As I said earlier, you grieve because you loved well. Flourish from the experience of loss by learning to continue to love, albeit in separation. You can keep your loved one’s memory alive in your heart forever, celebrate the life lived at appropriate times, and continue on in the next chapter of your life. Believe, as many therapists and mourners do, that healing is essentially a spiritual journey, since spiritual crises are common when we are overwhelmed by events that don’t fit our view of the world.

    What Healing Is Not

    As you can well imagine, healing does not mean that once you feel you have finished actively grieving and have accepted your loss, you will be like your old self once again. Anyone who suffers the loss of a loved one never truly returns to their previous life and becomes their old self again. Why? Because all of those interactions with the deceased loved one cannot be reproduced, and life will always be different from the way it was. Different does not mean, though, that life will be worse than the way it was before. Life could also be different for the better. It all depends on you.

    The best way to consider healing is that it is a continuous, ongoing event—a lifelong growth experience. Growth is all about living life in a better way. That is why healing is in many ways a higher calling: we take new roads, do new things, make new sacrifices, and mature in the process. It is a journey of self-discovery. As we heal, just like a broken bone, we get stronger and discover a new inner strength. And when grief revisits, as it surely will, our present condition of healing can be used to manage the hurt in a different way.

    We can use the lessons learned to minimize the hurt, accept the reminders of our loss as normal, and gently let them go just as they come into our thoughts. These lessons come from several sources: friends, family, readings, others who have coped well, unexpected happenings, and our spirituality. While one source may be most helpful, input from several sources is a common pattern.

    Healing is not a cure. A cure implies an end. Healing proceeds and proceeds as it prepares us for the next chapter in our life. There is no end to the healing that we continually need. Healing is promoted by sharing grief and finding new ways to deal with the new conditions of life.

    The Major Goal of Healing

    What does it mean to successfully heal from suffering the death of a loved one? The operational answer is peace of mind through radical acceptance. The intent is to proceed with adapting and make choices with inner peace as your major consideration. Nothing beats a quiet mind for promoting growth and creativity. But it is also essential that you overcome inertia, and only you are responsible for doing

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