Spiritual
Connections

Grief is often misunderstood.  It is a powerful and natural emotion.  In the midst of loss, each person’s experience is profoundly unique and all too often painfully isolating.

Grief springs not only from death but also from life-altering events, for example a brush with cancer.  Identifying and coping with the heightened sense of loss that accompanies most major life transitions, including such things as job loss, has become a new focal point for increasing our collective and individual understanding of grief.


When loss occurs, we are hit with a confusing myriad of emotions.  Our minds and hearts are battered by an onslaught of scary, strange, unpredictable emotions that do not abate on their own.  The pain of loss seems to want to carry on as a force of its own forever.  To complicate matters, most people do not know how to grieve. Yet, the painful experience of loss does not have to hurt forever.

Grief care assists people to step out of an emotional daze that all too frequently accompanies a major loss in life.  Furthermore, grief care can provide many valuable insights and lessons, including: a) the increased ability to feel and understand the pain of loss experience; b) better ways to manage the challenges that accompany supporting ourselves and others through the lengthy cycle of grief; and c) identifying therapeutic ways of moving from hurt, through healing, and returning to hope-filled living again.

Today we are in a grief epidemic.  We walk amidst a rapidly growing population of grieving children and teens.  At least fifty percent of youth in North America have "lost" a parent due to death, divorce, separation, or abandonment.  Virtually all children will encounter a significant loss or family transition while growing up.  We are surrounded as a culture by emotionally overburdened youth.  Our children collectively need us more than ever.  No child or adult should have to face the grief process alone.

The grief care process assists parents with understanding that children do not distinguish between the pain of loss that results from death and the pain of loss that results from divorce, separation, or abandonment.

Among the greatest gifts that we can give our families and ourselves are increased abilities to cope with the emotional difficulties that accompany grief and loss, and that gift can be implemented by care.

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