A lot of literature about grief is overwhelmingly death orientated. This is a good thing in that death is a universal experience but it is not an everyday thing. True, the loss of a loved permeates one’s daily life long after the event, but the actual event is singular and for the more fortunate, not nearly as regular. The reality is most people go to counseling for relationship loss.
Grief counselors deal with many people who are devastated by divorce, a cheating spouse, a broken engagement, or the sudden change of not having that person to call, hold, or spend time with. These aspects are very common to the human experience. With proper guidance, the wounds become scars and help one grow emotionally and sometimes spiritually. The loneliness and the un-needed anxiety people experience in finding a mate can be stressful enough for some, but when one truly believes they found the one, only to be shocked that everything was an illusion can be a horrifying change. Changes in life style from the tiniest schedule can shake the foundation of that person’s life. Even the smallest scent or image can bring a tidal wave of emotional imagery. Unfortunately there are no short cuts in this adaptation period. As so many grief specialists emphasize, one must do their “grief work”. They must experience the change the emotional pain that accompanies it. Of course, as death, there is the acceptance stage, the emotional stage of anger and mourning, and the final adaptation to the new situation.
A good grief counselor will guide the broken person through these phases and encourage emotional release in the healing process. Only after these initial steps, can the person utilize new meaning concepts to a new reality and properly place the lost relationship in its proper perspective of his or her life story. The question arises why does this adaptation take so long for some people? It all varies based upon the level of attachment. Attachment theory is a theory that was used in great depth with widows or widowers in their loss of a spouse. The same can be applied to broken relationships that do not involve death, but separation. The attachment will determine the length of the adaptation to the person.
So, if someone was in a relationship for many years and suddenly the relationship ceased, one should expect a greater withdrawal and more intense and lengthy adaptation period. The opposite can be said for a short two month affair where there is little attachment and hence less adaptation. As a grief counselor, it is important not to only deal with death but also every day pains of the heart. Proper understanding of attachment can help one assess the situation and lay a ground work for eventually adaptation and assimilation of the past into the person’s present. One can never give a time frame for recovery, but with a special guidance, a grief counselor can help a person understand the phases and steps and help them take the necessary steps for a happy future with someone else.
By: Mark Moran, MA, GC-C Certified Grief Counselor Email: mark@aihcp.org
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Photo Becomes Symbol of 911 Anniversary
Grieving Father's Photo becomes Symbol of 911 Anniversary
click here
Monday, September 12, 2011
Thursday, August 11, 2011
A Mother's Grief: Burying Her Child
Burying a child: A mother's unending grief
By Sanjay Gupta, M.D., Chief Medical Correspondent
August 11, 2011 10:37 a.m. EDT
By Sanjay Gupta, M.D., Chief Medical Correspondent
August 11, 2011 10:37 a.m. EDT
Monday, August 8, 2011
New Ways to Think About Grief
By Ruth Davis Konigsberg
Time Magazine US
The five stages of grief are so deeply embedded in our culture that they've become virtually inescapable. Every time we experience loss — whether personal or national — we hear them recited: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. They're invoked to explain our emotional reaction to everything from the death of a loved one to the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico after the BP oil spill to LeBron James' abandoning the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat.
The stages have become axiomatic, divorced from the time and place of their origin. If you were to read Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's On Death and Dying — the book that in 1969 gave the five stages their debut — for the first time today, you might be surprised to discover that Kübler-Ross, then a staff psychiatrist at Billings Hospital in Chicago, was actually writing about the experience of facing one's own death, not the death of someone else. It was other practitioners, having found the stages so irresistibly prescriptive, who began applying them to grief, a repurposing that Kübler-Ross encouraged. After all, there was no specific data set to contradict, no research protocols to follow: Kübler-Ross had based her theory on onetime interviews she had conducted with terminally ill patients, but she never asked them specific questions about the stages, because by her own account, she only conceived of them while up late at night after she had already been commissioned to write On Death and Dying.
Continued:
For complete online article: click here
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2042372,00.html#ixzz1USCqzJ8B
Time Magazine US
The five stages of grief are so deeply embedded in our culture that they've become virtually inescapable. Every time we experience loss — whether personal or national — we hear them recited: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. They're invoked to explain our emotional reaction to everything from the death of a loved one to the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico after the BP oil spill to LeBron James' abandoning the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat.
The stages have become axiomatic, divorced from the time and place of their origin. If you were to read Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's On Death and Dying — the book that in 1969 gave the five stages their debut — for the first time today, you might be surprised to discover that Kübler-Ross, then a staff psychiatrist at Billings Hospital in Chicago, was actually writing about the experience of facing one's own death, not the death of someone else. It was other practitioners, having found the stages so irresistibly prescriptive, who began applying them to grief, a repurposing that Kübler-Ross encouraged. After all, there was no specific data set to contradict, no research protocols to follow: Kübler-Ross had based her theory on onetime interviews she had conducted with terminally ill patients, but she never asked them specific questions about the stages, because by her own account, she only conceived of them while up late at night after she had already been commissioned to write On Death and Dying.
Continued:
For complete online article: click here
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2042372,00.html#ixzz1USCqzJ8B
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Spiritual Life Coaching: Respecting Other People's Opinions
Spiritual Life Coaching can help you to transcend the ego and learn how to honor and respect other people's opinions, no matter how much they may oppose yours. When you understand the importance of honoring other people's opinions, you dissolve the basis for all conflict, violence, and war on this planet.
At this point you may be asking, "What if one side is right and the other is wrong? Doesn't the mere fact that one side is right justify its passion?" Try not to think of disputes as one side being right and the other being wrong. To the Next Human, both sides are right based on their individual viewpoints. Everyone clings to their own truth in accordance with their own unique perspective.
Just because you have a different view of the world than your neighbor, it doesn't necessary follow that they are wrong. And that's why people get into arguments, and fight, and create conflicts, and cause wars, because the ego says, "You're wrong and I'm right, and therefore you are my enemy." And of course, this is madness from the higher perspective of the Self Realized.
A three-year-old boy doesn't know what he's doing when he knocks over your wine glass, breaking it and staining the carpet. He simply doesn't know better. A baby girl doesn't know better when she screams and cries so loudly that you think your eardrums will pop. And a puppy dog doesn't know any better when it chews up your brand new pair of shoes and urinates on your carpet. They just don't know any better. And so it is the same with people.
So whatever they do, no matter how heinous it may seem, must be understood as; that's simply where they are. If people knew better, they would be behaving better. It's that simple. It's called the hierarchy of consciousness. The bee has a higher level of consciousness than a flower. A cat has a higher level of consciousness than a mouse. And an whale has a higher level of consciousness than a turtle. And so it is with people. Everyone has their own individualistic opinion based on where they are on the ladder of consciousness.
No One is separate from the divine, no matter how hard they try to be. Now, that being said, that doesn't mean that we should just sit on the sidelines and become apathetic to all of the violence that pervades today. To the contrary, we can end it all overnight. But we can't get there until we begin to look at the violence from the higher perspective of Spirit. Spiritual Life Coaching can help us to practice non-judgment, non-reaction, non-resistance, and non-violence in our daily life. Then we will no longer be perpetuating the violence that already is. We will be weakening it.
When you blame yourself for anything, you are judging yourself. If you do something unconsciously, then afterward awaken to it and blame yourself for "being unconscious," you are still judging yourself and therefore remain unconscious. When you are unconscious, you "know not what you do" and therefore are never to blame for whatever it is you do while you're unconscious. Transcending blame is a prerequisite to your spiritual freedom. The "I am bad" thought that arises because of a "horrible" thing that you did in the past is always judgment and therefore still a sign of unconsciousness.
Spiritual Life Coaching can help you to reach this level of awareness now. It can help you to understand that you don't need to hold yourself accountable for the sins or mistakes of your past. Because you were not conscious of what you were doing, there is no need to hold a grudge against yourself. Know that you were not acting as your true Self and you will never judge your Self or anyone else again. This level of consciousness is the key to peace for you as well as everyone on the planet.
by Jason Lincoln Jeffers
Spiritual Life Coach, Jason Lincoln Jeffers is the founder of The Art of Transformation, a company devoted to teaching Self Realization to the world. His Spiritual Life Coaching program uniquely combines ancient spiritual wisdom with self transcendence, holistic wellness, predictive astrology, shadow & pain-body work, heart-based intention, the power of presence, and the law of attraction.
At this point you may be asking, "What if one side is right and the other is wrong? Doesn't the mere fact that one side is right justify its passion?" Try not to think of disputes as one side being right and the other being wrong. To the Next Human, both sides are right based on their individual viewpoints. Everyone clings to their own truth in accordance with their own unique perspective.
Just because you have a different view of the world than your neighbor, it doesn't necessary follow that they are wrong. And that's why people get into arguments, and fight, and create conflicts, and cause wars, because the ego says, "You're wrong and I'm right, and therefore you are my enemy." And of course, this is madness from the higher perspective of the Self Realized.
A three-year-old boy doesn't know what he's doing when he knocks over your wine glass, breaking it and staining the carpet. He simply doesn't know better. A baby girl doesn't know better when she screams and cries so loudly that you think your eardrums will pop. And a puppy dog doesn't know any better when it chews up your brand new pair of shoes and urinates on your carpet. They just don't know any better. And so it is the same with people.
So whatever they do, no matter how heinous it may seem, must be understood as; that's simply where they are. If people knew better, they would be behaving better. It's that simple. It's called the hierarchy of consciousness. The bee has a higher level of consciousness than a flower. A cat has a higher level of consciousness than a mouse. And an whale has a higher level of consciousness than a turtle. And so it is with people. Everyone has their own individualistic opinion based on where they are on the ladder of consciousness.
No One is separate from the divine, no matter how hard they try to be. Now, that being said, that doesn't mean that we should just sit on the sidelines and become apathetic to all of the violence that pervades today. To the contrary, we can end it all overnight. But we can't get there until we begin to look at the violence from the higher perspective of Spirit. Spiritual Life Coaching can help us to practice non-judgment, non-reaction, non-resistance, and non-violence in our daily life. Then we will no longer be perpetuating the violence that already is. We will be weakening it.
When you blame yourself for anything, you are judging yourself. If you do something unconsciously, then afterward awaken to it and blame yourself for "being unconscious," you are still judging yourself and therefore remain unconscious. When you are unconscious, you "know not what you do" and therefore are never to blame for whatever it is you do while you're unconscious. Transcending blame is a prerequisite to your spiritual freedom. The "I am bad" thought that arises because of a "horrible" thing that you did in the past is always judgment and therefore still a sign of unconsciousness.
Spiritual Life Coaching can help you to reach this level of awareness now. It can help you to understand that you don't need to hold yourself accountable for the sins or mistakes of your past. Because you were not conscious of what you were doing, there is no need to hold a grudge against yourself. Know that you were not acting as your true Self and you will never judge your Self or anyone else again. This level of consciousness is the key to peace for you as well as everyone on the planet.
by Jason Lincoln Jeffers
Spiritual Life Coach, Jason Lincoln Jeffers is the founder of The Art of Transformation, a company devoted to teaching Self Realization to the world. His Spiritual Life Coaching program uniquely combines ancient spiritual wisdom with self transcendence, holistic wellness, predictive astrology, shadow & pain-body work, heart-based intention, the power of presence, and the law of attraction.
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