Moving Beyond Loss And Grief

What is ‘Moving Beyond Loss’ ?

What if I told you that there is a high probability that your heart is broken, just like mine is!

It may have been caused by the death of someone close to you either recent or long ago or it may have been caused by a divorce or a breakup of a romantic relationship. It may have been caused by any of the more than 40 other losses that a person can encounter during their lifetime.

Losses such as miscarriage, retirement, illness or injury or loss of a limb, bankruptcy, redundancy, losing a job, still birth, death of a less than loved one, empty nest, loss of trust and many more losses that we will suffer during our lifetime.

Regardless of the cause of your broken heart, you know how you feel, and it is not for me to say, “I know how you feel,” because I don’t. Neither does anyone else. At best you remember how you felt when your losses occurred.

Your feelings are normal and a natural reaction to loss of any kind. The problem is that we have all been socialized to believe that these feelings are abnormal and unnatural.

My aim is to help provide you with the effective help I had so much difficulty in finding when we lost our only child closely followed by the loss of my husband, who died of a broken heart.

While grief is normal and natural, most of the information passed on within our society about dealing with loss is not normal, natural, or helpful. Grief is how we respond emotionally to loss, but most of the information we have learned about dealing with loss is intellectual.

We are programmed to deal with our loss with intellectual words such as ‘Time heals all wounds’, ‘Don’t be sad, there are plenty of fish in the sea’, ‘You must not cry when others are present’, Don’t feel bad, it was God’s will’, ‘Keep busy’ and you will feel better. These are some of the common incorrect ideas about dealing with loss. In fact, they are so common that nearly everyone recognizes them, and most people never question if these are valid.

As a Certified Grief Recovery Specialist, I use the evidence-based Grief Recovery Method which is not an ongoing support group or grief counselling programme. This is a structured step by step program that addresses unresolved grief over 12 weeks in a 1-2-1- program which works to help you move forward with your life.

After an eight-year struggle with my loss and grief, I discovered the Grief Recovery method which gave me a reason to live, laugh and remember my loved ones without the tears. I am a born sceptic, but I was surprised when I could finally talk about the good times I had enjoyed with my child without the guilt or pain.

I realised that as a Certified Grief Recovery Specialist, I could help all those who, like me, may be suffering in silence, not wanting to go for grief counselling or attend a grief support group or want to talk with anyone who would listen but not hear them.

Is it ever too soon to recover from a deep loss?

After a deep loss, there is a sense of numbness and a reduced ability to concentrate. In spite of that, we want to talk about the circumstances of the loss and to review the relationship we had with our loved one. Consequently, effective grief recovery can begin almost immediately because it is typical for a family to talk immediately afterwards about the family member who died. It is equally common following a divorce, retirement, pet loss, job loss or physical change to talk about the good and bad experiences with those relationships or events.

Talking about loss and about relationships is wonderful and good but it is generally not enough to allow us to feel complete. We need to take additional actions to help complete the pain we discover as we talk about our relationships.

How does this evidence-based program work?

“Evidence Based” means that the Grief Recovery Method was investigated and the research on how it works is published in a peer-reviewed journal. Dr. Rachael Nolan and Dr. Jeff Hallam published their results in two articles in “The American Journal of Health Education.” and at several conferences.

Their studies show that The Grief Recovery Method goes beyond a “best practice” or “promising approach” in dealing with the emotional pain of loss. It provides an Action Plan that helps find happiness despite the loss suffered.

The Method helps grievers deal with those things they wish might have been different or better. It gives them the chance to address their dreams and hopes for the future, which is not the future they had planned. It helps them address the words left unspoken and deal with the lost relationship that they thought would cause them pain for the rest of their lives. All these things may sound too good to be true, but this research shows that this dream of a better tomorrow is very possible. Learn More…

How will I know that I am healing?

The grieving process is different for everyone, but there are some general signs that can help you know when you are recovering from grief.

Grief can be a lengthy process that lasts from anticipatory grief—the process that begins before an individual has died—to recovery. So how do you know that you are recovering? Here are some of the most common symptoms of recovery from grief.

Signs that you are recovering from grief include:

Noticing your own recovery progress
Feeling more emotionally stable
Being able to laugh and joke with others
Sharing funny memories about your loved one without crying or feeling sad
Tackling holidays without feeling lost

Not feeling guilty about not visiting the cemetery
Feeling good about taking care of yourself
Looking forward to a different future
Developing new activities and interests
Desiring to help others in need

How can I heal my broken heart?

Please don’t just wait for ‘time to heal’ because time alone will not heal a broken heart. Time simply passes leaving us with the pain. When you are advised to “let go” or “move on with your life” nobody tells you how to ‘let go’ and what you need to do to accomplish that. I struggled with this phrase ‘let go and ‘move on’ for eight long years. Don’t let this happen to you.

It is almost impossible to “move on” without first taking a series of actions that help you on the road to recovery and moving on. The Grief Recovery Method has been developed and refined over the past 30 years to make it possible to move beyond pain and remember our loved ones and cherish the memories we have without the tears and heart wrench.

The Program

12 x 90 minutes of one-on-one F2F or Zoom sessions to help you work through the emotional pain and start the recovery process.

You will learn how to stop fighting to keep your true emotions hidden.
You will learn how to release the bottled-up pain which is what you have traditionally been taught to do after a loss. For example, ‘Be strong’, ‘Minimize your feelings, ‘Keep busy’, ‘Try to replace the loss’, ‘Grieve alone’.
You will learn to address the true cause of the pain, the loss itself and stop taking short term actions to appear ‘fine’ to others.

You will learn how to ‘Move On’ and ‘Let Go’ by discovering and completing what was left emotionally unfinished for you.
As you take the actions in the program you will find a reduction in that sense of a heavy heart and with that a new ability to move forward in your life without forgetting your loved one.
You will be coached on how to build a different life.