Little Gems
Growth and healing rarely occur in one grand transformation. Change happens bit by bit. In therapy, each insight and emotional shift moves us along the path toward greater freedom.
While a blog is not therapy, here I offer little gems of practical information and hard-won wisdom that I hope might spark something for you — an insight or emotional shift to move you along your own path.
When Your Kind of Grief Doesn’t Come with a Sympathy Card
In the midst of wrenching loss, many of us get the message from our culture or from those around us that we’re doing it wrong. Ambiguous loss and disenfranchised grief are both ways that social and cultural expectations add complexity to our grief experiences.
How to Love Someone Well When They’re Grieving
Let’s not let uncertainty or self-consciousness stop us from showing up for the people we love or care about.
Object-Trace Cells and the Grieving Brain
“If someone close to us dies, then, based on what we know about object-trace cells, our neurons still fire every time we expect our loved one to be in the room. And this neural trace persists until we can learn that our loved one is never going to be in our physical world again.”
Anniversaries of Loss and Trauma: The Body Keeps the Calendar
As the anniversary of a loss or a trauma approaches, it’s often the case that our bodies register the signs before we consciously take note of the calendar.