Mental Health Resource
Our goal is to bring people together around the issues of addictions by providing concise, up-to-date information and a meeting place for patients, their friends and families, and professionals who offer pathways to recovery. www.psyweb.com
Participate in a Research Study
If you have experienced the death of a loved one in the past ten years and are over eighteen years old, we invite you to participate in a brief online study of the ways that individuals make sense of and find meaning in loss. All participants will be entered in a raffle to win one of two $50 gift certificates to Amazon.com.
Your participation will contribute to a better understanding of grief and loss. The researchers, Dr. Brian Vandenberg, and Rachel Hibberd, are most grateful for your time and help in completing the study. If you have any questions, please e-mail rhibberd@umsl.edu. The study has been approved by the Institutional Review board of the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Click here to participate:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2DTKDZ9
Book Corner
Still grieving the death of her mother five years on, Mary Sullivan has been living on autopilot. Immersing herself in the daily details of taking care of her two teenage sons and husband, she gets by with occasional lapses of overwhelming grief. During a quick stop at a luncheonette, she breaks down again only to be helped by Cathy, the young woman manning the counter. Cathy's compassion is quickly reciprocated as Cathy finds herself motherless following a tragic accident. As Mary guides Cathy through the technical and emotional aspects of a loved one's death, Mary's family grows resentful of this interruption to their domestic routine. Author and playwright Rentschler (Jitters) has beautifully blended convincing characters, perceptive portraits of family relationships and friendships, and insight into the human capacity for healing and renewal. Recommended for all popular fiction collections.
Word Cloud
Funeral Wreaths
There are times when situations happen to others and we don't really know what to say or do. We feel like we need to something to help them with the hurt they have but our words are just not enough. We want to do something, take some type of action, but nothing we do would really help them.
We have all heard of Elizabeth Kubler Ross's Stages of Grief but I prefer to talk about layers of grief. As bereaved parents of babies, we quickly discover that our grief does not work in a straight line. Indeed in the early days, we can only describe our grief in terms of a roller coaster ride, a storm, and a cyclone.
I came across this book: They That Sow in Tears by Catherine Chappell and Charles Nolan Sandifer. Both shared the heartache of the loss of a child. Catherine's daughter and Charles' son were on the waiting list for organ transplant. But they did not make it to receive the transplants. In their grief, both found comfort working in their gardens. They found out that they were not alone. Planting a memory garden is a universal response to grief. I never thought of gardening in this way till I read their book.
A personal calamity would throw anyone upside down so that they feel in utter turmoil. Our comfort zone would be no longer available. The blow is harder to take if we had unwittingly assumed that whatever it was that we loved would always be there. We feel like shouting out 'It's not fair'. 'It's not the way things are supposed to be'. So what happens next?
A diagnosis of amputation can have a far reaching impact on your psychological state, much more in fact, than the actual physical loss itself. This might seem hard to imagine but because the operation to remove any limb could almost be considered routine these days, even the most difficult of amputations are invariably a success. Your emotional recovery takes much longer and this is because the stress of an amputation is inextricably entwined with your emotional state and this connection, can cause a myriad of emotions such as fear, grief, self-doubt and a lack of confidence afterwards.
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