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Delayed Guilt: An Unwelcome, Unproductive Feeling

Posted on August 8, 2015 - by Harriet Hodgson

I wasn’t prepared for the thoughts I had the other day, guilty thoughts that suddenly surfaced in my mind. Although guilt can cause positive change, for the most part, I think it’s a non-productive feeling. Guilty feelings can tug a bereaved person backwards on the recovery path, when the goal is to move forward. Guilt is a component of grief. Often our guilty feelings begin with the words “I wish.” My guilty feelings were associated with my elder daughter, who died in 2007. Some of my thoughts: I wish I had known sooner. I wish I had more knowledge. I […]

Susan Anderson: Recovery from the Ultimate Abandonment

Posted on August 7, 2015 - by Dr. Gloria and Dr. Heidi Horsley

Susan Anderson is interviewed by Drs. Gloria and Heidi Horsley for The Open to Hope foundation radio show. Anderson has extensive personal experience with loss and works as a psychotherapist helping others address their own grief hurdles. She’s also a speaker and author, as well as the founder of the Abandonment Recovery Movement. “Abandonment issues are primal feelings of loss from childhood,” Anderson explains. It’s that same feeling of “mommy’s not coming back to the crib” that people never really outgrow. Losing a loved one can definitely feel like abandonment at the primal level. When Anderson was married for 18 […]

Giving Back After Coping with a Loss with Dr. Janna Henning

Posted on August 7, 2015 - by Heidi Horsley

When Dr. Janna Henning experienced her own loss, it encouraged her to help others in similar situations heal. Dr. Henning talked with Dr. Heidi Horsley at the 2015 Association for Death Education and Counseling conference. Dr. Henning was in a car crash when she was 22, and literally experienced having her best friend die on top of her. Six years later, nearly to the day, she lost her partner in a bike-truck accident. “Having those two losses in my 20s I think really influenced my way of understanding (that) in some way the world doesn’t understand those losses.” When 20-somethings […]

Loss of a Parent Through Suicide with Franklin Cook

Posted on August 7, 2015 - by Franklin Cook

At the 2015 Association for Death Education and Counseling conference, Dr. Gloria Horsley discusses loss of a parent via suicide with personal grief coach Franklin Cook. “My dad died of suicide in 1978,” says Cook, which began his interest in the field but it took two decades before Cook was fully immersed. He was in his early 20s when his dad died, and it wasn’t until his 40s that he began actively volunteering in suicide bereavement organizations. Now, he’s been doing peer support for those who lost a parent to suicide. Cook’s father took his own life by cutting himself […]

Dr. Andy Ho: Grief and Cultural Differences

Posted on August 6, 2015 - by Gloria Horsley

At the 2015 Association of Death Education and Counseling (ADEC) conference, Dr. Gloria Horsley discusses cultural differences in grief with Dr. Andy Ho. He notes there are tremendous differences in grieving within the Chinese culture, with older generations in particular thinking many elements of death are bad luck. This has led to a communication meltdown between cultures, with younger generations unsure of how to proceed with death. Planning the logistics of death, sharing your wishes (organ donation? Cremation?) and other necessary conversations are often avoided in the Chinese culture. In the Mandarin language, the words “four” and “death” sound very […]

Tolerating the Intolerable: Beyond Numbing

Posted on August 6, 2015 - by Basia Mosinski

When the death of a loved one happens suddenly and unexpectedly, it can crack your heart wide open. The shock and pain of the loss is numbing at first because the reality that you will never see your loved one again is intolerable and overwhelming. Numbing feelings in a sense protects you from experiencing them all at once and from the reality of what has happened. The numbing begins to wear off after the funeral, after family and friends return to their own lives…then the reality that your expectations, hopes and dreams have inextricably been changed forever begins to surface. […]

Since Nobody’s Perfect, May We Speak Ill of the Dead?

Posted on August 5, 2015 - by Greg Adams

In our grief support groups, we often use this question somewhere along the way: “Since ‘nobody’s perfect,’ what are some things that were not perfect about the person who died?” For some, the answers come pretty easily, but for many, this is a difficult question to consider and some pass on responding. Our frequent tendency is to avoid speaking ill of the dead as it can feel disrespectful on some level and we don’t want to come across as critical of one who is not here to offer a defense. Yet, it’s true—no one is perfect and there were things […]

Set Free to Grieve and Heal

Posted on August 5, 2015 - by Larry Patten

In the Bible, Jesus healed on the Sabbath. Bad Jesus! Law-breaking Jesus! Once he was accused of healing a woman who’d been in physical agony for nearly two decades. Jesus replied (Luke 13:16) to his critics with, “And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?” Not only did Jesus ignore the rule of not working on the Sabbath, the person healed was a . . . woman. In that era, women were property, mere second-class citizens. Worse yet, the incident occurred in […]

Molly Gandour: A documentary called Peanut Gallery

Posted on August 5, 2015 - by Molly Gandour

Molly Gandour created Peanut Gallery, a documentary that addressed her sister’s death and the silence that ensued. Only recently did Gandour and her parents begin talking about the death. She shares her story with Dr. Heidi Horsley during the 2015 Association for Death Education and Counseling conference. Her sister died when Gandour was ten, and it wasn’t until she was an adult that the subject was breached. She returned to India to start this conversation. “It really captures how difficult it is to have these conversations,” says Dr. Horsley. Gandour’s sister had leukemia for as long as she can remember, […]

Saints and Ordinary People: We All Live by Faith

Posted on August 4, 2015 - by Charles W. Sidoti

“The beauty of belief in the Communion of Saints is that it serves to remind us of our basic connectedness to one another as human beings, a spiritual connection that transcends death.” Life can be very lonely at times. It is also true, however, that we are never really alone. Something common to many religions is that they have certain men and women whose lives of faith stand out in such a way that they serve as examples for others. Some religions call them saints, while other religions do not, but most have their great men and women whose lives […]