Helping People With Grief Recovery

By Jon Terrell, M.A.

Grief is a painful feeling. We grieve because we've loved and have lost the one we've loved. Sometimes, we grieve about other losses--of a job or a dream we had for ourselves, or the loss of our youth. Learn how our work helping people with grief recovery can support you.

My work is about helping people with grief recovery.  We focus on guiding people from emotional pain back to the joy of living.

We do this at our retreats, which we offer several times a year.

This approach honors all emotions, including anger, fear, and grief, as paths to healing and awakening. Our grief journey often includes these other feelings. By allowing all of our feelings to surface, we speed up the work of grief recovery.

Stuck feelings of whatever kind offer us gifts. In working through emotional pain, we become more human: more compassionate, more fully connected and alive in the world.

And as we help people with grief recovery, retreat participants grow:

• Our personality grows in its capacity to love and be loved.
• We become more able to help others with their grief because we have been there.
• We have experienced extreme emotional pain and survived, and that gives us greater capacity to be there for others.

We can be most effective by listening skillfully, supporting, and being with them.

As human beings, we are here to grow, to become whole and present, to love more deeply and freely. But sometimes we get stuck in our feelings and can't move forward. This is especially true when we are stuck in grief.

Helping People With Grief Recovery And The Grieving Process

Several pages on this website focus on different aspects of grief recovery work. Some entries give suggestions to help people overwhelmed by their feelings. Others explain the grieving process. Almost all the pages refer to our grief and loss retreat work as a way to help people move through pain and find joy again.

In these pages and throughout this website, I often touch on the unfinished work of grieving our childhood pain. As a psychotherapist, I find that the roots of current problems and pain are found in old unfinished memories that haunt us from our childhood. While this may be difficult to fully recognize in the current situation of helping people with grief recovery, there is usually a pile-up of past pain. This can be overwhelming and disorienting.

For those people who are unable to attend a mental health retreat for grief and loss, I offer grief counseling locally and long-distance. It's not a substitute for the retreats, but it can provide comfort and support.

Grief counseling can prepare clients for our retreats. At our events, people experience the healing power of a loving community, which goes beyond anything that individual work can accomplish.

Of all the emotions, grief is the slowest to heal. Often, there are other feelings, such as anger or fear, that are blocking our ability to walk through the emotional pain of grief. As these other feelings are acknowledged, we can face into our grief more directly and purely, with the added strength needed to let ourselves be healed. At our retreats, we engage in this process of reclaiming our Light and power from the related emotions, which may include guilt, sorrow, fear and anxiety, anger, and other pain.

When grief is related to the loss of a beloved person, our grief is never fully gone. Instead, as we work through our grief, we gradually come back to our present moment, to our current life. We live our lives rather than mourn the past.

Our memories live on in our hearts and deepen our present life rather than distracting us from it. We both reclaim our lives and cherish our past memories.

Here is a look at each page so you can find what you need:

Coping With Extreme Grief has some suggestions to help with emotional pain.

Handling Grief, Loss, Sadness And Pain is a short guide to how to deal with your feelings. Sometimes we hide from feelings because we are afraid of being overwhelmed by them.

Grief Stricken has other suggestions, including taking care of yourself, trusting your own unique process, and getting the right help.

Working Through Prolonged Grief includes activities that can be helpful for long-term grief.

10 Things I've Learned About Grief has suggestions from my experience about the grieving process.

Kubler Ross Stages Of Grief page talks about her groundbreaking work that can help you make sense of all the feelings you may be experiencing.

Grieving A Loss has more reflections on the grief process.

Pet Loss Page  I talk about the death and burial of my cat and how our retreat work can help people who have lost an animal friend.

About Our Grief Retreats focuses on the uniqueness of each of our retreat offerings.

Prolonged Grief is about meditation, stress management and some of the tools I use to help people.

Healing Divorce Grief is an interview with a participant at one of our retreats.

The Grief and Loss Retreat page highlights the healing journeys we offer 5-6 times each year.

Jon Terrell's work of helping people with grief recovery can include long-distance grief counseling. See the link below.

Go from Grief to Home Page

Go to Working With Anger and Depression

Go to Fear, Anxiety and Change

Go to Long Distance Grief Counseling 

Photo Credit - Grief/Joy by Lee Hicks

Legal Documents for those who want to attend our retreats: Go Here