Grief Psychology

Death is the last taboo in our society, and grief is still profoundly misunderstood. So many of us feel awkward and uncertain around death and shy away from talking honestly with family and friends. Grief Works is a compassionate guide that will inform and engage anyone who is grieving, from the expected death of a parent to the sudden unexpected death of a small child, and provide clear advice for those seeking to comfort the bereaved.

Although a mother's mortality is inevitable, no book has discussed the profound lasting and far reaching effects of this loss until Motherless Daughters. More than 20 years later, it is still the go-to book that women of all ages look to for comfort, help, and understanding when their mother dies. Building on interviews with hundreds of mother-loss survivors, Edelman's personal story of losing her mother, and recent research in grief and psychology, Motherless Daughters reveals the shared experiences and core identity issues of motherless women.

From the moment pets come into our lives, we know the day will arrive when we have to say farewell. Still, we are never emotionally prepared for the last adieu. In Goodbye, Friend, Gary Kowalski takes you on a journey of healing, offering warmth and sound advice on how to cope with the death of your pet.

We are all touched at some point by the dark emotions of grief, fear, or despair. In an age of global threat, these emotions have become widespread and overwhelming. While conventional wisdom warns us of the harmful effects of "negative" emotions, this revolutionary book offers a more hopeful view: there is a redemptive power in our worst feelings. Seasoned psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan argues that it's the avoidance and denial of the dark emotions that results in the escalating psychological disorders of our time.

Megan Devine offers a profound new approach to both the experience of grief and the way we help others who have endured tragedy. Having experienced grief from both sides - as both a therapist and as a woman who witnessed the accidental drowning of her beloved partner - Megan writes with deep insight about the unspoken truths of loss, love, and healing.

New Techniques of Grief Therapy: Bereavement and Beyond expands on the mission of the previous two Techniques books, featuring innovative approaches to address the needs of those whose lives have been shadowed by loss—whether through bereavement, serious illness, the rupture of a relationship, or other complex or intangible losses, such as of an identity-defining career.

In Reconnecting After Isolation, Dr. Susan J. Noonan draws on our collective experience of the COVID-19 pandemic to help listeners deal with the emotional impact of social isolation. Speaking as both a provider and recipient of mental health care services, Noonan combines her professional and personal experiences in an evidence-based and practical guide. Drawing on meticulous research and interviews with four psychologists, she outlines steps to overcome the emotional trauma of isolation.

Coping with loss is difficult, but that doesn’t mean you have to suffer alone. Based on the proven-effective acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) treatment, Moving Through Grief provides simple and effective techniques to help you get unstuck and start living a rich and fulfilling life again, loss and all. ACT is all about embracing what hurts and committing to actions that will improve and enrich your life.

Internationally renowned psychiatrist and author Irvin Yalom has devoted his career to counselling those suffering from anxiety and grief. But never had he faced the need to counsel himself until his wife, esteemed feminist author Marilyn Yalom, was diagnosed with cancer. In A Matter of Death and Life, Marilyn and Irvin share how they took on profound new struggles: Marilyn to die a good death, Irvin to live on without her.

This award-winning book has been hailed as the seminal work in the field. And now the fourth newly revised and expanded edition offers so much more to the bereaving pet owner. This edition also includes a significant new way of considering the meaning of afterlife for us and our pets. It discusses the topic from a 21st-century scientific perspective that is very different from existing religious or metaphysical ones, offering a new comfort to skeptics and agnostics as well.

As an analyst working with the dying, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés has developed seminal methods to help ease the fear that can accompany the dying process. In The Radiant Coat, this bestselling author shares myths and stories first told at the bedsides of the dying to comfort them and their loved ones. For other cultures, Dr. Estés teaches, death holds no terror. It is in fact characterized as an ally, a wise and caring figure, leading departed souls through the starry night into the next day.

This unusual and important audiobook is a series of reflections on death in all its forms: the science of it, the medicine, the tragedy and the comedy. Dr David Jarrett draws on family stories and case histories from his 30 years of treating the old, demented and frail to try to find his own understanding of the end. And he writes about all the conversations that we, our parents, our children, the medical community, our government and society as a whole should be having.

The conventional view of grieving - encapsulated by the famous five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - is defined by a mourning process that we can only hope to accept and endure. In The Other Side of Sadness, psychologist and emotions expert George Bonanno argues otherwise. Our inborn emotions - anger and denial, but also relief and joy - help us deal effectively with loss. To expect or require only grief-stricken behavior from the bereaved does them harm.

Whatever loss you have experienced, this book can help you to make sense of it; guiding you through those difficult and overwhelming emotions, explaining how these fit into the universal psychological process of grieving—and showing you a path to creating a more content life. Psychotherapist Christine Hopfgarten looks in detail at different reasons that we may encounter feelings of loss and grief, including bereavement, relationship break-up, losing a job, infertility, miscarriage and illness, and provides focused help.

Bruce Feiler, author of the New York Times best sellers The Secrets of Happy Families and Council of Dads, has long explored the stories that give our lives meaning. Galvanized by a personal crisis, he spent the last few years crisscrossing the country, collecting hundreds of life stories in all 50 states from Americans who’d been through major life changes - from losing jobs to losing loved ones; from changing careers to changing relationships; from getting sober to getting healthy to simply looking for a fresh start.

When best-selling writer Clare Mackintosh lost her five-week-old son, she searched for help in books. All of them wanted to tell her what she should be feeling and when she should be feeling it, but the truth—as she soon found out—is that there are no neat, labelled stages for grief, or crash grief-diets to relieve us of our pain. What we need when we're grieving is time and understanding. I Promise It Won't Always Hurt Like This is the book she needed then.

Following deaths, divorces, or the confusion of major relocation, many adults tell their children “don’t feel bad”. In fact, say the authors of the highly praised The Grief Recovery Handbook, feeling bad or sad is precisely the appropriate emotion attached to sad events. Encouraging a child to bypass grief without completion can cause unseen long-term damage.

'They have lightning in their souls, thunder in their hearts, chaos in their bones.' Nikita Gill's poetry has captured hearts and minds all over the world; her inspirational words have been shared hundreds of thousands of times online, plastered across placards on international women's marches and even transformed into tattoos. This collection will showcase mostly unseen poetry and prose, delving into ideas about passion, identity, empowerment and femininity. Written and read by Nikita Gill.

Suicide rates among Army soldiers increased 80 percent between 2004 and 2008, according to a recent report published in Injury Prevention. In the last several years, the number of soldiers returning from the Middle East with mental and physical wounds has continued to climb. According to Dr. Simon Rego, a supervising psychologist at Montefiore Medical Center, "Unlike any other time in history, U.S. military suicide rates now appear to have surpassed those among comparable civilian populations. It is therefore critical that we address this emerging public-health problem."

Suicide would appear to be the last taboo. Even incest is now discussed freely in popular media, but the suicide of a loved one is still an act most people are unable to talk about or even admit to their closest family or friends. This is just one of the many painful and paralyzing truths that author Carla Fine discovered when her husband, a successful young physician, took his own life in December 1989. And being unable to speak openly and honestly about the cause of her pain made it all the more difficult for her to survive.