“Tanya has a heart of gold and led my grief sessions with kindness. She held space and modeled how to hold space for others. I so appreciate her and am forever grateful for the work we completed together. I will use the grief approach that she taught me as I work through losses in life.”
AMBER W., educator
MY STORY
Years ago, I first started contemplating grief recovery when I watched my friend go through a divorce. Hers, like many, was full of deception, confusion, and pain. A therapist and psychiatrist helped her wrap her mind around her husband’s addiction and the reality that her marriage was really over. She tried a variety of antidepressants, but always the side effects put her in zone of suicidal thoughts. I sat with her as she experienced many challenging feelings and many scary thoughts. I believed her therapists must be “fixing” her. But I was wrong. They did help her with information and with stress relief techniques, but her torment continued. I felt let down by her therapists. Of course, so did she. I set my mind to start finding a solution. For a couple of weeks, I poked around the Internet and compiled a folder of bereavement companies, authors and people I meant to research further and share with her. But, I let the folder sit next to my coffee table, never finding the time to sift through the resources I gathered.
A few years later, my dad died. It shook my foundation. I swear I felt that tectonic shift in every cell of my body. My spirit, mind, and body had to find a new identity and new solid ground. I was surprised at this very tangible reaction. Also, like many other grievers, I’d find myself staring out the kitchen window for minutes upon minutes, unaware of time passing. I’d feel sad, or my mind was crazy with memories and my emotions were all over the place, or I was completely numb and unresponsive.
My dad and I were not close for most of my life, but in the last two years of his life, we had talked more. We were getting to know each other, slowly. I liked him and I believe he liked me too. Then he was gone. After some time, I remembered the bereavement research I had started to help my friend.
I opened that folder, I purchased a few books and audio programs—thankfully, one of them was The Grief Recovery Handbook.
PART 2 of MY STORY
My dad, Richard Swade
After my dad died, when my mind was crazy with memories, one of two images popped into my mind automatically. One was his face about an hour after he had passed. Due to his medical condition, his skin was yellowish and he was very skinny. This image was not a pleasant one and I distinctly had the sense that the body I looked at was no longer my dad. His soul, or essence, had left.
The other image that would pop into my mind was the way he typically stared at the computer, intense and slightly irritated—yet another image that wasn’t pleasant.
These two images were not my conscious choice, and no matter how hard I tried, they were the only two images my mind would allow. It was so strange having a childhood memory of my dad yet not having the correlating image, only one of the two images would come up. I was perplexed and disappointed, but I didn’t have the know-how or energy to do anything about it.
About a year after my dad died, I began the process of The Grief Recovery Method® and went through it with my dad in mind. When I completed The Grief Recovery Handbook, having taken all the steps suggested, an astonishing thing happened. The instant I finished, literally the moment that I finished the last step, my mind flooded with many images of my dad from my life with him. Images of him when he was laughing, when he was reading, when he got excited, when he was telling word play jokes, when he was with his grandchildren. It felt like a miracle at the time, and still does! I finally had access to ALL of my dad, not just those two unpleasant images. Those two unpleasant images are still there too, but now I have choices. I can flip through all of them like full pages in a photo album. I can’t explain what chemical or hormone flooded my brain when I finished The Grief Recovery Method® process that opened the locked gates to my visual memories of my dad, yet I am immensely grateful.
My recovery, my transformation, is unique because I am an individual and my relationship with my dad is unique. We all are unique. Your recovery will be unique as well, and I know recovery and transformation will happen.