Good questions are open-ended. A person can answer "yes" or "no" without engaging his or her brain. On the other hand, an open-ended question compels people to think about the facts of a text, or the situation.
Everyone goes through the grief process differently. Some experience phases of grief more powerfully than others. What aspects of shock that we have talked about best describe you? What did/does the “shock” phase look like for you?
Ask good starter questions. Don’t be afraid of silence. Silence gives people time to think and process. Consider calling on someone to answer. Absolutely control your desire to make a speech or tell a story about yourself.
A person can answer "yes" or "no" without engaging his or her brain. On the other hand, an open-ended question compels people to think about the facts of a text, or the situation.
What is connection? Connection is not simply a social media post, text, a ‘like’ on your page, or even receiving a letter or gift in the mail. A connection is how being in a relationship makes us feel.
When we lose a parent, we expect to be sad and we expect we will miss our parent, but what catches us by surprise are the things we do not expect when we lose a parent.
We live our entire lives knowing at some point we will lose our parents. In the natural order of things, children outlive their parents. We can live decades with this knowledge and still be devastated when loss occurs.
Many people find they come to despise the word “accept” when it comes to grief. It has connotations of being okay with the death, or quickly moving on from the person we lost.
There is nothing wrong with being strong, but with grief that approach can leave you simply stuffing the pain deeper inside and securing a future of physical pain, poor health, anxiety, and resentment.
The stigma of suicide in our culture today may likely keep you from feeling the freedom to reveal the cause of your loved one’s death, much less talk about how it happened.