Our Goals:
Grief is a process, a long and difficult
journey … Grief
can feel like a heavy, never- ending burden of hurt, confusion, anger and
despair.
We may feel as though nothing will ever be “right” again. Grief
can be felt emotionally, physically, spiritually and socially. The whole world
may seem changed – distorted.
Our goals with this website are to help you - the person suffering from grief:
and most importantly -
As a person who has suffered many losses, I often felt overwhelmed and as if I were drowning in grief. I suffered for many years: I did not know what was wrong or what to do about the situation. I just wanted to stop hurting.
At first, my focus was on helping myself. In just a few months, I had read 6 books on dealing with grief. I began to understand that I was suffering from delayed and undiagnosed grief. The more I learn, the more I want to help others.
For more than 10 years now, I have
worked in the field of Substance Abuse Treatment. Over the last 4
years, I have personally talked to nearly 3,000 men and women who are
suffering from addiction
to chemicals (alcohol and drugs).
Between 85 - 95 % of these individuals are also dually-
In
the course of my clinical work, I have asked these people what were
some of the underlining causes or "driving factors" of their addiction.
Approximately 40% of the respondents named grief or grief related issues as a major contributing factor in their ongoing addiction. This was "normal grief" caused by the death of a loved one.
Over the course of treatment, an even larger percentage (nearly 50%) of the people acknowledged that "symbolic" grief was a significant factor in their life-long abuse of substances.
"Symbolic grief" refers to the loss of a life dream, loss of health, dissolution of a marriage, loss of a business, etc...
While studying to become a Certified Grief Counselor (GC-C), I read many textbooks and case studies on the subject of grief. I personally talked to many other people who were also experiencing grief. The amount of research available is both vast and ongoing.
Through all of this, one thing become perfectly clear to me:
There are hundreds of thousands of people who are suffering the way I had - mostly because none of us had any idea of what to do or how.
It is our hope that what we share on this website will help you as much as it has helped us.
Please let us know if you find something here that was helpful.
24 hours a day, 7 days a week ONLINE.
Our goal is that all e-mails and contacts will be answered within 24-48 hours.
We look forward to hearing from you!
