When life gets in the way. How can we find hope again?

The decline of a loved one.Seeing a loved one break down and gradually decline quickly or over a longer period of time is enormously painful. It can be felt both physically and mentally and be an almost paralyzing powerless experience. Noticing small or large changes; A more tired gaze, slower movements, a mind that loses the thread can be the beginning of an end we are not ready for.Welcome to listen!

Grief during the summer holiday season.Summer series; episode 5Today´s episode is about grief during holidays and vacation, but it can also be representative for other specific times of year when you might feel extra lonely and vulnerable for individual reasons. The summer holiday period or vacation, can be difficult since loneliness might be extra hard to handle. The summer season awakens feelings, which can be nice and positive filled with hope, but it can also be winter-hidden frozen feelings of sadness that are now melting in the heart, coming to the surface. This can mean a stressful emotional time, loaded with expectations that can be difficult to relate to, take part of and live up to.Welcome to listen,Catharina

This is a podcast about grief and loss and how we can find hope. How are we and how can we move forward? Even if your life's greatest losses are not caused by death, this is still for you. Today I will talk about myths about grief. I think we can all recognize: -Don't cry, can be perceived as; Don't show that you're sad through a reaction of crying, even though you're sad. This is easy to say meaning well, but the interpretation is that the actual expression of the emotion is wrong. From early age, we risk to earn that crying is weak in our society. We can hear someone who is crying being called names already in the playground. Crying is actually a great tool when it comes to reactions to grief and processing it. When you can let your emotions out, you shouldn't have to hear that it´s wrong, when you're in grief after a painful life change. In this episode I talk about other myths and examples of what we can say insted. Welcome to listenand follow. Thank You, Catharina

Grief can manifest itself through emotional, cognitive, physical, and behavioral reactions.It is common that we have difficulty concentrating and remembering things. We can forget what we were supposed to get in the kitchen or what we would say or do. It can also be difficult to make decisions and you feel confused. Sometimes we deny and find it difficult to accept what has happened. It does not feel real.We can get caught up in dwelling, analyzing and constantly thinking about what has happened. Being busy dealing with all the things that grief awakens in us can make it difficult to focus on other things. After my mother's death, it felt like cotton in my head and I had to make a lot of effort to remember things and be able to function. Everyday life worked, but it came at a high cost of enormous fatigue both emotionally and physically.Today´s episode is about the variety of reactions one can feel after a painful life change.Welcome to listen!

Summer series; episode 2Time and change. When life gets in the way, we often need to reprioritize time and think about what needs to . Maybe time just goes by without us feeling better.  When we talk about grief linked to time, we may think that we will get over the loss during or after a certain time, but it doesn't work that way. Every grief and loss are individual, thus the need for time also. It is also about what life in general looks like around us. For my part, it's almost five years since my mother died. The physical grief that hurt my body doesn't hurt in the same painful way anymore, but that doesn't mean that my grief is less, that I've forgotten or that the love isn't as great. There are good days and bad days, days we have more energy and days we have less energy, which is also normal. In this episode I talk about how we can support ourselves or others considering time in painful life changes. I also share some tools that helped me when my mother died. Welcome to listen.

Grief recovery helped me to heal and I decided to become a certified grief coach myself, since I also wanted to help others, which I do now; individually, in groups and proactively with seminars and through this podcast. So, my own experience led to a strong urge to share the tools. I also believe a lot in proactivity about how we as fellow human beings can support and be there for each other when life gets in the way in different forms and of various reasons. We often know how to get and achieve things, but rarely how to handle losing them, when someone or something no longer exists in our lives.Welcome to listen and follow.Catharina