Recently I got to be a guest on the Recover with Colleen podcast. She defines recovery as a journey to wholeness, sustainable wellness, and the integration of body, mind, spirit, and emotions. I love that Colleen’s podcast focuses on self-care and connection with yourself as an important part of the recovery journey. When I look at her website, I see how her approach and philosophy are similar to what I believe parents need for their recovery journey as well.
We all need to focus on learning how to meet our own needs, understanding our emotions and what they are signaling to us, and learning how we’re responsible for how we feel instead of looking outside ourselves for answers. It’s another reminder of how important it is to focus on our similarities with our kids instead of our differences.
In this episode, we discuss the importance of self-care in the grieving process. We focus on my grief from the loss of my daughter Helanna, but grieving is important for all losses. Grief is how you move through the painful gap between expectations and reality. Life is filled with all kinds of painful gaps. We need to acknowledge and grieve them in order to release resistance and move toward acceptance.
Over the last year, I’ve learned that living with grief is a lot like living with a child’s addiction. It changes us forever. We can’t control grief any more than we can control our child’s addiction. We can manage our experience of it with the way we show up for ourselves and we have to learn to live with it, instead of resisting it.
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