You may be feeling overwhelmed, lost, and uncertain about the possibility of healing. You seem to cycle between numbness and overwhelming emotion.

What is covered in this phase of the Path to Peace

• Validation of your unique story of grief

• Identify your personal strengths, coping capacities, and resilience factors

• Clarify available supportive relationships and resources

• Learn grounding and emotional regulation skills ( breath work, grounding and containment techniques), so you have embodied access to calm when needed.

• Create tangible reminders of the support and strength you have

• Learn how to communicate your needs and access resources when you need them

• Assessing your current life demands, support systems

• Discussing your cultural, religious and spiritual beliefs as they pertain to your grief and loss

Here, you will. start to learn how to engage with your grief and see glimpses of possibility beyond pain. “Pain is not solved…it is tended to”

Using the concepts and techniques supported by the most current and advanced Grief research, A Path to Peace uses this phase to help you engage with your grief in ways that will help you name your emotions and fears to find self-compassion and understanding. In this phase we address the following topics:

• Using gentle inquiry, we deepen exploration without interrogating. Questions will open doors rather than demand specific answers.

• Learn avoidance patterns and how they impact your healing

• Understand how grief is manifesting in your body physically and learning how to manage them

• Learn to navigate overwhelming emotions that can come on quickly and without warning

• Learn strategies for dealing with anniversaries and holidays

• Putting all the fragments of your loss experience, from before your loss to the present, into a cohesive story.

Human relationships are always evolving, retuning and repairing. When death interrupts this cycle during a phase of rupture or before repair can occur, the natural process is disrupted. Research in Attachment Theory shows that we have a fundamental need to complete this process within our grief journey. This phase of the A Path to Peace engages with this topic in the following ways:

• Symbolic expression of words left unsaid

• Imaginal dialogues and forgiveness processes to address unresolved conflicts

• Addressing grief for the relationship that never was and the release of release

• Addressing self-forgiveness and understanding the limits of personal control

• Focusing on lost opportunities and accepting life’s impermanence

• Creating ways to maintain continuing connection through practices and rituals and legacy planning

Research has shown that unresolved relationship issues are amongst the strongest predictors of prolonged grief. Here we will find emotional peace, expression completion, self-forgiveness, and a path toward continuing bonds.

Often, loss changes who we are. “Who am I now??” Phase four of the Path Peace provides ways towards rebuilding your identity. This is not about “moving on” or “finding a new purpose.” Rather, it involves a complex integration process where connections to the deceased and past identity are maintained while simultaneously building a viable new sense of self. Here is what you will work on:

• What core values will be maintained that transcend the loss of your loved one?

• What activities and interests will you continue?

• What personal strengths and qualities endure?

• What new dimensions of capability and resilience have been discovered?

• Revising priorities and values based on insights found after losing someone you love

• What new roles and relationships are developing and how is your understanding of yourself evolving?

It is very common for those who are grieving to withdraw. It can be due to a lack of energy, feeling misunderstood, judged, social anxiety and not knowing how to talk about your loss, and not wanting to manage people’s reactions. This phase of the Path to Peace focuses on reengagement in safe and fulfilling ways.

• Assessing your current level of social interaction and with whom.

• Understanding what social interactions feel manageable versus overwhelming

• Discussing specific anxieties and concerns about social reengagment

• Learning to create and communicate appropriate boundaries with family, the workplace, social events, religious communities, and new relationships.

• Create a concrete, personalized reengagement plan with specific goals and action steps

• Reflection to evaluate and adjust specific steps in the reengagement plan.

A Path to Peace concludes with an integration process of reviewing and finding meaning in the grief journey. Here we explore how grief becomes part of your story - not the whole of it. What is emphasized:

• Integration of your loss into a coherent life narrative

• Building relapse prevention skills that cultivate resilience and renewed purpose

• Exploring new activities including potential volunteer work

• Pacing new commitments to respect post-loss recovery needs

• Developing sustainable self-care practices

• Ongoing growth strategies

• Future support planning