A Tool for Helping Survivors of Loss Walk Through Complicated Grief

COVID-19 has brought new challenges to survivors of loss: sudden losses, less support because of physical distancing, the unavailability of common distractions and coping mechanisms, not being able to say goodbye or see loved ones in person before they pass, and media coverage of COVID-19 and constant day-to-day reminders in every covered face. In the wake of this pandemic, knowing how to help survivors of loss is of paramount importance.

Grief work is a daunting field in the best of times, as it seeks to help clients walk compassionately and constructively through deep vulnerabilities, as well as dramatic life changes. Isolation, increased anxiety, and a dearth of resources multiply the difficulties that grievers and counselors face. Grief work has struggled with how to teach people to appropriately apply healing techniques in order to process their loss and live within their new normal.

Over the past 20 years, I have been leading grief support groups in nursing homes, churches, and as a hospice bereavement coordinator where I attended to the grief needs of over 250 families. From these many encounters with survivors of loss and my own desire to create the very best grief support, RESTORED: A Self-Paced Grief Workbook for Your Journey from Loss to Life was born. Its goal is to provide both the sense of group solidarity, comfort, and understanding that a grief group can give and to create a highly personalized space where a survivor can take the time to safely encounter their grief, understand their loss, and take ownership of their future.

RESTORED is a five-time award-winning workbook for survivors of loss to navigate their grief journey to the restored lives they are seeking. This workbook’s information, illustrations, real-life examples, suggested exercises, and reflection questions make the complicated world of grief make sense and highlight the journey to healing with 15 achievable practices.

Take a small look at the RESTORED framework and you will quickly see how it is different than typical grief therapy. 

RESTORED Framework: Teach, Show, Apply, and Further Resources

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. ~ Lao Tzu

When people are navigating deep life changes, they need more than mere education—they need to learn how to put that education to use. This is the aim of the RESTORED program. The workbook gently teaches new grief concepts, shows the survivor what it looks like to utilize these concepts, and then supports them as they apply what they have learned.

TEACH

In each practice, you will find a section entitled “Education.” These sections provide knowledge from experts and reflections from others about what helped them. The tools in this section provide the survivor with direction as they work through loss.

SHOW

In each practice, you will find “Resilient Survivor Examples” from the perspective of five resilient loss survivors. Sometimes, to find one’s own way through loss, it helps to see how others have made it through their grief journey.

In each practice you will also find a “My Story” section. These sections contain pieces of my own story of loss from when I was 15 and my mother passed away as an example of what processing a loss may look like. My story is also included to help the reader connect further with the grief process provided. As the survivor reads my story, this creates an environment of trust and reciprocity, which promotes catharsis as the survivor finds their safe space to process their loss.

APPLY

In each practice you will find “Suggested Exercises” and “Reflection Questions” to help process the information from that section and put these ideas into practice. Journaling has been proven to help logical thinkers engage their feelings and creative thinkers further process their experiences (Leaf, 2013; Siegel, 2009). The heart of the workbook is its ability to engage the reader and speak to each part of their experience, giving them the space to see and understand their loss and to envision and claim for themselves the first steps of establishing their new lives.

FURTHER RESOURCES

At the end of each practice, you will find a “Going Deeper” list of books and articles. These are recommended resources on the topic covered in each section. If you want to spend more time on any particular part of the grief process, these are tools to help.

More on Navigating Grief

Each person’s journey through grief will be unique. However, whatever twists and turns a journey may take, loss presents us all with the same critical challenges. This workbook walks through the five key parts of the grief and restoration process, which I refer to as the 5 R Principles.

1. Reestablish Order: Education and self-care tools are provided to bring order to the chaos of grief, normalize the grief process, and set a foundation to work through the grief.
2. Reset Expectations: What are the survivors feeling, what barriers are they experiencing, and what questions are they asking? Answering these questions will help equip a survivor of loss to identify and confront their reaction to loss. This confrontation will include feeling the pain of loss, expressing those painful feelings, and releasing them.
3. Remember Your Loved One: Memories are the bridge between one’s past and future. They put the puzzle pieces of life back together. We will remember the survivor’s loved one together through recalling memories, telling their story, and creating healing rituals.
4. Renew Identity: The renewal of identity occurs as a survivor gains perspective on who they were before loss and starts picturing their new beginning. Creating a mental picture of this new beginning will eventually help them start to build their renewed identity. Renewing identity also occurs through overcoming fears about the future, especially fear of those places or events that might trigger strong emotions, like holidays.
5. Restore Life After Loss: A restored life happens gradually as one solidifies the integration of the life from before loss and the life that continues. Life after loss is restored when the survivor of loss can effectively reconnect to their loved one’s story, to their own story, to their ultimate purpose in life, and are able to join into the stories of others around them.

These principles gently guide and empower survivors of loss with actionable practices. RESTORED’s practices aim to build resiliency and teach survivors of loss the delicate balance of remembering their beloved and adjusting to their new normal. While walking through each of the 5 R Principles, survivors must choose to reconnect and accept support from other people. A survivor may bounce back and forth between these principles and they may need to revisit them more than once.

Final Thoughts

My goal is to equip clinicians who work with grieving clients so that survivors of loss may find restoration for their physical functioning, mental clarity, emotional stability, interest in people and activities, renewal of spirit, and purpose for their future.

Secondly, I want to reframe the grief process. I do not believe grief should be scary and intangible but should be viewed as a gate we must all pass through. Going through this gate helps us to appreciate and honor the people who we have loved and lost and spurs us on to dive into deeper relationships with those we still have the pleasure of walking alongside.

Resources

Denckla, C., Koenen, K., & Shear, K. (2020). Managing bereavement around the coronavirus (COVID-19). The Center for Complicated Grief, Columbia School of Social Work. https://complicatedgrief.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Managing-Bereavement-Around-COVID-19-HSPH.pdf

Leaf, C. (2013). Switch on your brain: The key to peak happiness, thinking, and health. Baker Books.

Shear, M. K. (2010). Complicated grief treatment: The theory, practice and outcomes. Bereavement Care, 29(3), 10–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/02682621.2010.522373

Siegel, D. J. (2009). Mindsight: The new science of personal transformation. Bantam Books.

Southwick, S. M., & Charney, D. S. (2012). Resilience: The science of mastering life’s greatest challenges. Cambridge University Press.

Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (2010). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: A decade on. OMEGA-Journal of Death and Dying, 61(4), 273–289.

Willis, M. (2020). RESTORED: A self-paced grief workbook for your journey from loss to life. https://www.goodmourningwithmarilyn.com/restored

Zolli, A., & Healy, A. M. (2012). Resilience: why things bounce back. Simon & Schuster.

Will you join me in RESTORING lives? If so send me an email, I would love to hear from you.

Marilyn Willis, MA, NCC, LPCC
Counselor at Marilyn C F Willis Counseling in Madera, California

Website: GoodMourningwithMarilyn.com

Find the “RESTORED” workbook at: GoodMourningwithMarilyn.com/book

Have a grief question? GoodMourningwithMarilyn@gmail.com