Understanding Your Grief Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

Since its debut thirty years ago, this favorite by one of the world’s most beloved grief counselors has found a place in the homes and hearts of hundreds of thousands of mourners across the globe. Filled with compassion and hope, Understanding Your Grief helps you understand and befriend your painful, complex thoughts and feelings after the death of someone loved. Befriending grief may sound counterintuitive, but actually, your grief is your love for the person who died in a different form, and like that love, it’s also natural and necessary. Perhaps above all, Understanding Your Grief is practical. It’s built on Dr. Wolfelt’s Ten Touchstones, which are basic principles to learn and actions to take to help yourself engage with your grief and create momentum toward healing. This second edition maintains the content of the first edition but builds on it by adding concise wisdom on new topics such as the myth of closure, complicated and traumatic grief, grief overload, unmourned grief, loneliness, the power of ritual, and more. Excellent as an empathetic handbook for anyone in mourning as well as a text for support groups, Understanding Your Grief pairs with a guided journal.

Dr. Alan Wolfelt has been recognized as one of North America’s leading death educators and grief counselors. His books have sold more than a million copies worldwide and have been translated into many languages. He is known around the world for his compassionate messages of hope and healing as well as his companioning philosophy of grief care. Dr. Wolfelt speaks on grief-related topics, offers trainings for caregivers, and has written many bestselling books and other resources on grief for both caregivers and grieving people.