The Tender Path of Grief & Loss

Sometimes the pain of loss feels like molten lava in our hearts, a burden that no one wants to hold. If you're seeking expert guidance on healing the loss you feel deep inside, this book is for you. Know that your heart is expanding to hold the lessons grief is teaching you.

With gentle compassion, Robert Jackman invites you to acknowledge and honor your grief instead of pushing it away. Join in this walk on the tender path as you explore elements of the Shockwave, the Stretch and the Solace and learn to weave a loss into the tapestry of your life.

Accessible and relatable, this book offers practical wisdom to guide your journey through pain into hope and shares heartfelt, encouraging stories of those who discovered their inner strength in times of overwhelming loss.

The Tender Path of Grief and Loss will help you:

• Develop key skills for navigating loss
• Set boundaries to protect yourself from emotional landmines
• Identify unacknowledged losses that contribute to anxiety and depression
• Learn how to hold space for the unfixable and unsolvable
• Use self-care and compassion to heal
• Discover new ways to comfort a grieving friend or loved one

Through meditations, writing prompts and exercises, you will put words to your grieving process. You will learn what to do when a death or loss begins to stretch you in new directions and gain confidence and resilience as you honor your loss.

If you are ready to move forward in your healing process, read The Tender Path of Grief and Loss and find a new sense of purpose and meaning.

Advance Praise:
The Tender Path of Grief and Loss: Compassionate Stores and Practical Wisdom to Help You Heal adds to psychotherapist Robert Jackman's Practical Wisdom Healing Series, which includes Healing Your Lost Inner Child and Companion Workbook and its companion Healing Your Wounded Relationship. It tackles the pain of loss and the deep grief that accompanies it with powerful descriptions that will resonate with anyone who is struggling to heal after experiencing loss:

"...fearful sorrow is not the bogeyman. We are, in actuality, in fear of ourselves, seeing ourselves so small and trivial next to this titanic grief. This unwelcome friend is more a part of us than we know, our beginning and ending. Take a pinch of this raw sorrow, so new and unknown. Taste its bitter edges and realize it isn't lethal, but ignoring it just may be."

The guiding light and strength of this book lie in the disparate stories of grief that Jackman includes as examples of healing and transcendence. Each story represents a different kind of loss and reactions that illustrate how to acknowledge and face a loss and its ongoing presence in life.

The three phases of the "tender path" are covered through various examples: "In the first phase of the tender path, we respond to the loss based on the emotional landscape within us at the time of the loss." This offers a progressive series of lessons that take each loss experience and adds wisdom, insights, and lessons to help readers understand the disparate processes of grief and how different people react to them: "You will learn the difference between grief and depression and the reasons why some people can't move on. You will also learn how to determine whether you are choosing restorative or indulgent responses to the pain of your loss."

The "tender path" to healing embraces three phases: "the shockwave, the stretch, and the solace." Each holds insights key to not just understanding, but moving along in the process.

Jackman's focus on maintaining fluidity and strength, and his assessing focus that acknowledges there is no right or wrong way to grieve, outlines the invitations and signposts in the process that point the way to growth and healing. This approach serves as a blueprint for those afraid of getting stuck at various places as loss is integrated into the rest of their lives.

The stories supporting this process present diverse, heartfelt, and eye-opening insights into the various phases of traversing the "tender path" towards healing. Each represents a window of opportunity for readers to use the experience to consider their own transformative options and processes.

Can loss come to be seen as not just an outcome, but an opportunity? Those grieving may not perceive this, but in the end, the transformative prospects can be many.

The result is a primer that should be on the reading lists not just of those who have lost and are grieving, but any human being who would better understand how to find hope in hopeless situations.

Choosing the "tender path" involves an amazing journey of growth and realization. Its message offers wide-ranging opportunities for reflection, discussion, and insights on the individual level and for those in groups, making The Tender Path of Grief and Loss a top recommendation for libraries seeking self-help and psychology books filled with uncomfortable truths and comfortable insights that support and encourage discussions.

D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review