Getting Grief Right: Finding Your Story of Love in the Sorrow of Loss

When Patrick O'Malley lost his infant son, the grief took him full force and challenged everything he'd ever learned about grief and recovery.  There was no moving on, no neat little progression of stages, as psychology had taught him.  He could not simply "move on" as he'd encouraged so many of his clients to do in his years as a psychotherapist.  So he had to find another way to reconcile his loss.  In this book, he explores how the familiar stages of grief can trivialize an individual's experience, pressure them to do the impossible and move quickly past one of the most significant losses of their life, and worsen their suffering with pointless feelings of shame and guilt when they cannot.  He uses his own story and some of his clients' as examples of what can be done instead, and shows readers how embracing our loss and telling our story can help us weave both our sorrow and love back into our lives, where it can linger as a comforting reminder of what you had and what you survived rather than an unending, unbearable pain.  Because of his own experience with loss, his book holds uncommon empathy and becomes a warm, accepting presence and comfort.