When we experience the death of someone we love or a significant change in our life, we often feel vulnerable and seek comfort like a child would. Our capacity to function in the roles and responsibilities we have can be much more difficult when we are grieving.
When Let Grace In was asked to write a children’s book about grief earlier this year, we started to think about what target age we would like to write it for. While the book is written in language for younger school age, we think adults will also be able to benefit from the story and the interactive therapeutic activities included at the end of the book too.
The grief we experience in childhood stays with us throughout our life and continues to accumulate as we collect other losses and significant changes. According to The Grief Recovery Method, our bodies were not meant to be a storage facility for grief, they are supposed to be a processing plant. Learning the right tools to help heal the hurts from grief is the key to growing around your grief.
One of the tools to help heal our childhood grief is using our imagination and going back in time to ask yourself what it was you needed during your time of loss or significant change. My husband recently revisited the grief he felt as a 6 year old when his father died. He asked himself what it was he would have liked back then to do or hear from someone and decided that he would have liked to play legos. So he went and bought a lego set and remembered his dad and the grief he felt losing him while he put it together and comforted his 6 year old self. It now sits on his desk as a visual reminder that he can remember and heal the hurts from his past even now.
With our new children’s book launching soon, we hope that it will be a helpful tool to heal some of the hurts of the grieving child within us all. Stay tuned for your chance to preorder our book!
By Ashley Wolfe, MA, CCLS, Grief Method and Bereavement Specialist and author of Let Grace In’s upcoming children’s book being published soon.
