The Heart of Grief

Send us Fan Mail In July of 2025, Brian's wife of 45 years died. This loss has brought him into a new, deeper and more complex experience of grief. Christmas 2025 will be the first one in 4 1/2 decades without Diane's presence and participation.  This episode of The Heart of Grief is the fusing of two episodes from December 2024. Part two of this combo is a focus on spiritual faith in th...

Send us Fan Mail Sometimes when people are faced with changes or endings in difficult or painful relationships, they wonder why they are feeling badly. Why are they grieving a relationship that was not enjoyable or good for them?  In this episode, Brian explains the feelings that can often follow the death of someone we call a "Less-than-loved-one." While this can be very confusing for t...

Send us Fan Mail Professional grief counselors sometimes refer to the tasks of integrating grief into our lives going forward. The goal is to recognize the changes brought by a loss and incorporating the memories, influence and emotional/spiritual presence of a deceased loved one into our life. This is a right and worthy objective and professional care givers offer many suggestions of what this co...

Send us Fan Mail Following a tragic, traumatic or completely preventable death, a griever's thoughts can  become focused on the cause or circumstances of the loss to the point where they are missing out on a good grieving process for the loss itself.  Recovery from the loss of a loved one calls for attention to the person who has died and to the relationship that has ended. The healing proces...

Send us Fan Mail The grief of loss happens to all of us. Sometimes that hurt digs in deep and keeps resurfacing. There are a lot of ideas and programs designed to help us find healing. What can we feel confident in to really help?  That’s what today's episode is about ... Has the Grief Recovery Method®  Program been shown to help? Does it really work?  Brian reviews the evidence from academic...

Send us Fan Mail  In February 2022 Alain Parenteau's wife of 23 years died following a very difficult illness. For Al the addition of a series of other painful losses over a relatively short period of time left him very much aware that he didn’t posses the emotional tools needed to address the accumulated grief. Al’s journey through the Grief Recovery®  program was not an easy one. He had som...

Send us Fan Mail Brian examines the idea of finding some meaning out of a difficult loss experience. What is meant by “meaning?” What do people look for in this regard? What do people find? What benefit does discovery or identification of some “meaning” bring to the griever? How does meaning fit into the perspectives of Grief Recovery? Does meaning accomplish resolution of the lingering pain and d...

Send us Fan Mail This is the first in a series of interviews with participants from our grief recovery programs.  In this episode I’m talking with Bob Gaudet, a young man who came to recognize that many of the emotional challenges he was experiencing stemmed from a lost relationship with his long-estranged father, someone whom Bob refers to as a "living less than loved one."  Bob’s story...

Send us Fan Mail Healthy grieving requires that we address difficult emotions head on.  Following a significant loss, our minds begin to review the relationship or the circumstances of the loss. Our various memories will prompt both enjoyable and distressing feelings. The enjoyable memories may lead to sadness that our loved one is no longer with us, yet the enjoyable memories themselves and the a...

Send us Fan Mail It’s commonly wondered if men grieve differently than women. I want to explore this with the goal of better understanding the differences and achieving greater success in promoting grief care programs among men. While men are similarly equipped for emotional awareness and expression as women, recent science has revealed differences in brain function. This, together with well recog...

Send us Fan Mail Our previous episode from Jan. 1, 2025 discussed the difficulty some people have with forgiving themselves for things done in the past. This is often connected to a loss either through death or some other ending of a relationship. Principles and steps were provided for finding release from the weight of self-disappointment. In this Questions of Faith episode, Brian adds insights f...

Send us Fan Mail With this episode coming out on January 1, 2025, I’m thinking about the idea of new beginnings. Today’s topic offers an opportunity to step into something that holds great potential for living healthier and happier lives. Religion / psychology / science all speak of the importance of forgiveness for personal and relational health. We speak quite a lot about its importance in grief...

Send us Fan Mail What might the Babylonian exile of the ancient Jewish people around 2600 years ago have to do with carrying the pain of grief during the holidays? Christmas is a holiday rooted in the Christian faith. How might the spiritual Christmas message and our relationship with God through Jesus connect with our holiday time grief? Brian sees a connection with both the Hebrew experience and...

Send us Fan Mail It can be hard to know how to do things at the holidays when walking through difficult loss. Do you keep it as much the same as possible or do you decide to do things very differently? What will you personally take part in? What will you bow out of? How will you explain your feelings? Will you act strong and joyful in an effort not to dampen the happiness of others? Is it better t...

Send us Fan Mail This is part 2 of my conversation with Clarissa Moll. Clarissa is an award-winning writer and podcaster who helps bereaved people find flourishing after loss. Clarissa’s writing appears in Christianity Today , The Gospel Coalition , RELEVANT, Modern Loss , Grief Digest and more. She co hosted Christianity Today’s “Surprised by Grief” podcast and is a frequent guest on podcasts and...

Send us Fan Mail Grief is about emotions, a very difficult and complex combination of feelings. In order to work through our losses well, we need to be able to acknowledge and address those feelings. But most of us have trouble dealing with even the more regular emotions of life. Grief can present what seems an almost insurmountable challenge to our hurting hearts. We need to talk about feelings,...

Send us Fan Mail Clarissa Moll (MA, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is an award-winning writer and podcaster who helps bereaved people find flourishing after loss. Clarissa’s writing appears in Christianity Today , The Gospel Coalition , RELEVANT, Modern Loss , Grief Digest and more. She co hosted Christianity Today’s “Surprised by Grief” podcast and is a frequent guest on podcasts and radio...

Send us Fan Mail The goal of the Grief Recovery Institute is to reach as many people as possible with life changing help for the struggles of loss.  This is about help that makes a difference not just in a current loss but provides tools that equip people well for facing future losses. One key to accomplishing this is to provide correct guidance for children that will prevent them falling into the...

Send us Fan Mail Is it OK to tell God how we really feel about a loss or other tragedy that rocks our lives? Many Christians feel they need to focus on thoughts of future comfort and messages of God's good promises. Genuine feelings of sorrow and anger can be overlooked or held in painful silence. In this Questions of Faith episode, Brian argues that God invites us to emotional honesty. Lamen...

Send us Fan Mail Familiarity can be beneficial, providing safety, comfort and enjoyment. It can also become detrimental. In this episode Brian explains how a familiarity bias regarding response to loss can lead to narrow thinking that keeps us stuck in our grief and hinders us from considering better ways.  Healthy grieving can involve taking courageous steps into new ideas that while initially un...

Send us Fan Mail What do apologies have to do with healthy grieving? In our Grief Recovery Method® programs we recognize that recovery from loss involves identifying and bringing completion to unfinished pieces of emotional business in a relationship that has ended. This includes making apologies for things said or done by us, the grieving person, that have resulted in some hurt or disappointment...

Send us Fan Mail CS Lewis commented at the beginning of his popular book A Grief Observed “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid.” Well not only can grief feel like fear, grief can include various actual fears. It’s important to recognize that and to know what to do with it. This episode explains the importance of naming our fears...

Send us Fan Mail We’ve looked at forgiveness from various angles in two of our recent episodes. This Questions Of Faith episode is going to consider that powerful emotional action step with the addition of a faith perspective. The question is, how does biblical teaching impact our understanding and application of forgiveness? Brian offers 4 considerations: -There is the added relationship with God...

Send us Fan Mail When a loss experience leaves us with a deep hurt caused by someone, it can be hard to let go of the pain. In this episode Brian shares the idea of Compassionate Reappraisal ; a way of considering the circumstances of the offending party using Difficult Compassion . Toxic, life-limiting anger and heartache can be released, to allow for the peace that comes through forgiveness. Dr....

Send us Fan Mail A Questions of Faith episode, this is the second part of Brian's interview with colleague, Andy Reeves.  We’re going to continue our conversation about finding God in the midst of suffering, with a particular focus on mental and emotional health issues. Andy shares some practical suggestions for both receiving and giving care and finding meaning. Joni and Friends Podcast Logo...