For people who are grieving, the holiday season can be the most dreaded time of the year. If you are grieving a loss – whether it be a death of your person and/or pet, a non-death/living loss such as a an estranged relationship, a breakup, a divorce or fertility challenges, you might find yourself wishing that you can skip the holiday season and New Year celebrations. In this blog, we share about 7 ways to get through difficult moments during the holiday season.

The idea that a person should always have a positive mindset regardless of one’s life circumstances is a prevalent message in today’s society. The pressure to be positive no matter what is known as Toxic Positivity and can be harmful to a person - while there are benefits to being optimistic, toxic positivity resists all difficult emotions in place of a cheerful and often falsely-positive façade.

Partners may use different words and express their distress differently. However, they are oftentimes asking the same questions, “Are you there for me? Do I matter to you? Will you come when I need you, when I call? In other words, they are yearning for emotional responsiveness.

Dr. Sue Johnson, marriage and family therapist who extensively researched attachment-based therapy, Emotionally Focused Therapy (a therapy she developed more than 30 years ago), found that emotional responsiveness is the key to lasting love and secure connections.

Many hours and years of our lives are devoted to working – on top of work, we juggle our personal lives. It is challenging to ensure work-life balance. This is all the more a challenge if commuting to and from work takes up a portion of our day. With the reality of work taking up a large part of our lives, it is vital that reflect on what sustainable work looks like. It is imperative that we prevent burnout and take time to recover from burnout if we are experiencing burnout.

Mother’s Day and the days leading up to it can be hard for so many reasons. For many, this day is one that they dread instead of anticipate. This day can feel isolating when you are grieving a loss, whether it be a non-death or death loss – each loss is unique and sometimes this contributes to feelings of loneliness. It is our hope that this blog post validates your pain and lets you know that you are not alone in this. We see you and feel with you as you grapple with the range of emotions that you may be feeling this Mother’s Day weekend. In this blog, we share about the different types of grief and loss and ways you can cope with grief on the days leading up to Mother’s Day and on this day.

It is hard enough to grieve one loss and the death of one person. When you experience multiple losses, grief is experienced at a whole other level. You may be asking yourself, ‘How do I even begin grieving these losses?” A sense of confusion may arise in the process of disentangling the multiple losses – picture a large tangled ball of grief with many threads to untangle. It is no wonder that it can feel like a complex endeavour to cope with cumulative grief.

Have you ever found yourself feeling guilty for getting less done during the day than you have hoped for?

So how do you shift our relationship with work and rest? How do you come back to the truth that we are human BE-ings and not human DO-ings?

Here are some suggestions of ways to deal with guilt when it shows up.

We are now 4 months into the year 2022. It is not too late to reflect on your intentions for the year. In this article, the word ‘intentions’ is used as the meaning of this word goes deeper than the word, ‘resolutions’. Intentions are goals that with intended actions. Resolutions tend to focus on things we do not want to do or things we want to avoid (e.g. eating less junk food) and on the final outcome (e.g. losing weight). On the other hand, intentions are part of the process and journey to move towards what we desire. In setting intentions, we commit to taking small daily steps. Intentions reflect specific goals instead of broad and generic goals.

The experience of grief is made up of so many intricate and hard moments: The time when you received the life-altering news. The wailing on the other end of the phone. The tears shed. The sleepless nights and nightmares. The fear and anxiety. The painful agony that feels unescapable. The yearning for who or what you have lost. The what-ifs, if-onlys, should-haves and regrets. The questionings. The world you were familiar with, now completely altered. The stories that replay in your mind about your life that was and your life that now is. The crushed hopes for the future. Your identity in the absence of who or what you used to have.