Healing Your Grieving Heart Journal for Teens (eBook)

INTRODUCTION We have written this journal just for you and teens like you. It is a special place for you to share your thoughts and feelings. Within the pages that follow, you can remember, celebrate and commemorate the life of the person to whom this journal is dedicated. Our hope is that this guided journal can be a 'safe place' for you to explore your experiences with grief. As you tell your story, your words will guide you on your personal, unique journey through the healing experience of grief. As your words bring life to these pages, you will be giving testimony to the love you will always have for the person who has died. Because you are a teen and because you're unique, you're very special. This is an exciting stage of your life. The changes you're going through physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually can be exciting but also overwhelming. You're not a kid anymore. You're not an adult, yet, either. Others may expect you to act, think and feel like an adult, but much of your childhood, thankfully, is still inside you. that at any other age. When someone close to us dies, we begin a journey, a journey not of our choosing and with no exact course. It's hard to understand and cope with all the feelings that accompany grief along with the changes your body and mind are going through. In some ways these feelings are similar, both can cause your moods to swing unexpectedly. Both can make you feel out of control of your life. We're so sorry you have lost someone who meant a lot to you- perhaps even the world. While we cannot think and feel exactly what you are, we do want you to know we have both been there. We both experienced the deaths of friends and family early in our lives. Like we did, you may feel very sad or hurt right now. Perhaps you're angry. Or depressed. Maybe you feel lost or deserted. Maybe for the first time you really realize that we all die. All these feelings are part of grieving and are OK to feel. Let us explain the very important difference between grief and mourning. Grief is what you think and feel on the inside when someone you love dies. Mourning is the expression of these thoughts and feelings-letting them out somehow. You mourn when you talk to other people about your grief, when you cry, when you look at photos of the person who died, when you visit the cemetery or when you write about your feelings in a journal like this. You may be grieving like crazy inside but unless you let out those powerful thoughts and feelings-unless you mourn-you won't truly heal. Journaling has proven to be an excellent way for many teens to do the work of mourning. Journaling is private and independent, yet it's still expressing your grief outside of yourself. I've been a grief counselor for a long time (almost 20 years!), and I've found that journaling helps grieving people: • clarify what you're thinking and feeling. • have a safe place of solace, a best friend, a place where you can fully express yourself no matter how sad, scared, confused or lonely you feel. • strengthen your self-awareness of how your grief journey changes over time. It can be amazing to go back months and years later and read what you have written and realize how much you have changed. When you pore through these pages even years later, you will remember what your grief journey was like for you and you will cherish what you have written. • soften the intensity...