Understanding Your Suicide Grief Quotes

“Having faith does not mean you do not need to mourn. Having faith does mean having the courage to allow yourself to mourn!”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“You, in part, have known who you were based on having this person in your life. Now you have essentially lost a “mirror” that helped you know who you were. The world feels different without him or her in it.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“Sharing your pain with others won’t make it disappear, but it will, over time, make it more bearable. By definition, mourning (i.e., the outward expression of grief) requires that you get support from sources outside of yourself.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“To think that as a human being you “get over” your grief is ludicrous! You don’t get over it, you learn to live with it. You learn to integrate it into your life and into the fabric of your being.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“If you are mad at God, be mad at God. Actually, being angry at God speaks of having a relationship with God in the first place.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“You must be vigilant about guarding yourself against this misconception. Tears are not a sign of weakness or inadequacy. In fact, your capacity to share tears is an indication of your willingness to do the work of mourning.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“When your grief is ignored or minimized, you will feel further isolated in your journey. Ultimately, you will experience the onset of the “going crazy” syndrome. (See Touchstone Five.) Masking or moving away from your grief creates anxiety, confusion, and depression. If you receive little or no social recognition related to your pain, you will probably begin to fear that your thoughts and feelings are abnormal.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“Mourners who continue to express grief outwardly are often viewed as “weak,” “crazy,” or “self-pitying.” The subtle message is, “Shape up and get on with your life.” The reality is disturbing: Far too many people view grief as something to be overcome rather than experienced.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“love, then we realize this is a misconception we need to keep educating the world about.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“As one Catholic priest observed about suicide, “When its victims wake on the other side, they are met by a gentle Christ who stands right inside of their huddled fear and says, ‘Peace be with you!’ As we see in the gospels, God can go through locked doors, breathe out peace in places where we cannot get in, and write straight with even the most crooked of lines.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“Therefore, we should not assume guilt after a suicide death. Many survivors have worked long and hard to help someone prior to a suicide death.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“So, the misconception is that we always know why, when the reality is we often don’t know the specifics of why. My experience with many survivors suggests that you may very slowly, with no rewards for speed, discover that it is possible to live with the uncertainty of never fully knowing the answer to “why?”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“At times, of course, you will grieve alone, but expressing your grief outside of yourself is necessary if you are to slowly and gently move forward in your grief journey.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“Mourning is when you take the grief you have on the inside and express it outside of yourself. Another way of defining mourning is “grief gone public” or “the outward expression of grief.” Talking about the person who died, crying, expressing your thoughts and feelings through art or music, and celebrating special anniversary dates that held meaning for the person who died are just a few examples of mourning.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“Paradoxically, it is gathering courage to move toward the pain that ultimately leads to the healing of your wounded heart.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“If you are dishonest about your pain, you stay in pain.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“But here is the problem: By staying in whatever form of denial, you miss the opportunity to do the grief work related to your feelings. You inhibit your capacity to experience perturbation (see p. 70). As you have seen emphasized in this chapter, befriending your pain is central to your ultimate healing. Until denial is broken through and the pain is experienced, you are on hold and authentic mourning cannot take place. If”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“Deceiving yourself into thinking the pain does not even exist is sure to make it intolerable. Spiritual maturity in your grief work is attained when you embrace a paradox: to live at once in the state of both encounter and surrender, to both “work at” and “surrender to” your grief.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“journey through grief is that of integration or reconciliation. You cannot get over or resolve your grief, but you can integrate or reconcile yourself to it. That is, you can learn to incorporate your grief into your consciousness and re-discover meaning and purpose in your life. See Touchstone Nine for more on integration and reconciliation.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“You have probably heard or been told the cliché: “Time heals all wounds.” Yet, time alone has nothing to do with healing the wounds of grief that come with suicide. I like to remind myself and other survivors that healing waits on welcome, not on time! Healing and integrating this loss into your life demands that you engage actively in the grief journey. It can’t be fixed or resolved; it can only be soothed and “integrated” or “reconciled” through actively experiencing the multitude of thoughts and feelings involved.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“Taboo: something society decides is so terrible that no one is allowed to do it, talk about it, or learn about it. Stigma: the mark of shame and ridicule placed on those people who do kill themselves, and on their families. The stigma is the punishment for breaking the taboo.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“Someone you love has completed suicide. In your heart, you have come to know your deepest pain. To be “bereaved” literally means “to be torn apart.” You have a broken heart and your life has been turned upside down.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“Authentic mourning means being totally vulnerable to what you think and feel in response to the suicide death. Keeping your heart open wide allows you to listen to your life force, or spirit, and slowly brings you out of the dark and into the light. “The centerpiece of the integration of grief is not the mind, but the heart.” Alan D. Wolfelt”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“honoring the ten Touchstones, you are making an effort to find hope for your continued life. Through intentional mourning, you yourself can be the purveyor of your hope. You create hope in yourself by actively mourning the death and setting your intention to heal.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“You are not to blame, you can and will survive this wilderness experience, and you do not have to go through this alone.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“Being open to your eventual healing is more important than trying to understand the ‘why? ’ of the suicide.” Alan D. Wolfelt”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“And, as someone once astutely observed, “Mystery is not something to be explained, it is something to be pondered.” The starting point for the instinctive “why?” must be anchored in a confession of mystery.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart