Grief

"Grief is a conflicting mass of human emotion that we experience following any major change in a familiar pattern of behavior. Grieving is the most misunderstood and neglected growth process a person can go through. While we commonly think of education and relationship-building as growth processes, and we've all heard that we should 'learn from our mistakes,' when we hear the words 'grieving' and 'growth' in the same sentence, we are likely to be surprised. Religious and spiritual leaders for centuries have pointed out that we should look at loss as an opportunity for personal spiritual development. Yet in modern life, the process of moving through intense emotional pain has become so private and misunderstood that most of us have very little idea of what the process is or how to deal with it. Simply put, grief is a normal and natural response to loss."

-John W. James & Frank Cherry, The Grief Recovery Handbook