Alan D. Wolfelt > Quotes

“Food is symbolic of love when words are inadequate. ”
― Alan D. Wolfelt

“You can know something in your head but not in your heart.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, The Wilderness of Suicide Grief: Finding Your Way

“The soulmate’s grief is unique, they taught me. It is more profound and pervasive. It is more akin to the death of a twin. It is the severing of a timeless relationship, one possibly formed before life here on earth.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, When Your Soulmate Dies: A Guide to Healing Through Heroic Mourning

“Sorrow is an inseparable dimension of our human experience. We suffer after a loss because we are human. And in our suffering, we are transformed.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“Love all God’s creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light; love the beasts, love the plants, love every creature. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. And once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it ceaselessly, more, more, and more every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an abiding universal love. Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and untroubled joy. Fyodor Dostoevsky”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, When Your Pet Dies: A Guide to Mourning, Remembering and Healing

“[S]ociety often tends to make those of us in grief feel shame and embarrassment about our feelings of grief.

"Shame can be described as feeling that something you are doing is bad. And you may feel that if you mourn, then you should be ashamed. If you are perceived as 'doing well' with your grief, you are considered 'strong' and 'under control.' The message is that the well-controlled person stays rational at all times.

"Combined with this message is another one. Society erroneously implies that if you, as a grieving person, openly express your feelings of grief, you are immature. If your feelings are fairly intense, you may be labeled 'overly-emotional' or 'needy.' If your feelings are extremely intense, you may even be referred to as 'crazy' or a 'pathological mourner.'

"As a professional grief counselor, I assure you that you are not immature, overly-emotional, or crazy.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“Plato wrote about one version of the concept of soulmates all the way back in the year 380 B.C. In his mythological text Symposium, he says that human beings originally had two faces, four arms, and four legs. They lived in joy because they were happy and complete. But then jealous Zeus came along and split them in two, and ever since, people have spent their lives searching for their other halves.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, When Your Soulmate Dies: A Guide to Healing Through Heroic Mourning

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“Grief stuns us, and we quickly surrender to isolation, disbelief, and uncertainty. From that moment on, we’re on a search for help to survive and reassurance we’re not crazy.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart

“Your grief needs you right now. And as difficult as it is, you need your grief—because it is now an essential part of your life and who you are.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your 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

“We look back at the past we shared with the people who died, and we look forward at a future without them. Like Janus, we are standing in the doorway, but this doorway of our grief is not a comfortable place to be. We’re betwixt and between, in what is called “liminal space.” Limina is the Latin word for threshold and is related to the concept of limbo. We don’t like being in this limbo doorway. We would rather go backward to the way things were or fast forward to some future time in which we’re feeling settled again. But here’s the thing: it is only in the doorway of liminal space that we can reconstruct our shattered worldviews and re-emerge as transformed, whole people who are ready to live fully again.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Grief One Day at a Time: 365 Meditations to Help You Heal After Loss

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“The word “contemplate” means to create space for the divine to enter. So if we exile ourselves to a special place—as simple as a quiet room we love, as plain as a park or a path in the forest, as far removed as a visit to a monastery or other spiritual destination—we are opening our hearts, minds, and souls to contemplation. We are creating space for the divine to enter.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Grief One Day at a Time: 365 Meditations to Help You Heal After Loss

“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

“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

“If you have the energy, take a walk today through a quiet area of town. Or better yet, get out of town and find a “safe place” in nature. Rest when you’re tired and contemplate the ways in which you might take better care of yourself in the coming weeks and months.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Healing a Spouse's Grieving Heart: 100 Practical Ideas After Your Husband or Wife Dies

“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

“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

“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

“You may have heard that your grief journey’s end will come when you resolve, or recover from, your grief. But your journey will never end. Soften, yes, but end, no. People do not “get over” the death of a pet.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, When Your Pet Dies: A Guide to Mourning, Remembering and Healing

“Companioning the dying and the bereaved is therefore not about assessing, analyzing, fixing, or resolving another’s grief. Instead, it is about being totally present to the mourner—even being a temporary guardian of her soul.”
― Alan D. Wolfelt, Companioning You!: A Soulful Guide to Caring for Yourself While You Care for the Dying and the Bereaved

“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

“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