Hope After Child Loss
with Laurel Brookes, MS
Support Courage Peace
Following Your Light will Help you to
- Learn healthy grief instead of suffering
- Renew your well-being by lowering your stress levels with EFT Tapping
- Support your heart by embracing self-compassion
- Create a life that honors both you and your loved one
- Neutralize the grip of disempowering thoughts
- Choose hope to live a meaningful life in your new normal
Is This You?
- You feel like a stranger in your own life
- You feel guilty, defeated, depressed, and isolated
- You’re constantly asking ‘why’ and ‘what if’
- You feel consumed by your grief to the point that it’s hard to breathe
- You want support to find strength, encouragement, and meaning but you don’t know how…
Behind your mask can you relate to an inner-critic scolding
- You’ll always feel like this
- You don’t really deserve to be happy
- Don’t get your hopes up, you’ll just be disappointed again
- Self-reflection will make you feel worse
- Stay small and stay invisible to stay safe
Believing that you’re a failure, you
- Feel unloveable—even your child left you…
- Suppress your emotions due to guilt and fear
- At times feel like, what’s the use?
- Criticize and Isolate yourself
- Let your self-care slide
You may wonder: Why do I feel so much anger, rage or grief?
When my only child, Tara, age 2, died, It felt like my world had come to an end. “Whose life was I living? I’ll never smile again and mean it,” pounded through my head. I could hardly breathe. It felt as if my heart had been ripped out of my chest and put through a meat grinder. I felt so defeated…
Laurel Brookes
Much like Laurel, your nervous system becomes wired according to the trauma you hold in your system. This disempowering information gets locked into your nervous system. Your lower energy centers carry your unhealed and trapped shock, anger, rage, and grief. Your lower energy centers are like a tape recorder of the messages that you continually keep replaying in your head.
The Stress Response
The stress response, or “fight or flight” response is the emergency reaction system of the body designed to keep you safe from harm. The nervous system is naturally wired to sense and respond to fear, pain or danger in the primitive or reptilian part of the brain called the amygdala. When stress makes you feel strong anger, aggression or fear, up to 80% of your blood can leave your prefrontal cortex (rational brain) and rushes to the amygdala (primitive brain) where the fight-or-flight response in the amygdala is activated and lights-up. Because you are on auto-pilot, it often results in a sudden, illogical, and irrational overreaction to the situation, which you may later regret and demean yourself for.
The stress response is meant for short periods of real danger. It was not intended to stay on during everyday life. Yet, many people live in a constant state of chronic stress, worry and anxiety because their weakened root chakra (foundation) has been overwhelmed by stress.
This chronic state of stress is debilitating to your physical and emotional health and well-being. It is a state of dis-ease that eventually turns into disease and has a massive negative impact on your health and your ability to think clearly, act decisively and feel a natural state of well-being.
Adapted from Margaret Lynch Raniere
Hope After Child Loss: Awaken Your Inner Peace
With the support of EFT Tapping, your nervous system is more resilient and less reactive. You will trigger the stress response less often and will be able to turn it off when the danger is gone. Your body-mind systems will return to a more relaxed mode. In this state, your mind becomes calmer, and your thinking clearer and more creative. Your nervous system regulates and which signals the brain to release ‘feel-good’ chemicals rather than the stress-chemicals that have left you spinning. This leads to an upgraded well-being on all levels: body, mind and spirit.
EFT ‘tapping’ is a practical, easily-learned, hands-on technique for dealing with emotional distress at the deepest level. A news story in Examiner.com called it, “one of the most successful psychology self-help techniques ever developed.” Clinical EFT is the evidence-based form of EFT, validated in over 100 scientific studies.
-Dawson Church, PhD
A deep, systematic approach is necessary to heal traumas
Beth grew up in an alcoholic family that taught her that asking for help showed weakness. “We mind our own business and our business is nobody else’s business,” was downloaded into her nervous system by her abusive father. It was this mindset that kept her from ever reaching out for support with her own alcoholic husband. She and her children suffered in silence for years remaining true to her childhood messages and ‘vows’ of isolation. It was only after Beth started confiding in a counselor that she was referred to by a friend, that she began to dismantle her childhood limiting belief that reaching out for support is a sign of weakness. Rather, she had a lightbulb awareness that reinforced that reaching out for support is an act of courage and self-love.
What is called for to free this deep wounding is competent and compassionate therapy which allows you to voice grief, hurt, loss and rage. Without this, you will remain trapped in your past, where your identity is built on the opposite of the qualities that you desire to embody. Without systematic intervention, these old limiting beliefs erode your health and well-being over time and dis-ease becomes a disease.
Who Does ‘Hope After Child loss’ Serve
Hope serves anyone seeking to recreate their life after the death of a child. You know too well the unspeakable pain and sorrow that comes with the loss of your precious one; and you have decided that allowing this pain to define your life and take you down is not the legacy you choose to leave. Nor is it what your beautiful child wants for you.
Einstein told us that we can’t solve a problem at the level in which it was created. In other words, we need to step back and look at the big picture to begin to grapple with the puzzle pieces as we rearrange them to recreate a new purposeful life.
Even though your life will never be the same, consider that your new life may be destined to unfold in a meaningful and powerful way as a result of walking your grief journey by following your Light.
Against all odds, let hope be your best friend now, as you place your trust on that glimmer of Light; especially while you’re waffling between hopeful and hopeless. You are not alone.
In summary, if you’re feeling a spark of hope and desire to recreate your life, and you recognize that you need a helping hand, you’re in the right place. Let ‘Hope After Child Loss’ support you…
Ways To Work with Laurel
You can work with Laurel in one or two ways:
EFT Grief Support Group:
There’s often a kind of ‘magic’ that happens in grief support when we come together with Kindred Spirits who
are on the Hope after child loss path. This creates a feeling of safety—a feeling like, “these folks get me. I feel
like I belong here.” Even though this is a group that no parent wants to be in, there is a feeling of gratitude
for being here.
Individual Package Sessions: If you are interested in working in-depth with Laurel individually, check out the various ways to do so here.
Einstein told us that we can’t solve a problem at the level in which it was created. In other words, we need to
step back and look at the big picture to begin to grapple with the puzzle pieces as we rearrange them to
recreate a new purposeful life.
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