Healing Your Holiday Grief: 100 Practical Ideas for Blending Mourning and Celebration During the Holiday Season (Healing Your Grieving Heart series)

Customer satisfied

Lost loved one right before Thanksgiving so did a friend. We were helped through the holidays with this spiritual healing read.

I have been a big fan of Wolfelt's work for many years and have a large number of his publications. I actual include a few of his books as required reading for my pet loss grief counseling training program. So my disappointment with this book was surprising. There are two unfortunate omissions in this book. One, there is no table of contents. While the "100 ideas" are marked 1-100, readers have to read through the whole book to see if any of the ideas might be relevant or inspiring to them. A simple table of contents would allow readers to use that as a reference to quickly see what they want to read or scan. Without this, it's sort of a hodgepodge of ideas that's hard to sort through. However helpful some of the ideas may be to most people, they're too hard to find! When people are grieving, they are often not as grounded or mentally clear as usual. Making it hard to read a book intended to help them seems counterproductive. Two, there are also no page numbers! In addition, unlike his other highly organized books, the ideas presented do not seem to have any organization of the content. This is the only Wolfelt book I won't be recommending. But don't let that keep you from reading his others--they are excellent.

Practical grief helps and encouragements from a man who can speak from personal and professional experience. All Dr. Wolfelt's publications are worthwhile.

As usual Alan Wolfelt does a wonderful job in providing good and realistic ideas for those who are in need of support after the death of a loved one.

As a therapist I was disappointed. It was not multiculturally sensitive.

I purchased this book (along with some others) to help prepare a 40 minute discussion/talk on managing grief during the holidays. True to its' name, it did have 100 practical ideas to help with mourning and loss during the holidays. I found some of the ideas to be new and helpful while others were pretty much common sense ideas. This is a good read if you are simply short on ideas and looking for a few good suggestions on how to incorporate the memory of someone into your holiday traditions. This book really is focused on the practical advice though, so I would look elsewhere if you are wanting a book to help you understand the process of grief and how the holidays complicate mourning.