Candyce Ossefort-Russell

Please #remember that the next time you feel alone with something big. It’s not only okay to reach for help. It’s the healthy, intelligent thing to do.

Life & even nature doesn’t work like that! Fallow periods are required for incubating ideas, for getting to know your soul. In order to live a meaningful life, you’re going to experience some static times — sometimes dark and frustrating — between things. #livealifeofmeaning

Seeds of healing & growth are embedded in suffering itself. But we have to adopt an attitude of compassion that accepts that suffering is terrible, even as it is necessary; that understands that suffering is more likely to lead to growth & healing when communities help sufferers.

Once you’ve identified your loss, your next step is to understand exactly how you feel about it, since grief can manifest in a number of ways.

Note to self and others: If someone who’s died comes into your mind, let their close loved ones know.. #Griefadvocate #Remembering #grief #care

Putting words to your felt emotions begins the process of making sense of them. This helps you discern what actions, emotional expressions, or distractions will truly help you move through your feelings, or healthily bear your emotional state if it’s ongoing. #goodtherapy

I will say it time and time again; Grieving people need support without being pathologized or shamed into silence or a quick “recovery.” #DEEPtherapist #Grief #Time #goodtherapy #Grievingisnotlinear #yourgriefisyourown

Softness in the face of difficulty leads to transformation, and transformation most often hurts. To trust softness as a response to difficulty’s hardness requires strength, courage, and awareness. This trust is much easier to come by when I have support through the difficulty.

When you can allow people who can understand your sadness and pain to walk into the scary places with you, you will feel a connection within your pain, a connection that does not make the pain go away but that helps you bear the hurt. Connection within pain is love. #love #pain

Our nervous systems like uncertainty only if there's safety in the background. Without safety, no amount of planning can adequately prepare us for the way death slams uncertainty into life, destabilizing relationships and physical places that were havens of safety.

Sometimes I become numb to the #nondescript moments of daily life, and my thoughts wander mindlessly as I go through the motions of #mundane routines. Now and then, though, a tiny notice of one of those nondescript #moments wakes me up to the preciousness of the day! #life

One of the most basic tools I’ve learned from focusing on right-brained #processes is to reverse the foreground and the background of what I attend to and comment on in session with focus on what I intuitively notice in moment-to-moment tracking vs left-brained narrative.

When we have the courage to be present and undefended in the midst of our loved ones’ anguish and the helplessness it generates in us, a dark and shimmering beauty emerges.

Too often I hear from clients, friends, & loved ones who’re grieving that they feel crazy or isolated because their grief doesn’t fit into superficial norms, and no1 understands. Or they get smacked around by platitudes delivered by people who haven’t gone through a loss and have no idea what 2 say