Watch the Full Video Sessions Here
These are the complete video segments for the 8 sessions of Through This Valley.
The loss of a loved one is a totally disruptive experience. It can leave us feeling broken physically, emotionally, and spiritually. In this session, we focus on these feelings of brokenness, making the point that deep personal pain is a part of grief, that it won’t last forever, and that God cares about what we are going through.
It’s very common to experience some feelings of shock after a loss. It can be almost “surreal” to face this new and foreign reality. In this session, we discuss those feelings of shock and numbness. We talk about how numbness can be a good thing in the process of grieving. But we also discuss how intentionally numbing out is not a good thing. We also discuss the very common emotion of guilt, and we think about the difference between real guilt and “false guilt.” Then, we discuss a few potentially healthy coping strategies like focusing on self-care, going to counseling, or joining a support group. Finally, we discuss a few coping strategies participants can use anywhere, anytime: journaling, letter-writing, and prayer.
In this session, we discuss the two emotions you probably most associate with grief: anger and sadness. While, at first, these emotions may seem to be negative forces in your life, we want to encourage you to see them as neutral... as a God-given alert system to let you know that what you are going through is a big deal. We want to remind you in this session that the fact that you experience deep sadness is an indicator of how much you loved the person who died. But, we also discuss the fact that sadness can sometimes escalate to bigger challenges that require addressing--like depression. When we talk about anger, you may be surprised to learn that anger can actually be a good thing. It can motivate us to take positive action. We'll talk about how to differentiate healthy from unhealthy anger. And, we'll remind you that patience is key in the process of dealing with these sometimes-challenging emotions.
In this session, we talk about some of the challenges that are part of grief... challenges we don't often encounter in any other situation. We talk about dealing with special days, being intentional about ways to memorialize the person who died, and dealing with their belongings, as well as several other common challenges.
In this session, we discuss the importance of relationships and how they impact your grief. Specifically, we focus on how you can identify emotionally safe people that will ease the burden of your pain.
In this session we talk about how to deal with some common relationship challenges. Often you're getting a lot of advice from well-meaning people who think they know how you should grieve. In this session, we talk about good ways to respond to advice-givers, and how to set some healthy boundaries. We also take a few moments to talk about the relational difficulties of losing a loved one to suicide.
In this video, we begin our discussion of how our faith impacts our grief. We talk about why bad things happen to good people. And, we begin to think about how our belief in God informs our experience of loss.
In this video, we talk about what happens the moment someone dies. We talk about the hope we have in Jesus Christ, and how to know him. And, we emphasize the importance of patience in the grieving process. Before we close, we talk about some next steps you might want to take on your grief journey.