Welcome to my Keyboard Culture blog and to the topic of Healing Stages of Grief!

My name is Ken Matthies, and I’m a father still walking the healing path I discovered in the shadows of my own grief after the sudden death of my youngest daughter in 2002.

In future posts I’ll be talking about the many aspects and experiences of loss, grief and bereavement and how they touch your life.

Most importantly, I’ll also be talking about the ways I’ve discovered to help you find your healing from the painful effects that accompany them.

In fact, these posts will often be actual stories (and occasional poems) taken from my own early or continuing journey of healing, passed on to help you find your way along your personal healing path.

There’s little question in my mind you’ve been told by now that finding your healing from grief is a process – a series of stages we all have to go through to come out recovered on the other end.

Many different interpretations and expressions of these stages exist in the written materials available on the subject (including within my own published Stages of Grief – Healing Your Grief  articles/audios available on my website), but in essence, these entire variations boil down to three key stages:

• Avoidance (Walking the Edge)

• Confrontation (Entering the Depths)

• Integration (Mending the Heart)

I’ll talk in greater detail about these stages in later posts.

As you’ve no doubt discovered by now, grief is the loneliest and most painful individual reality you can have on earth. Once experienced, you’ll know for yourself how true this is.

Because grief is such an intensely personal experience there’s a strong tendency to at first be unaware of these stages - or once aware - to ignore them in the throes of your pain. But you will find as you gain knowledge of them you will find your way through them more quickly to the healing which waits for you within.

Maybe you’re still in denial that these stages exist, let alone that you have to pass through them.

Some of you reading this may still be fighting the inevitability of these stages of grief in your own experience, and still be insisting (as I did for far too long) that you can “deal with it yourself” or “do it on your own”.

In my own experience of denial, I eventually realized how wrong I was to think that way and went looking for expert help to give me knowledge of these stages and my progress through them. Understanding the stages of grief led much more quickly to finding and walking my healing path from loss, grief and bereavement.

So I want you to find reassurance in the truth that these stages do in fact exist – and that gaining a clear understanding of them will help you heal with greater certainty and far better results than “doing it on your own” will ever be able to achieve.

Exploring these stages and talking about your experiences in them will also help you understand that you really aren’t as alone in your grief as you feel, and make you aware that the light of healing really does exist at the end of them.

It’s a light and a healing you will no doubt welcome into your life.

With Love and Understanding

Ken Matthies

HeartSpun Posts from the Crucible of Experience