Synopses & Reviews
If you’ve lost a sibling, you feel sad, confused, or even angry. For the first time, a psychotherapist specializing in teen and adolescent bereavement offers a compassionate guide to help you discover your unique coping style, deal with overwhelming emotions, and find constructive ways to manage this profound loss so you can move forward in a meaningful and healthy way.
Losing a loved one—at any age—is devastating. But if you’re a teen who has lost a sibling, this loss can feel even more so. Siblings are also lifetime playmates, confidants, role models, and friends. After losing a brother or sister, you may feel like a part of yourself is missing. You may also feel lonely, depressed, and anxious. These are all normal reactions. But even though the pain feels unmanageable now, there are ways you can start to heal.
Grieving for the Sibling You Lost will help you understand your own unique coping style. You'll also find effective exercises based in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to help you work through negative thoughts, and learn the importance of creating meaning out of loss and suffering. Most importantly, you'll learn when and how to ask for help from parents, friends, or teachers.
If you’ve lost a sibling, the pain can feel unbearable, but there are ways you can start to heal. This book will show you how.
Review
“
Grieving for the Sibling You Lost is a groundbreaking book, giving a much-needed voice to the experience of sibling death—one of the most unacknowledged and minimized losses today. This book does a wonderful job of providing tips, tools, and coping strategies on how to find hope and meaning after a sibling loss. It is a must-read for bereaved siblings who want to gain a better understanding of the sibling experience. I wish I had this book when my 17-year-old brother died.”
—Heidi Horsley, PsyD, LMSW,MS, executive director of Open to Hope Foundation, and adjunct professor at Columbia University
Review
“A clear, helpful, experience-near book, this is useful not only for teens grieving the loss of a sibling but also for parents of adolescents. Written in a simple way, teens can identify with the way grief feels, think about their own feelings and behaviors that are normalized, and gain some understanding of the undertow of grief. A well-written and very direct look into the life of adolescents who face profound losses.”
—Joan Berzoff, MSW, EdD, professor and director of the End-of-Life Certificate Program, Smith College School for Social Work
Review
“Erica Goldblatt Hyatt provides a wonderful resource that can help teens understand what grief is, the symptoms that often accompany it, and the various ways to cope with sibling loss. Using real stories of teens who have suffered sibling loss, this book gives teens support in a very real and relatable way. Teens of all ages will be able to use these stories as guides to help them understand and make meaning of their own grief experiences.”
—Mary Alice Varga, assistant professor of educational research at the University of West Georgia, and active member of the Association for Death Education and Counseling
Synopsis
When teens lose a sibling, it is devastating. They lose a lifetime playmate, confidant, role model, and friend. Now, for the first time, a psychotherapist specializing in teen and adolescent bereavement offers an essential guide for teens who have lost a sibling. In the book, teens will learn how to process difficult feelings by finding their unique coping style, deal with overwhelming emotions, and find constructive ways to cope with this profound loss so they can moveforward in a meaningful and healthy way.
Synopsis
When a loved one dies, children are faced with a kaleidoscope of feelings, thoughts, and questions. Struggling with these issues can be overwhelming without guidance, support, and creative forms of expression. This bereavement book contains simple, effective activities to help children and parents communicate about death and the grieving process. Through these activities, children will learn how to grow and thrive after the loss of a loved one.
Synopsis
Thousands of children each year experience the death of a loved one before they reach the age of 18, and some 10 to 15 percent of them experience mental health problems, such as depression, as a result. One study found that childhood grief is correlated with low grades, sleep problems, moodiness, behavior problems, and an inability to concentrate. When a loved one dies, children are faced with a kaleidoscope of feelings, thoughts, myths, and questions. This workbook offers tools that you can use to help a grieving child in your life deal with these feelings.
The first section of Why Did You Die? is for adults. It describes a child's grief process and what can be expected as it progresses. The latter section includes activities you can do with a grieving child. Using an art therapy approach, the activities guide the child through the issues he or she must eventually confront. Different activities help the child express difficult feelings, separate myths from facts, and understand the finality of death. This direct yet non-threatening, secular approach will help children learn, grow, and thrive.
About the Author
Ellen Goldring, LPC, is a board-certified and registered art therapist and certified child life specialist. She is currently a supervisor of Child Life/Creative Arts Therapy Services at Joseph M. Sanzari Children's Hospital at Hackensack University Medical Center in Hackensack, NJ. She offers therapy for the children of adults with life-threatening illnesses and for medically ill patients and siblings, and has developed children's bereavement programming.Erica Leeuwenburgh, LPC, is a licensed professional counselor, board-certified art therapist, and child life specialist. In 1987 she established a pediatric psychosocial program for children with the Joseph M. Sanzari Children's Hospital at Hackensack University Medical Center in Hackensack, NJ. This Child Life/Creative Arts Therapy program provides comprehensive psychosocial support services for infants, children, and adolescents with art, music, dance/movement, and drama therapists and child life specialists. Her clinical work focuses predominantly on hospitalized, chronically ill, or bereaved children and their parents, and children whose parents are critically ill. She is an assistant visiting professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY where she has taught for more than 10 years. She lectures nationally and has published several articles.