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Quote by Eleanor Haley

“Rumination in grief is a form of avoidance. We know - this is completely counterintuitive. As we talked about [previously], avoidance is when you work hard not to think about something. How could rumination possibly be a form of avoidance? Margaret Stroebe, Henk Schut, Maarten Eisma, and an array of their colleagues first suggested this 'rumination as avoidance' hypothesis and then did research to investigate it. There is a lot to say on this topic, but here's what you need to know: studies have found that grieving people will often ruminate on very specific aspects of their loss. This keeps their brains so busy with those very focused events or details that they don't have to face the even more difficult and painful aspects of their grief.”

Quote by Eleanor Haley

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What's Your Grief?: Lists to Help You Through Any Loss

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Eleanor Haley

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“After a significant loss, it's tempting to live life in the past - wishing it had been different, screaming that it was unfair; deconstructing every decision to figure out where things went wrong or what you could have done differently, imagining what life would be like now had the past turned out the way you wish it had. But as the existential psychologist Irving Yalom said, sooner or later we all have to 'give up the hope for a better past.' You cannot change the facts of your history; you cannot change your loss. But you can integrate that loss into who you are now and decide what that will mean for you as you move forward. It is easy to conceptualize life as a series of events that happen to you, and your story as a reporting of those events. But it is not that simple. It is not just what has happened to you that shapes you. The way that you make sense of what happened to you also shapes you. There is the story you have lived up until this moment and then there is the story you are still living, telling, and creating. You are not just the storyteller; you are the story writer. How you understand the story of your past and your present is shaping a future that is still unfolding.”

“His face paled, and he stroked a hand down the mare's cobweb-coloured mane. 'I was forced to watch as my father butchered the female I loved. My brothers forced me to watch.' My heart tightened for him- for the pain that haunted him. 'There was no magic spell, no miracle to bring her back. There were no gathered High Lords to resurrect her. I watched, and she died, and I will never forget that moment when I heard her heart stop beating.' My eyes burned. 'Tamlin got what I didn't,' Lucien said softly, his breathing ragged. 'We all heard your neck break. But you got to come back. And I doubt that he will ever forget that sound, either. And he will do everything in his power to protect you from that danger again, even if it means keeping secrets, even if it means sticking to rules you don't like. In this, he will not bend. So don't ask him to- not yet.' I had no words in my head, my heart. Giving Tamlin time, letting him adjust... It was the least I could do.”

“I no longer felt fifteen. Thirty-five, forty-five ; these numbers came, in turn, to feel somehow insufficient. Not even sixty-five, no, nor seventy-five, seemed to encompass what I was. I wasn't JeongDae any more, the runt of the year. I wasn't Park JeongDae, whose ideas of love and fear were both bound up in the figure of his sister. A strange violence welled up within me, not spurred by the fact of my death, but simply because of the thoughts that wouldn't stop tearing through me, the things I needed to know. Who killed me, who killed my sister, and why. The more of myself I devoted to these questions, the firmer this new strength within me became. The ceaseless flow of blood, blood that flowed from a place without eyes or cheeks, darkened, thickened, into a vicious treacle ooze.”