Navigating Grief - Teenagers

Grief Episode Guide for Teens: Creating a Pathway to Resilience and Recovery (Grief Journal) by Psychotherapist Kathleen B. Whelan

Grief Episode Guide For Teens: Creating a Pathway to Resilience and Recovery: 1 (Series one Grief Episode Guide's)

This very thoughtful, interactive grief journal by Kathleen B. Whelan is a valuable and helpful resource for teenagers and young adults navigating grief.

Kathleen, very helpfully begins with an introduction to the complex process and emotions of grief through Kubler-Ross's Five Stages of Grief and then invites readers to journal their emotions and feelings. Expression of these is the first stage to the healing process, helping us become aware of our emotions, process them and move forward.

Kathleen gently advises us to honour our feelings and use the journal as a way to document and acknowledge the very difficult and challenging feelings that we go through. This can be kept private or shared, depending on how we want to use the journal. It's lightweight, ideal for a handbag/backpack so that whenever those feelings and emotions surface we can use the journal to express/jot these down. In this way, it serves as a wonderful tool to support our healing journey.

What's helpful, is that Kathleen gives us the language we might be missing to understand our feelings better from feeling ambivalence, anger, discombobulation, isolation and volatility.

What struck me about the journal is the way it's designed to capture our feelings about grief, through imagery, poetry and coping strategies. I also love the colour coding to mirror the different stages of grief and emotions that people go through as we heal.

A valuable resource that goes a long way in helping us navigate grief and all its complex emotions - whether you're a teenager, young adult and or even an adult.

 

 

Looking for something more specific? Get something more tailored with our personalised book prescriptions within 48 hours. 

You might also find it helpful to learn some bibliotherapy techniques to help your child process these feelings by completing our online Bibliotherapy, Literature and Mental Health course, Children's Bibliotherapy Skills Online Course or read our book Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading.

A big hello and thank you for reading! Passionate about literature, psychology, and life I launched Book Therapy as an alternative form of therapy using the power of literature. I train mental health professionals, librarians, teachers as well as readers on using bibliotherapy in their own work through our online Bibliotherapy, Literature and Mental Health course. We also curate reading lists/personalised book prescriptions for clients based on their individual needs. This is our signature personalised reading service.

You can also check out Book Therapy’s other free reading lists and A- Z of book prescriptions (covering both fiction and non-fiction). These suggest books based on your existing life situation (e.g. anxiety, job change, relationship heartache) as well as interests (e.g memoir, historical fiction, non-fiction, crime etc). There’s also a Children’s A — Z of Book Prescriptions. Feel free to check out the blog for more literary gems. There’s also a post on my personal story of how I entered the world of bibliotherapy and book curation.

In this role, I have had the opportunity to publish two books called Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading and The Happiness Mindset, and write various literary essays and pieces for newspapers and magazines. I have undertaken bibliotherapy workshops for The United Nations, various libraries in New York and corporate organisations in the UK and US. My book recommendations have featured in the Guardian, Marie Claire, NBC News, Asian Voice, New York Observer, Sydney Telegraph and various other publications. If you are a parent you might enjoy a podcast I’ve recorded with speech and language therapist Sunita Shah on Raising A Reader & Storyteller. And if you’d like to connect, email me at bijal@booktherapy.io or www.booktherapy.io.

Book Therapy is a participant in the Amazon EU, US and Canada Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Amazon.ca