Grief Is Acceptance and ‘The Will to Love’ Radiates Healing

An elderly woman opens a car door. Her late husband’s belongings are still on the passenger seat. In the back are the toys her inner child was once too busy to play with. The girl has one hand on the wheel. The woman can open the door for her. Only her inner child can choose to step through it.
 
I came to write this book through my own experience of grief. I lost my stepfather of thirty years, my father, and then my mother. Their deaths brought me to a question that runs through these pages. What do we grieve when someone dies? Sometimes, alongside our longing for the person we love, an older sorrow makes itself felt. I call it the ‘second grief’. We begin to mourn the childhood we spent learning who we had to become to keep love close. We grieve the 'unlived life.'
 
The Four Doors of ‘The Map Room’ offer four ways into that experience. Through Development, I ask what happens when a child learns that love depends on being good, useful or exceptional in living a life that was never theirs and the grief of a life not lived. Through the Human Condition, I explore how those early bargains shape the adult who grieves and how it shapes their grieving. Through Burnout, I return to the competent professional who has spent a lifetime at the wheel and how grief relates to burnout, again in an evidence-based way. Through Re-Collection, I ask what becomes possible when the petrified inner child who carried that responsibility is finally free to play and the True Self steps forward, as a transformative new approach to grief.
 
My own journey runs alongside deep, trans-paradigmatic research spanning bereavement studies, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, metaphysics and the contemplative traditions. At the heart of the book is the Pivot, the moment when surrender restores 100 percent agency. I can still ache for someone I love and have a choice about how I meet the person beside me. This is where the ‘Will to Love’ becomes an act.
The woman at the car door still loves her husband. Some of the tenderness she received from him is there in the way she waits for the girl to make up her own mind. This is what I mean by transformation, and by BEing love. What heals in one person can become warmth another person feels. That is the ‘little sun’, and this is how it radiates healing.
 
Dr Olivier Branford · Illustrated PDF ebook · First edition · 391 pages