Susan, your host, welcomes Wendy Lichtenthal to today’s episode. Wendy Lichtenthal, Ph.D., FT is the Director of the Bereavement Clinic and a clinical psychologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. After experiencing loss at an early age, Wendy found herself driven to address the suffering of grieving individuals. As a licensed clinical psychologist, her practice focuses on helping cancer patient helping cancer patients and their families cope with loss and adversity. Over the last two decades, Wendy’s federally-funded research has focused on understanding how bereaved individuals find, or struggle to find, meaning in their lives and their loss. This has led to the development of Meaning-Centered Grief Therapy (MCGT), a manualized therapy that aims to enhance bereaved individuals’ sense of meaning so that they can learn to co-exist with their grief. MCGT helps grievers recognize their ability to choose their attitude in the face of suffering, to choose how they construct narratives related to their loss, and to choose how they maintain a sense of connection to the person who died. It also assists them with finding their lighthouses in the sea of grief, that is, their “whys” for continuing on, despite their pain.

 

Key Takeaways:

• Wendy shares her grief story that began during her childhood being “superstitious” and having recurrent thoughts about death.
• Wendy learned to embrace that there is no control over whether you lose someone.
• Things are happening to us all the time, we have the ability to be the narrator of the story and to find the meaning we want these events to have for us.
• No answer will satisfy the question: “Why did this happen to me?” or “What could have I done to prevent it?”
• Find your reasons to move forward.
• You don’t need to ask permission to lean on to your story, you own your narrative.
• You can grieve in your own way, it needs to be meaningful to you.
• Susan talks about how grief changed who she was.
• Ask yourself: Who am I now? What matters to me? What did this loss mean to you at this moment? Who was this person to you?
• Wendy talks about how she helps people who are grieving by assisting them in finding and making meaning in their lives using Meaning-Centered Grief Therapy.

 

Resources

Tendrilsofgrief.com

Email Susan: [email protected]

 

Meet Wendy Lichtenthal

Follow Wendy on LinkedIn