Processing Grief with psychotherapist and co-founder of The Good Grief Project, Jane Harris

Grief and death are terrifying words for many of us. Of all the emotions, I’ve found, we really try to body swerve grief. But the thing is, grief doesn't go away if you ignore it. You can't cheat grief, so in this episode we try to look it in the face and talk about why it's important to start processing it and how you might go about this.

I speak with psychotherapist and bereaved mother Jane Harris. I first met Jane, and her photographer and film-maker husband Jimmy Edmunds, almost ten years ago. Their son, Josh, had died in a road accident in Vietnam two years earlier. He was 22.

I'd gone to interview Jane and Jimmy for an article I was writing for the Guardian family section on how to organise a different sort of funeral.

Despite their pain, they were so generous and meeting them changed me and my approach to death and grief.

Jane and Jimmy created the Good Grief Project, a charity dedicated to creative and active approaches to grief. They run some amazing retreats for the bereaved and have made some wonderful films, and written books. You can read all about them here: www.thegoodgriefproject.co.uk where you can also find links to their films: Beyond Goodbye, Say their Name, and the award winning A Love that Never dies.

Their next book, When Words are Not Enough - Creative Approaches to Grief is out in November 2022 with an introduction by our very own Dr Kathryn Mannix who spoke so eloquently on the death episode in Series One.

Cruse also provides amazing bereavement support. And for children there's the excellent Winston's Wish.

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