Bearing the Unbearable

ldquo;When we feel pain, our natural instinct is to do something to make the pain go away. But what can we do if the pain is unbearable and will never go away? Joanne Cacciatore learned about this kind of unbearable pain when she suffered the death of her own child. In her book *Bearing the Unbearable, *she tells us in a deeply personal way about this experience of unbearable traumatic grief and what she learned from it about healing, and she also tells us, in a series of very moving personal stories, what she has learned from her life’s work helping others in their healing. She learned that, while our instinct may be to make the suffering go away, our deepest need is to feel the suffering, to experience it fully, as often and as long as the suffering demands to be felt. Because it is only by deeply and repeatedly feeling our suffering that the process of healing can occur. As Joanne describes it this healing is a profoundly mysterious process in which the suffering doesn’t change but in the process of not changing is paradoxically transformed into healing. So bearing the unbearable is not impossible. It is the only way to heal. But how exactly does that healing happen? One aspect that Joanne emphasizes is that in the process of fully experiencing our unbearable suffering we come to accept the unavoidability of the suffering and our own helplessness in it, and in that acceptance we discover a new compassion, first for ourselves and then for all our suffering fellow human beings. Another aspect is that we cannot and should not feel so much suffering alone; that to heal we need to be able to feel and express our suffering to another person who understands and accept it and feel it with us. Ideally, it should be a person who can continue to understand, accept, and feel it with us throughout all the weeks, months, and years that we will continue needing to feel it. Such a person is a true healer. Such a person is Joanne Cacciatore.”

Auteur

Dr. Joanne Cacciatore is a Zen priest, the founder of the international NGO the MISS Foundation, author of the award-winning best seller, Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and The Heartbreaking Path of Grief, professor at Arizona State University, and a bereaved mom since the death of her daughter in 1994. She is also the founder of Selah Carefarm, the first carefarm for the traumatically bereaved in the U.S. and a haven for animals rescued from abuse, neglect, and torture. She is an acclaimed public speaker and provides expert consulting services in the area of traumatic loss. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as The Lancet, Social Work and Healthcare, and Death Studies, among others.

Texte du rabat

If you love, you will grieve—and nothing is more mysteriously central to becoming fully human.

Dr. Cacciatore is featured in the 2021 documentary series The Me You Can’t See, from Oprah, Prince Harry, and Apple TV.

Bearing the Unbearable is a Foreword INDIES Award-Winner — Gold Medal for Self-Help.

When a loved one dies, the pain of loss can feel unbearable—especially in the case of a traumatizing death that leaves us shouting, “NO!” with every fiber of our body. The process of grieving can feel wild and nonlinear—and often lasts for much longer than other people, the nonbereaved, tell us it should.

Organized into fifty-two short chapters, Bearing the Unbearable is a companion for life’s most difficult times, revealing how grief can open our hearts to connection, compassion, and the very essence of our shared humanity. Dr. Joanne Cacciatore—bereavement educator, researcher, Zen priest, and leading counselor in the field—accompanies us along the heartbreaking path of love, loss, and grief. Through moving stories of her encounters with grief over decades of supporting individuals, families, and communities—as well as her own experience with loss—Cacciatore opens a space to process, integrate, and deeply honor our grief.

Not just for the bereaved, Bearing the Unbearable will be required reading for grief counselors, therapists and social workers, clergy of all varieties, educators, academics, and medical professionals. Organized into fifty-two accessible and stand-alone chapters, this book is also perfect for being read aloud in support groups.

Now available as an online course from the Wisdom Academy and as a journal in Bearing the Unbearable: A Guided Journal for Grieving.