Surviving and Thriving After Love and Loss with Kimberly Smythe

Aired Thursday, 6 April 2017, 7:00 PM ET

Letting Go Again - Surviving And Thriving After Love And Loss With
Kimberly Smythe

Healing Your Heart After Loss

If there’s one thing that none of us can avoid in life, it is the
loss of a loved one. It doesn’t matter how we lose that person –
whether through death, ill health, enforced distance, or their
choice to reject our love and/or no longer be involved in our lives
– loss can be both devastating and life-fracturing.

Love and loss are universal experiences and how we move through
them can not only have a significant impact on our physical,
emotional, psychological and spiritual health, but in some cases
even the entire trajectory of our life. Loss is inescapable, and
when one is deep in the grip of it, one can feel like the loneliest
person on earth. So how do we survive loss? From where do we get
the strength to cope with the devastating emotions that invariably
crowd in to fill the void left by a loved one’s absence? Is there
any gift in loss? If so, how does one let go enough to move beyond
the pain and suffering to find it?

Author Kimberly Smythe spent decades suffering the overwhelming
grief and myriad painful emotions that followed her excruciating
decision to give up her first child to adoption when she found
herself pregnant at the age of 16. Terrified at the thought of
losing the love and approbation of her family, she instead chose to
experience a different loss – a decision that, in her innocence,
she never foresaw would lead to years of struggling to find a
solution to the guilt, depression, grief and self-approbation that
would follow in its wake. Years later, when, against all odds, she
was reunited with her daughter, Smythe once again found herself
having to let go and find a pathway through the loss of her
daughter for different reasons.

Kimberly Smythe’s book, Letting Go Again, is a deeply personal
story about her own experience, but in the telling it nonetheless
offers important insights about such universal themes and emotions
as grief, loss, regret and self-recrimination that we all encounter
at some point in our lives. The gift it offers to the reader is
that it calls us to challenge our perceptions about love, loss,
acceptance, surrender, relationships, and letting go.

Website: http://www.lettinggoagain.com/