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/