Seeing Through the Grief: A Time Perspective Therapy Approach

When we experience a great loss, our despair can be so intense that we get stuck, oftentimes facing backwards, reliving painful experiences that may leave us feeling stranded in the past. We can find ourselves living day-to-day on autopilot, going through the motions, while in the back of our minds we might think we don’t deserve to be happy anymore. When we try to look at the future, whatever plans we had made prior to our loss now seem impossible to achieve.

If this sounds familiar, Time Perspective Therapy (TPT) is designed to help; it provides simple tools to turn your perspective from dark to light, from negative to positive. This book dives deep into the many facets of grief: from depression and caregiver stress to reestablishing relationships that may have fallen to the wayside and making plans for your new and different future. Through real-life intimate stories of those who have suffered loss and grown from the experience, and easy-to-do exercises, it is designed to help you learn how TPT can help you cherish the past, enjoy the present, move toward a new and brighter future, and live a fulfilling, meaningful life.

Rosemary K.M. Sword is the author of numerous -TPT-related articles, coauthor of a popular PsychologyToday.com blog, and the developer of -TPT-based Aetas: Mind Balancing Apps for mobile devices. She lives in Kula, Hawaii. Stanford University professor emeritus Philip G. Zimbardo is known for his landmark prison study, dramatized in the IFC film The Stanford Prison Experiment. His nonprofit Heroic Imagination Project teaches how to meet challenges with wise and effective action. He lives in San Francisco.