Seven Choices: Taking the Steps to New Life After Losing Someone You Love (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Many readers will rightly welcome psychologist's Neeld's seven-stage, step-by-step guide to mourning and recovery, accompanied by a description of phases necessary to complete the "grieving process." Based on the author's own experience and that of 60 others, the program requires the mourner to knowingly choose to undergo each stage as it occurs. The book also discusses with compassion physical and emotional traumas to expect and offers sound advice on how to adjust to change and form new life patterns and human bonds. 35,000 first printing; $35,000 ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Referring in her title to phases of the grieving process and their eventual resolution, the author (a writer and former professor of English) movingly recounts her own widowhood--a halting progress toward understanding recurrent grief and an attainment of a hard-won creative outcome. She offers a well-organized and detailed review of research on grief, with 60 vignettes by others who have lost loved ones through death or divorce. It will be of interest to a broad audience, including families and loved ones experiencing problems consoling or advising the bereaved. This well-written work provides accurate and ample information to help us find pattern and significance in the healing process. For those who grieve the aftermath of a suicide, an additional pertinent book is needed: Rita Robinson's Survivors of Suicide ( LJ 9/1/89).
- William Abrams, Portland State Univ. Lib., Ore.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 345 pages
• Publisher: I B S Books Stocked; 3 Sub edition (June 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0937897906
• ISBN-13: 978-0937897904
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #955,965 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Provides a "road map" for coping with loss and rebuilding..., February 12, 2004

By	"mom2socialworker" (San Bruno, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Seven Choices: Finding Daylight After Loss Shatters Your World (Paperback)

As a hospice social worker currently leading grief groups, I think this is one of the most valuable resource I have discovered....

This book provides a thoughtful "map" to the experience of sudden loss as well as coping with loss of any type. Harper Neeld, from her own experiences of loss, offers a new conceptualization for visualizing loss (the impact) and how it affects the world and offers most importantly a concrete active process for facing grief or the transition of coming to terms with a loss.

Things I love about this book.
1) It is very well written. Harper Neeld is a college professor and writes in an engaging manner with broad use of other peoples' stories, literature and personal experience;
2) It is honest. She wrote the book over a 4 year period and chronicles her path of coping with her loss and her own coming to terms with it.
3). She utilizes most of the grief literatures as a foundation and incorporates key ideas appropriately throughout her book.
4) It is action oriented - Seven choices refers to her conception that as mourners face different facets of their grief/pain, they have different choices that lead to healing such as "to experience and express grief fully..." making choices until their have discovered what lyes beyond their grief.

This book offers a tremendous opportunity for comfort and support by someone who has been there. For professional staff, it offers a new twist on grief theory pulling from broad aspects of scholarly resources regarding grief.

The author also maintains a website www.elizabethharperneeld.com which has a monthly newsletter and informtion on her work which includes guides to writing and the writing process.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grieving My Death, November 18, 2003

By	Keith Williamson (Murphy, North Carolina) - See all my reviews

In late of 1989 I had a devastating head injury. I think the popular wording now is a traumatic brain injury. I was in a coma for 12 days and in the hospital for three months. After I got out of the hospital, I had to go to outpatient speech therapy for another six months.

I found out over the next two years that the person who used to have my name had died. I went back to Georgia State University to find out I had a severe speech impairment and had no short-term memory. I could not remember anything new.

I had been high school valedictorian of my class. At the time of my head injury I was supervising third shift in a printed circuit board plant, as well as going to GSU almost full time. When I realized that person was dead, it was like the most important person in your life had died - and that person was me!

A close friend of mine recognized the grief I was going through and urged me to go to the GSU counseling center and get some help. I did. The psychologist I saw wanted me to read On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. I think it is the classic on grief. It studies the grief that terminally sick patients go through before they die. I could not read it. I was too close to dying myself when I had the head injury.

I felt the grief I was experiencing would permanently drown me in sorrow and sadness. One week when I saw the psychologist, I was told I would not help myself because I would not read the grief book. I immediately went to the library and found Seven Choices. The book changed my life. It specifically addresses losing a loved one unexpectantly. That is exactly the way I felt, except the loved one I lost was the old me.

The book was a tremendous help to me. It gave a blueprint of the process I would have to go through to get better. I can not say enough good words about it. Over the next ten years I got better, but it took a long time. When I think of what I went through, I think of the book. The book meant that much to me. It is a super book on one of the most devastating emotions one can feel. That emotion is grief.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A way to focus the process of greiving, March 19, 1999

By A Customer

After losing my husband at the age of 33 I found myself with nobody in the same situation to share my feelings with. This book helped me focus the feelings I had, which were often so overwhelming and confusing. I found myself reading her quotes of other people's feelings and experiences and saying "yes - that's it - I feel that too". The book was such help to me that I buy a bunch of them from time to time and share them with friends who lose someone close to them.