It wasn’t until I was in a yoga class listening to the instructor talking about the importance of letting go that I realized a particular type of grief has been plaguing me recently.

Some scholars contend that all depression is a form of grief. Whether or not we have a diagnosable mental illness, all of us experience grief over the course of our lives. Grief doesn’t just occur after the death of a loved one. It can occur in reaction to trauma, the loss of a relationship, or even in reaction to changes that happen in our lives that weren’t our choice or that we feel we couldn’t control. We can grieve over a childhood that was fraught or non-ideal, or an imagined future we had for ourselves that no longer seems likely.

What all of these experiences have in common is that the way we think about ourselves when experiencing grief impacts our relationships with the people in our lives,........

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