January 10, 2008: Healing through Service - John Pete

January 10, 2008 - HEALING THROUGH SERVICE:  JOHN PETE.  John Pete is a Certified Grief Counselor and founder of www.MyGriefSpace.net <http://www.mygriefspace.net/> .  Like many others, John came to the field through losses in his personal life that include drowning, suicides, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, homicide, leukemia, AIDS and pets.  Whenever possible, John uses his personal experiences to ease the suffering of others who have lost a loved one.  He encourages anyone grieving a loss to actively seek out healing resources as a way to regain some much-needed control in their lives.  John states that he finds tremendous personal healing by helping others.

John Pete:  As I went through my own grief over the next year and tried to sort out what happened, I was doing a lot of research primarily on the Internet looking at different sites and different resources, and it began to occur to me that I was spending a lot of time jumping from site to site to site to site.  And I thought, why not put a lot of these resources together into one site?  And that kind of sparked the idea for www.mygriefspace.net <http://www.mygriefspace.net/> .

John Pete:  It was at the point where I was doing a lot of research and working through my own grief.  One of the things that I found most helpful to me was talking with other people, relating to other people.

John Pete:  Eventually all of this made me want to get into the field of helping others.  I kind of always found myself going quickly from being helped by the support of others to being the one that was trying to help everybody all the time.  So I think it is important, though, that anybody that gets into this field is at a point in their own grief that they’re ready to help other people and it doesn’t drag them back into their own grief.

John Pete:  It’s going to happen, of course, and I think how we handle grief as grief counselors is not so different than everybody else.  We may be armed with a little more information and be a little more prepared, but I think when it happens to us, we go through everything that everybody else goes through.

John Pete:  I think a lot of people that come to the field of grief counseling come here through their own losses and their own experiences and end up wanting to help others.  I mean loss is an experience in life like nothing else and having been there yourself is just invaluable to helping others.  You can go get all of the technical experience and all the book experience and all the degrees and what not, but I think one thing that you can’t get anywhere else is the experience itself, until it’s happened to you.

John Pete:  I think it’s really important for people not only that have lost someone or that are going to lose someone but in general to be attentive to the fact that it’s very, very likely that we are going to lose loved ones in our lives.  And it seems to me, I run into this a lot that society has kind of turned a blind eye to the topic of death and dying and healing afterwards.  I don’t often run into people that are teaching their children about death and dying and how to cope with it. 

John Pete:  People do not know what to say when somebody has died and it’s really not that easy for anybody listening that might take something away from this.  Just be there for them.  Just say I’m sorry for your loss.  I’m here to listen, and that will open a huge door, bigger than you think.

John Pete:  I would just say that if you’re hurting, reach out.  If you see somebody that’s hurting, reach out and try and meet somewhere in the middle and I think everybody will come out better for it.

John Pete:  I think there are a lot of opportunities for people that want to help others as part of their own healing, and those don’t always relate directly to the field of grief.  There are hospitals and centers for developmentally disabled or the mentally ill or the blind or the deaf.  If you need to get out and do something that will more than likely take you in a positive direction, I would always suggest checking into volunteering in one of those areas of service.

John Pete:  Sometimes your neighbors need help.  They might have a broken leg and need you to run to the store.  All these little things do help you feel better about yourself.