Dr. Joanne Cacciatore is a Zen priest, the founder of the international NGO the MISS Foundation, author of the award-winning best seller, Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and The Heartbreaking Path of Grief, professor at Arizona State University, and a bereaved mom since the death of her daughter in 1994. She is also the founder of Selah Carefarm, the first carefarm for the traumatically bereaved in the U.S. and a haven for animals rescued from abuse, neglect, and torture. She is an acclaimed public speaker and provides expert consulting services in the area of traumatic loss. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as The Lancet, Social Work and Healthcare, and Death Studies, among others.
"Bearing the Unbearable was impossible to put down. It quickly
becomes obvious that you are reading a book that is rich with
imagery blended with emotion and tied into traumatic stories of
loss. Woven within the chapters, Dr. Cacciatore also offers extra
guidance that may be helpful for palliative and hospice providers
as she talks about how she maintains resilience in the face of her
magnetism that draws the public to share with her their most
vibrant and terrible stories of loss. Bearing the Unbearable is
beautiful, and a must read for caregivers, bereaved parents, and
learners. It is the closest thing to having a deep unlimited
conversation with parents carrying their child forever at their
side."-- "Mary Ann Liebert, Inc."
"Bearing the Unbearable is an experience more than a book. In
recounting many cases from her extraordinary therapy practice
devoted to helping people who are undergoing severe and traumatic
grief, the book offers the reader an experience that--like grief
itself--is painful but for which one will be deeply grateful
afterwards. Cacciatore's amazing book shows us through its many
emotionally gripping examples-guaranteed to trigger readers' own
lurking tears--much that is novel and illuminating about the
ineffable depth and labyrinthine nature of intense grief."--Dr.
Jerome Wakefield, DSW, PhD, Professor, NYU School of Medicine and
author of The Loss of Sadness
"At a time when even the most normal of human experiences, such as
grief and suffering, are being pathologized and medicated by a
bio-psychiatric industry, Bearing the Unbearable is an honest and
courageous examination of the most common of human
experiences...Dr. Cacciatore's powerful book doesn't stop with
delineating the process of grief. [It] shows grieving human beings
how to reclaim the process as normal and sacred, and how to insist
on defining the process for themselves, which leads to powerful
healing...This book will become a staple in my practice, and as
well as at Warfighter ADVANCE programs."--Mary Neal Vieten, PhD,
ABPP, Executive Director, WARFIGHTER ADVANCE
"In this poignant, heartrending, and heart-lifting book, Joannne
Cacciatore teaches how loss is transformed to peace, devastating
grief to active and practical love. Beautifully, beautifully
written, Bearing the Unbearable is for all those who have grieved,
will grieve, or support others through bereavement."--Gabor Maté
MD, author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
"When we feel pain, our natural instinct is to do something to make
the pain go away. But what can we do if the pain is unbearable and
will never go away? Joanne Cacciatore learned about this kind of
unbearable pain when she suffered the death of her own child. In
her book Bearing the Unbearable, she tells us in a deeply personal
way about this experience of unbearable traumatic grief and what
she learned from it about healing, and she also tells us, in a
series of very moving personal stories, what she has learned from
her life's work helping others in their healing. She learned that,
while our instinct may be to make the suffering go away, our
deepest need is to feel the suffering, to experience it fully, as
often and as long as the suffering demands to be felt. Because it
is only by deeply and repeatedly feeling our suffering that the
process of healing can occur. As Joanne describes it this healing
is a profoundly mysterious process in which the suffering doesn't
change but in the process of not changing is paradoxically
transformed into healing. So bearing the unbearable is not
impossible. It is the only way to heal. But how exactly does that
healing happen? One aspect that Joanne emphasizes is that in the
process of fully experiencing our unbearable suffering we come to
accept the unavoidability of the suffering and our own helplessness
in it, and in that acceptance we discover a new compassion, first
for ourselves and then for all our suffering fellow human beings.
Another aspect is that we cannot and should not feel so much
suffering alone; that to heal we need to be able to feel and
express our suffering to another person who understands and accept
it and feel it with us. Ideally, it should be a person who can
continue to understand, accept, and feel it with us throughout all
the weeks, months, and years that we will continue needing to feel
it. Such a person is a true healer. Such a person is Joanne
Cacciatore."--Elio Frattaroli, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry
at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book Healing
the Soul in the Age of the Brain
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