Of course, we have to take care of ourselves when we are grieving.  Amen to that.

And what concerns me about the self-care approach to healing grief is that I fear some heartbroken people might stop there and fail to take other steps. We might fail to take our pain into our community. We might even become caught in habitual, self-limiting patterns. This complete focus on the self, while necessary, is a very Western thing: it’s all about the individual. Of course, self-care gets us functioning again — as does the care of others. Read more