The Choice: Finding Life in the Face of Adversity -- Six Stories from a Therapist's Casebook

Now available in paperback -- Jan Hatanaka's powerful, life-enhancing book on how six people, encountering significant adversity, made a conscious choice to work to build a life of meaning.

Using six stories from her casebook as a therapist, Hatanaka explores and illustrates the complex relationships that exist between death and grief and the path that can lead to reconciling that grief.

Included in her stories is her own heart-wrenching and dramatic experience following a major health crisis. Hatanaka draws on her personal, clinical, and academic experience as she takes the reader through the Greif Reconciliation Process, describing the actual steps taken by people who manage to build a life of meaning in the face of significant adversity.

The Choice is brilliant in its simple, gentle, and profound exploration of the reality of suffering as part of the human experience. It exposes the hope that can be hidden in affliction.

The Choice will be of great help to those currently in the grips of personal adversity; the loved ones of those who are suffering; and health-care professionals, including medical practitioners, counsellors, therapists, and spiritual advisors.

About the Author

Dr. Jan Hatanaka's approach to grief and reconciliation is informed by: her personal experience; her extensive academic research on the universality of grief and loss; and her in-depth discussions with hundreds of individuals willing to recount their personal stories. The founder of Grief Reconciliation International Inc., she holds positions at York University, Toronto, in the Department of Nursing, the Religious Studies program, and the York Institute for Health Research. She has a B.Sc. in nursing from the University of Ottawa, a Master's degree in education and counseling psychology from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Wales.

From the Author

I wrote The Choice to introduce a process and a language that I hoped would help those who had made a choice to work toward greater understanding and wisdom concerning the reconciliation of grief in their lives.

We grieve in response to the loss of someone or something that we hold dear. While this response may manifest itself in many different ways, this book serves to illustrate the many common themes that surface in stories told by individuals relaying their personal experience in working to reconcile grief. I am pleased that this book is serving as a practical guide to those seeking help and those seeking to help others.

From the Back Cover

A dramatic, challenging, and liberating book that introduces the choice we all must make when faced with adversity — a book that traces the intense struggles and triumphs of those who have learned to reconcile grief in their lives, including, in this book:

• The author herself, who survived a major challenge to her health
• An up-and-coming student, whose fall on a football field renders him a paraplegic and takes him to the edge of suicide
• An MBA graduate, who discovers that unresolved grief in his family two generations back is threatening his marriage today
• A mother of two young children, who experiences a terrorism threat and can't reconnect with her family and colleagues
• A retired boxer, who faces the toughest bout of all when given the news that his condition is inoperable
• A woman entering her senior years who is emerging from a deep well of depression over the loss of her twenty-year-old son