“Claire Bidwell Smith is one of the few voices in the grief world I trust implicitly. With Anxious Grief, she provides a practical and comprehensive guide for clinicians supporting clients struggling with anxiety after a loss. Grievers need professionals who understand the nuance and complexity of life after loss. Claire’s new book will help you be that presence for your clients.”

—Megan Devine, LPC, grief expert, psychotherapist, and author of How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed

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Conscious Grieving: A Transformative Approach to Healing From Loss

An intimate guide to grieving that offers hope and healing within loss from one of the nation’s top grief therapists.

Conscious Grieving is a book for anyone seeking guidance and support after loss. Renowned grief therapist Claire Bidwell Smith combines her deeply personal experience of loss with her long career spent working with thousands of people to introduce a new approach to grief, one that promotes hope and even transformation.

What does it mean to grieve consciously? Most of the time, when we lose someone we love, it feels like grief is just happening to us. We feel out of control, and overwhelmed. Claire reminds us that while loss is something that inevitably happens to all of us, how we choose to grieve is up to us. When we can consciously engage with our grief, rather than avoiding it, we can access profound pathways to healing.

Presented in a series of thoughtful, brief vignettes that don’t overwhelm the reader, Conscious Grieving offers a new framework for each stage of grief: Entering, Engaging, Surrendering, and Transforming.

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Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief

This groundbreaking book explores the little-known yet critical connections between anxiety and grief, with practical strategies for healing, following the renowned Kübler-Ross stages model

Anxiety disorders are on the rise; many people are looking for resources to help them cope with anxiety, yet most people aren’t aware that unresolved grief is a primary underpinning–or that the two are related at all. In my own therapy practice and life, I’ve discovered the connections between anxiety and grief. In my upcoming book, backed by research, case studies, and interviews, I break down the physiology of anxiety, giving readers a concrete foundation of understanding in order to help them heal the anxiety caused by loss. Taking a big step beyond Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ widely accepted five stages, Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief explains the intimate connection between death and grief and how they specifically cause anxiety–unpacking everything from our age-old fears about mortality to the bare vulnerability a loss can make us feel.

With concrete tools and coping strategies for panic attacks, getting a handle on anxious thoughts, and more, Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief  bridges these two emotions in a way that is deeply empathetic and eminently practical.

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The Rules of Inheritance | Claire Bidwell Smith

The Rules of Inheritance

A coming-of-age story that is both heartbreaking and exhilarating.

In this astonishing debut, Claire Bidwell Smith, an only child, is just fourteen years old when both of her charismatic parents are diagnosed with cancer. By the time she is twenty-five years old they are both gone and Claire is very much alone in the world.

The Rules of Inheritance is a remarkable lesson on how to overcome some of life’s greatest hardships. Written with suspense and style, and bursting with love and adventure, The Rules of Inheritance vividly captures the deep grief and surprising light of a young woman forging ahead on a journey of loss that humbled, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.

The Rules of Inheritance was nominated for a Books for a Better Life award and has been published in 17 countries.

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After This | Claire Bidwell Smith

After This

In After This, acclaimed author, and therapist Claire Bidwell Smith confronts the question she encounters every day in private practice—what happens after we die?

In an exploration of the afterlife that is part personal, part prescriptive—Smith invites us on her journey into the unknown. She wonders: How do we grieve our loved ones without proof that they live on? Will we ever see them again? Can they see us now, even though they are gone? Chronicling our steps along the path that bridges this world and the next, Smith undergoes past-life regressions and sessions with mediums and psychics and immerses herself in the ceremonies of organized religion and the rigor of scientific experiments to try and find the answers.

After This is unique in the power of the personal journey that underlies the book’s message. What we believe about what happens next affects everything about how we live–and love–right now.

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“A brave and intelligent book about big loss and even bigger love. The gritty truth and hard-won grace in this beautiful memoir astonishes me.”

–Cheryl Strayed

“In this eloquent, smart, funny and deeply thoughtful book, Claire Bidwell Smith takes us on a powerful journey of discovery.  She asks the most important questions about life, love, death, and what it means to be human, and does so with equal measures of skepticism and a broken-open heart.  By doing so, she becomes an utterly trustworthy guide.  Reader, follow her.  You’ll be so glad you did.”

–Dani Shapiro, author of DEVOTION and STILL WRITING

“Claire Bidwell Smith, with her writer’s heart and therapist’s mind, has written a stunningly generous book alive with curiosity, humility, skepticism, and bravery. In After This you will teeter on the edge of the Spirit world; and whether you believe, or wish to, or simply can’t, Bidwell Smith has written the most inspiring book about death you will ever read.”

–Christa Parravani, author of HER: A MEMOIR

“Forget everything you think you know about grief. Smith’s memoir is the most honest book I’ve ever read about how loss unmoors, challenges and changes you, written in prose so exquisite it could be poetry. Dazzlingly brave and absolutely true.”

—Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You

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