Camp Widow® presenter: Carolyn Gower
When the hits keep coming: navigating the really hard stuff without your person
The death of your person changes you, but how can it not?
You’re not only robbed of the future you’d planned and expected with them, but now you must navigate a multitude of new challenges without your biggest cheerleader by our side.
This can cause anxiety, hypervigilance, and fears that you may have never encountered before.
These overwhelming emotions can leave you feeling very isolated in a world that really doesn’t handle grief well.
In this workshop, we’ll discuss secondary losses and some of the more common challenges that widowed people may face. We’ll also explore how to cope if something unexpected were to happen, because unfortunately, even widowhood doesn’t leave us immune to bad things.
I’ll share tools, tips, and strategies to help you find your own inner strength and resilience, even when you don’t think you could possibly cope with one more “hard thing”.
This workshop has been seven years in the making, learning first-hand from challenges I’ve experienced over the time I’ve been widowed.
As I was lying in a hospital bed a year ago, having survived a serious illness against all odds, I kept telling myself that something good had to come from this latest challenge. I knew I had to continue my work supporting widowed people because I now had so much more to share… and so this workshop was born.
The skills you will learn can empower you to face your own personal challenges with determination, hope, and optimism.
I believe it is possible to not only grieve fully, but also to live fully.
About Carolyn
Carolyn Gower is a grief and life coach, certified grief educator, author, speaker and podcaster living in Ballarat, Australia.
Carolyn became widowed when her beloved husband Tony died from prostate cancer in 2017, She soon discovered just how grief illiterate our society really is and set out on a mission to normalise grief.
A self-confessed “grief nerd”, Carolyn is now fulfilling her passion of helping other grievers across the world, through her coaching, workshops, courses, group programs, speaking, book, social media and the My Person Died Too podcast, which she co-hosts with American widower and coach, John Polo. She is also passionate about educating our society on ways to best support those with a grieving heart.
However, 2023 was to come with even more challenges for Carolyn, when in March she was faced with the rare and deadly flesh-eating bacteria, Necrotising Fasciitis. After almost a month in an induced coma, two months in hospital, and fifteen surgeries, Carolyn spent the remainder of 2023 learning how to walk and perform normal daily activities again.
Carolyn speaks with raw honesty and vulnerability, sprinkled with a touch of humour, about the challenges she has faced, and how she has overcome them.
Her wish is to inspire and bring hope to others who may find themselves facing the unimaginable, so they too can find joy and happiness, and live a life that feels fulfilling.
Hope, community, understanding
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