End of the Hour: A Therapist’s Memoir by Meghan Riordan Jarvis
What happens when a trauma therapist is traumatized by loss?
Esteemed trauma therapist Meghan Riordan Jarvis knew how to help her patients process grief. For nearly twenty years, Meghan expected that this clinical training would inoculate her against the effects of personal trauma. But when her father died after a year-long battle with cancer, followed by her mother's unexpected passing while on their family vacation, she came undone.
Thrown into a maelstrom of grief, with long-buried childhood tragedy rising to the surface, Meghan knew what she had to do―check herself into the same trauma facility to which she often sent her clients. In treatment, trading the therapist's chair for the patient's couch, Meghan took her first steps toward healing.
A brave story of confronting life's hardest moments with emotional honesty, End of the Hour is for anyone who has experienced the unpredictable, lasting power of grief―and wondered how they'd ever get through it.
What Looks Like Bravery
By her mid-thirties Laurel is a ship about to splinter on the rocks, having learned the hard way that no achievement can protect her from pain or remove the guilt and regret her dad’s death leaves her with. So, she determines to explore her troubled internal wilderness by way of some big exterior ones—Northern New Mexico, Western Alaska, her Tinder App. Joy in the wake of loss, she learns, isn’t possible despite the hardest things that happen to us, but because of the meaning we forge from them.