May We All Heal – How to share yourself

May We All Heal starts tomorrow! I’m so honoured to host the 4th MWAH creative (and FREE!) healing event in the name of the Grieving Parents Support Network.

May We All Heal – what is it?

If you’re new, you might like to read the detailed information about MWAH on the event page and the information specific to this year.

Our theme this year is ‘Share Your Grief’ because I believe it is so important both for your own grieving and healing, as well as for the people surrounding us, to hear YOUR grief story. Through the prompts, we will be able to highlight different angles and perspectives.

Sharing – yes or not?

Sharing yourself, to most of us, is a vital part. Child loss is a very isolating experience, both through the emotional intensity, the taboo of the topic and the misguided myths circulating in society. Those often leave the bereaved confronted with unreasonable expectations (in themselves or from others) of what healing means and in what time frame it should be completed.

Whether you choose to partake on your own, with your own private notebook or whether you’d like to share yourself with a wider audience is your personal decision. We just know from participants testimonials that the aspect of community that resulted from sharing, commenting and conversing with others played a huge role in their healing.

If you decide to share, you might like to share this notice to family and friends, so they know what to expect and why. Add your personal words and let them know how they can best support you during the MWAH project month. Click on the image to see a bigger version and then save it to your device.

How to share

There are two main avenues which you can choose to share: Instagram (IG) or Facebook (FB).

Instagram (IG)

Advantages:

• IG is an image-based social network (pictures and videos)
• you can add a comment, usually not too long otherwise you’ll run out of space and need to copy the rest in a comment
• MWAH has already a great community, due to the fact that’s where it started to be shared
• if you choose to also share on FB, you can do that in one step by sharing on IG and enabling FB sharing (only possible onto your own personal and professional pages)

Disadvantages:

• you might need to learn and understand a new social network
• IG doesn’t provide the option of groups as FB does, therefore each person posts on their own profile
• taking part in the community aspect means having to follow other individuals rather than just being able to read and comment on what they share in the May We All Heal group

If you know how to use IG, simply add the hashtags #mayweallheal and #MWAH2018 and make sure to follow @mayweallheal (event profile, mainly used during the event) and @mymissbliss (Nathalie’s and Grieving Parents Support Network’s profile, used all year around).

Also, if you normally have your IG profile set on private, consider making it public, at least for the duration of MWAH. It just easier for people to see what you’re sharing and comment.

If you haven’t used IG before, and want to try, follow these steps:

1. download the app on your smartphone
2. create an account
3. search @mayweallheal under user and follow them
4. start sharing

You’ll learn IG by doing it, it is really very intuitive.

Facebook (FB)

Advantages:

• FB is the more widely knowns and used social network
• you can add a comment, usually not too long otherwise you’ll run out of space and need to copy the rest in a comment

Disadvantages:

• harder to control who sees things, unless you use the private and closed May We All Heal group
• FB heavily limits what you get to see on your newsfeed, so you need to actively go to the May We All Heal group

I’m going to assume that you’re on FB and know how to use it. 

If you haven’t already, you should follow the following pages:

• Grieving Parents Support Network (event host)
• May We All Heal (book page)
• May We All Heal group (peer support group)

We will use the May We All Heal group to share because it’s a private and closed group. This means that only members can see and read your posts. So, if for whatever you prefer your friends on FB not to be able to see what you share, this is the place to share. You can however not directly post there from IG.

Sharing on the MWAH peer support group page

In order for this to work, we need to create some structure on how you all share on the group page.

In the image, you can see an example from last year’s event. We will post a daily lead image with the prompts in the May We All Heal group.

IMPORTANT: Please ONLY post your images and words underneath that daily lead images. This way, all the contributions to a specific prompt are together in one place and not scattered over the newsfeed of the group. Individual posts get lost, clog up the feed and due to that fact will be deleted. 

 

 

 

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