What Support is Available for Someone Struggling Through Grief?

We're seeing a lot of questions around grief in particular. Um, one family who, who recently lost a mother. What support do you have for parents navigating grief, grief of a parent, maybe in this case, or, um, grief of, of friends or other family members? Again, we're seeing a real theme of, of questions a around grieving here, Right? So, uh, I know that's not maybe a specific situation or a specific case. You're talking about many different people. So I'm, I'm gonna be a little bit more broader general here, but, but there's a couple specific things that I would want to say here. First of all, it is acknowledging what that loss has done to you as a caregiver. Uh, the, the first starting point is, is, is much like what we do when we get on airplanes. When we get on an airplane, one of the first things they say is, in case of an emergency, make sure when this mask comes down, that you put it on yourself before you do it on a child. Same concept here. Um, you have to respond to your own emotions and understand your own emotions so you can communicate and ask your child appropriate questions. If you're not prepared, your child may be dealing their own grieving, but you also have to go through your own grieving. So I, I want to first of all start, we, we wanna put that oxygen mass on ourself. That means we get aware and attuned to our own emotions, our own fears, our own concerns about the loss. So the second part is then how do I do that with my child? My belief is that we need to be as authentic and real as possible. I'm sad. So we model the emotional expression that we want our children to be able to do. So again, I don't know what necessarily my child's feeling, but I know what I'm feeling. A few years ago, a good friend of mine who did his doctoral dissertation with families who are dealing with, uh, a family member who had terminal cancer, they would be dying in the next few months. And what he did is he took, let's just say for example, uh, if I can find something, uh, well, I can't, let's just say it's a, well, let's say, let's say it's my keys, and let's say that we're gonna talk about this cancer, like it's my keys and we're gonna externalize it. We're taking it outside of me, and now we've taken it outside. And now each member of the family has the opportunity to talk about that externalized cancer. In other words, the cancer's now outside of this, the person even dealing with cancer. What does that mean to me, a loved one? What does that mean to them? And what my friend found is that families that could talk about these things and externalizing it, it actually helped the family make more sense of the experience because they were opening up as if it was something outside of them. And in doing so, they, it really opened them up to more awareness of what their, uh, family members were dealing with. So, similar situation here, the grieving process. There's a principle here, and the principle is that we need to give it a voice. And what I mean by giving it a voice when we're in grief, if it stays inside of us, then it's an unspoken experience. We don't know what to do with it. We might try to bury it, but ultimately we're way more effective, way more effective in the healing process if our grief has a voice. Younger children would probably be better by maybe drawing it out or acting it out or playing their emotions out. Sometimes with our children, we might be throwing a ball back and forth as we communicate, but rarely are we gonna do a eye to eye with, uh, younger children, teenagers, because they don't like to do the eye-to-eye contact. Primarily the theory is because we are bigger than they are, uh, they have a feeling of intimidation or you have more power than me. So this play, or walking together or doing the dishes together and talking about their experiences can be much more effective because we're taking away what a perceived power differential. And we're doing it as, as we're just going back and forth, talking and playing, getting the mind going, allowing them to converse. So getting them to talk about it is one of the core concepts I would wanna get across here. When we can open up about our experiences, it's actually very, very healthy for us. When we can't and we suppress them over time, it starts to gna at us, and it's what we call an unresolved issue. And those unresolved issues typically come back to bias. So one more thing there is you can't force them to do it. You create the environment where they feel safe to do it. And that's really a fundamental element as well. If there's one thing I could get across tonight, it would be this, safety is the essential part of all human connection. In other words, we have to feel safe in order for our body and our mind to want to connect, open up with other people.