People often don’t think about the grieving process until they are faced with a bereavement. At this point you are within the process and can face many unanswered questions.
In this episode, Tracy, one of G Seller's Bereavement Counsellors explores what grief is and a few ways that can help you to cope.
We will be covering more bereavement topics in future episodes, so please do send any questions to us.
People often don’t think about the grieving process until they are faced with a bereavement. At this point you are within the process and can face many unanswered questions.
In this episode, Tracy, one of G Seller's Bereavement Counsellors explores what grief is and a few ways that can help you to cope.
We will be covering more bereavement topics in future episodes, so please do send any questions to us.
Hi. My name is Andy Eeley, I'm a Senior Funeral Director with G Seller Independent Funeral Directors. And we've been serving bereaved families since 1910. I'm sure you are well aware there's lots and lots of different misconceptions and myths and taboos around the Funeral Profession and what goes on. So we've decided to put this series of podcasts together to try and dispel some of those myths and of course, answer any questions that you have. Please do, like share and subscribe. And if you do have any questions, send them to liftingthelid@gseller.co.uk and we will genuinely do our best to answer them. It really truly is Our Family Caring For Your Family. We've got a huge topic and we're only going to touch on it briefly and this is the topic of grief. So I'm joined by my colleague, Tracy. Hello, Tracy. How are you, Andy? I'm good, thank you. Nice to be here. So, Tracy, what's your role? What do you do? Okay, so I'm part of the Bereavement Support team. So I'm a Bereavement Counsellor. Okay. So that's offering one to one counselling for anyone in the families that we've looked after for the funeral service of their loved one. And also we do some group therapy and I'm also working with, doing workshops for business and education sectors to help them support students or their staff members following a bereavement. Brilliant. So, Tracy, how did you get here? I mean, I mean, qualifications, or a bit of a past time? Okay, so a long six year training at Leicester Uni, then graduated from there as a Counsellor and then worked in education, a lot of the time with children, young people, and gradually moved through to working at a bereavement agency in Leicester, where I kind of found, I guess, my passion, in the area that I wanted to work in particularly. Moved around quite a bit and experienced as much counselling as I could, but always kept coming back to the bereavement side of things. And then I was always aware of G Seller because my family have used them for many generations for services when we've had somebody die in our family. So then I saw the opening and I was aware of the Bereavement Service and I thought, the opening, I thought, yeah, that sounds like a good one. So I started January this year. You did. Yeah. It's quite unique thing, isn't it? G Seller, of course, we don't just look after the funeral, but we look after the family after the funeral. And that's kind of where your role comes in, isn't it? It's quite unique for a Funeral Directors to do that. I don't think I know of anywhere else that does that to be honest with you. This is a huge question, but what is grief? Well, I guess the simplest explanation is it's the mixed up feelings that we feel if somebody that we love dies. And it's not easy to actually explain it in very simple terms like that, and those feelings can be all over the place. So are there any obvious symptoms as such? Well, the theoretical part of this and the way it's explained, as we learn in theory, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed this in 1969 and she described it as there being five stages of grief which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Okay, but I think the thing of calling it stages and the way she illustrated it was in very linear form that it looks like you have depression, then you have anger, then you have so and so on. But that's not how it is, actually. All those things can get very mixed up and you can be bouncing from one to the other. And that's when we can feel like we're kind of a bit out of control. We just don't know how we feel because we can feel kind of okay in the morning and then floods of tears in the afternoon, so kind of a bit all over the place. And the acceptance bit I do take a bit of an issue with that because I don't feel that we accept the loss of somebody we love dearly. I think it's more that we learn to live with it. Okay, so you talk for a kind of a linear piece there which we don't feel is quite accurate. Such I mean, I've studied models, and oscillating theories where we bounce around all over the place, different people, though I imagine we don't all grieve in the same way. No, you mentioned the oscillation and that is more the realistic way that it is. Some people it's bouncing from getting on and living life to actually feeling like you're debilitated and can't cope with anything. We bounce between the two and some people will be more in one area and some will be more in the other. And then you can look at somebody else and think, well, they're not feeling like I'm feeling, but they've lost somebody that they love, so why am I feeling like this? So actually we're all very individual in the way that we grieve. Yeah, absolutely. Do people ever ask you, what does grief feel like? Yeah, and I think that's people want to know, to know that they're not going crazy almost. I never say there's anything normal. There's no normal way to grieve, but actually there's usual ways that people can grieve, so it's not uncommon ways that it happens. So sometimes that's when the one to one therapy is quite useful because that can help people to like, we can reality check, the fact that you're not going crazy and that these are very usual responses and people knowing that it can really help them to feel that they're a bit more in control of what's going on. Okay, so how do we do that? How do we cope? I guess that's part of your role, to assist with that coping mechanism. I'm not going to say quick fixes, because I think that's a ridiculous term. Is there anything that we can do to help us cope with this grief? I mean, the most important thing you can do is to accept how you feel. Okay. I think we all want to, we all have to get up and go out and put that game face on and not show our emotions. But actually the more we suppress our emotions and that's kind of the denial part of grief, it's like putting them in a pot and it's a boiling pot and eventually the lid is going to come off. So if you don't let yourself feel everything, it's going to explode. And that will probably be more traumatic than if you just let yourself ride the roller coaster of emotions. Absolutely. So we're G Seller and your role is to support those families. How would you go about doing this? What's kind of first steps, I guess? Okay, well, when the Funeral Directors have looked after the families through the funeral process and they will be made aware of the bereavement service at that point, but sometimes it doesn't always go in so much. So around six weeks after the funeral, we will contact the family just very softly with some information, just telling them about the service. We're not asking them to do anything and there's no time limit to when they can contact us. And for some people it might be a little way down the line, but then they can contact us and there's an online form they can use on our website or they can give us a call and do it that way. And basically then we would invite them in to have what we call an assessment appointment, where we just talk to them about what we can offer them and what might fit their needs the most. And so that ranges from one to one counselling in more the traditional kind of way that people might know counselling. And then there's group therapy and we do mixed groups and we're just developing a mens only group. Okay, that's quite important because men is quite apparent we don't talk. No, that's right. So sometimes in just a male group they can feel a little bit more comfortable. And comfortable to talk about other things as well. So it's not just about what's going on for them with their grief, but we're basically driven by what we see the need to be. So we are continually developing the service in that sense to what the public need. Kind of evolving it. Yeah. As I said before, I think it's quite important that we at G Seller, don't just stop at the funeral and that's it, goodbye. You come in and give that extra level of bereavement support and care. I suspect as well, there's challenging times in the year for families. You know, those first anniversaries, Christmases and all those pieces; do you often get, is that something that's quite prevalent in your discussions. Yeah, it is. And people can get very anxious at how are they going to cope at times like anniversaries coming up or not just the birthday of the person that has passed away, but their birthday as well, that kind of thing. And Christmas, particularly is a big one that people get very anxious about, how am I going to be at Christmas? Is going to leave a massive gap. We talk about that empty chair, don't we, the empty chair at the table. Yes. I mean, the one thing that I encourage people to do is to make some plans, but think about what you want to do. So forget about everybody else, because often people are too worried about making it okay for everybody else. Actually look after yourself and do what you feel right for you, but don't be bound by it. But having some loose plans can help people feel a little bit more in control and secure. They've got something that they know that they're going to do, but if you don't do it, that's okay as well. Absolutely. And that's kind of the biggest thing. If there's one time in your life when you can be a little bit what people might consider selfish, is now when you are grieving. Because actually, if you don't look after yourself, you're not going to be any good to look after anybody else in the future. Brilliant. I think on that, Tracy, thank you. As I say, I think that was the tip of the iceberg. I think this is something we're going to be covering in the future in further episodes of this podcast. So, again, thank you for your time. Please, genuinely, any questions, please like share, subscribe, send the questions into liftingthelid@gseller.co.uk and we'll do our best to answer them. And thank you. We'll see you next time.