Episode 0 - Responsible Rebels, an introduction

Join grief trainers and advocates Martin Roddis and Trudie Bamford as they introduce a new podcast discussing grief and loss and the insights and skills that supporters need.

Transcript

Welcome to Grief in the Room. In this podcast, we do a deep dive into all things grief, so that when those themes of grief and loss show up in your client's story, you're prepared, with the insight, tools, and most importantly, confidence, to give them the kind of support they need. Grief in the Room is presented by Martin Ruddis and Trudie Bamford, grief trainers and advocates, and good friends.

We bring warmth, humanity, and humor to the subject. We're so glad you're joining our conversation today. Please do subscribe to and say hello to us in the comments.

So Trudy, hello everyone and welcome. Episode zero of our new pod. Excited. It is exciting. It is exciting. So my name is Martin Roddice and I'm here with Trudie Bamford. And this is our first venture into podding. Uh, we're both fans of podcasts. And in fact, our starting story was through cruise bereavement support, but also a mutual love of pods.

Do we call them pods? Well, you keep calling them pods. It slightly grates on me, but

I'm sure it's called a pod. Pretty sure it's a podcast. Okay. And as we go through and explore our differences, the way we look at our therapies differently, the way we deal with our clients differently and approach our work differently, you're going to understand the nature of our relationship more and more.

So welcome to grief in the room. So, so a good starting point really would be to probably explain why we chose grief in the room, because we seem to be fixated on rooms as we are both elephants in the room as well. Absolutely. And the elephant in the room is grief, because it's the thing that people don't talk about.

And yeah, it is the thing that is present in everybody's story and everybody's life at some point, grief and loss, but it's the elephant in the room. So grief in the room. And when you say that it's present in everyone's stories, we see that, don't we? We see that with our delegates that we train and we see that with the people that we see and we've got lots of stats and facts.

It is the one constant that we will all have to deal with. And yet it's a subject that not everybody likes to talk about. They certainly don't. And talking about people that don't like to talk about it. One of the reasons why we've started this podcast is because we are both trainee counselors, psychotherapists.

And what we've discovered is there are certain organizations that don't like to talk about grief. Hmm. And grief in the room in this context is the therapy room. So as, as trainee therapists seeing clients, we are going to see clients suffering with grief and loss, and yet we're not being properly trained.

So that when grief walks into the room, do we know what to do? Do we know what to do? And is grief really being screened for and assessed, or is it one of those things that just pops up all of a sudden? And then the counsellor, therapist, even trainee counsellors and therapists, because we're all doing client hours, it just, like volunteers that we've trained, or that I've trained for cruise bereavement support, you know, it's like, what do I do?

What do I do? And I think this is what happens, people, people present with something else. So they will present with depression or anxiety or a number of issues. And it's only when they start to unwrap their story with you that you discover that grief is going to be a big part of that. At that point, you've already taken that client on because you may have looked at their notes and thought, well, I am, I'm capable of handling that.

And then all of a sudden. They start unpacking that they lost their dad to suicide, or they lost their child in a traumatic way, and now that grief is in the room, you now have to deal with it, and you don't feel equipped. And you and I know that when that thread is pulled, it's never about a simple, he says, simple death.

It's never just about someone's died. It's all that loss that is wrapped around that death, let alone any sudden and shocking and traumatic aspect to the death. And the thing about grief You know, we, we've both got that grief foundation. We, we've studied and we've taught grief theory. And the beautiful thing about grief theory is that when you understand the principles of it, you can translate those principles to any other kind of loss that people go through.

So understanding grief theory, understanding Standing models of grief and how we process grief and loss will help you deal with many other kinds of presenting issues with that. Clients may bring like the end of relationships, for example, or grief over your children leaving home when they go to university, things like that.

And it would be fair to point out and say that, whilst we're talking about, and we'll explore this more and more and more, about the lack of structured grief training for therapists or counsellors within the framework, because we know this, we know this from the feedback we've had, we know this from the amount of counsellors and, you know, Even, you know, trainees and qualified counselors that don't have and state quite overtly they haven't got the grief skills and knowledge because it was never taught them.

I think it would be fair to say, Trudy, that again, one of the, the, um, draws that we had between each another is that we generally don't do things by half. You certainly don't, and that'll become very clear. That's the way you're, that's the way you navigate the world. You need to know more and you drill down.

You're, you're more than curious. I would describe myself as curious. I'm not quite sure what one word you would describe yourself as, but we basically both. Have a passion for, if we're not talking about dead, death, and dying, we're researching dead, death, and dying. We're understanding dead, death, and dying as we stride on the backs of those giants whom we are reaching out to, to actually understand more about their work.

And again, that will unfold over the next week. Series of pods that we do podcasts. Sorry. Now you're saying it out loud. You can hear it. Can't you?

So Trudy, what's what's you will get to know as audience. If we have an audience, you will get to know us over a period of time. Slightly irreverent. I certainly am. The conversation will be conversational. We're going to provide resources and supporting resources via our website and, and whatever else mechanic we come up with.

Trudy is masterful at creating those resources. We want to start a conversation, maintain a conversation and deliver skills, knowledge, and Skills, knowledge, and a, I don't know, an assurance, confidence amongst trainee counsellors. That's what we, that's what we're trying to do. So, Trudie, do you want to talk about your training counsellor experience to date?

And then I can talk about mine. Yeah, sure. So I'm halfway through a humanistic integrative degree. Um, I'm currently seeing clients. I'm halfway through my, my client hours as well. And um, I went into the training already having had a good foundation in grief training because I trained with cruise bereavement support with Martin.

Nevertheless, I assumed that grief would be an integral part of the training experience, that we would do a full module on grief. And I was startled to find that we actually are going to do one morning out of a three year course. I couldn't believe it. So I started asking around other modalities, other counsellor friends who, who, who'd maybe trained, uh, wanted to train psychodynamically and other modalities.

And it seemed to be the same experience across the board that grief is, it's minimized to a morning. a day, instead of it being an extensive grounding, which I, it just blows my mind because it is such, it's such a huge part of our human existence dealing with grief and loss that to, to minimize it to just a couple of hours and say, there you are, you're done now.

And, um, if you want to know more, then you go off and do CPD. I just, I just find that genuinely shocking. Genuinely shocking. And again, as the story unravels, you will realize that Trudy is generally not easily shocked. So, and I agree with you entirely. And it's interesting because again, my grief grounding is, is very incredibly comprehensive with cruise training, further research, other training, specialist training.

And now, you know, and I have been for quite a while now. I am a trainer for Cruise Bereavement Support, which is a deeply fulfilling part of my work. And I'm also a trainee. counsellor, psychotherapist, but I've taken different routes to Trudy, which has really been very interesting as me and Trudy have explored our relationship over the last year and we've come together and we are elephants in rooms and Trudy's developed lots of content that I've used and still do use in all our training that we deliver.

for Cruz and other clients. And Trudy's a trainer as well. She's developed that material. What I've realized is that my training, I'm more cognitive behavioral therapy, specifically rational emotive behavioral therapy. And I know that in my first year, no, we didn't cover grief. I have spoken to my wife who is years down the line with rational emotive behavioral therapy and DBT and all sorts of other things as well.

She's now more blended. No, we don't cover in our course in any depth grief. Why? Well, because we've got lots of other frameworks to do. And also it becomes a CPD event for us. So, Yeah, it's not covered in my syllabus either, although we do talk about the manifestations of, but not truly to the level that me and you do in our training programs when we design our training courses.

It's essentially our grief awareness section is probably, I don't know, to a factor of what any counseling student would have. Is that fair to say? Yeah, and, and more to the point, it isn't just about depth, it's about it being up to date. You know, we make sure that our understanding is incredibly bang up to date, even a little bit, a step beyond up to date, because we're working with some of the top grief academics.

So it isn't just about depth, you know, I am painfully aware from my experience from talking to others, but also from training that we have done with qualified therapists, that even the training that is being done, it's largely outdated. It does not include the wide range of models that we know need to be taught.

It just skims along the surface and it doesn't keep abreast. of things like, for example, Mary Frances O'Connor, the neuroscience of grief. That's not touched upon in any training modality, even the ones that do spend a little bit longer. So it isn't just about the fact that the amount of training is minimal.

It's also about the quality and it's about the, you know, whether it, whether it's current, whether it's moving, that is also an issue that we want to address. You know, as part of this podcast, it's, it's not enough to have a basic foundation of grief, understanding. It's not enough. We've gotta keep up to date as well.

How are we going to do that? How are we going to structure and organize the pod for people? Well, we are gonna break it down into three kinds of topics. So we are going to be spending some. Some of the episodes looking at the academic models, the framework, the theory, so that you are set, you're putting that scaffolding in.

We're also going to look at really practical stuff, therapeutic practice, how these understandings can help us when we're in the room and grief is in there with us. And I think this is really important. We are going to dive deep on specific topics around grief. And this is something that has been asked for over and over again.

Um, for both of us with our training work is, can you please present us something on neurodivergence and grief? Can you please present us some understanding on what happens after drugs or alcohol bereavement? This kind of training is not available out there at the moment. So we're going to give you some understanding about that in this podcast and make it really practical so that when you're faced with that with a client, you already have that foundation in place.

So we're going to ignite that curiosity, hand over some knowledge. Are we going to do things like handouts, tools, and videos and things like that available for download? Of course we are. And if anyone would like to see any of those, you can go to elephantsinrooms. co. uk at the moment. We've started to put some up there and we will name drop all the time.

So the people that we're working with, the people that we're collaborating with, these are people that are giants of grief that we've reached out to. And we are just trying to make their information more widely available, accessible, understood, and keep it true to the original intent and model of what they intended.

So, you know, we're excited to do this and we hope you're going to join us for the journey. Absolutely.



Trudie, do you want to say anything else? What have we coming up, got coming up in the first proper episode? Yeah, what have we got? I think we're going to be looking at the dual process model, which is one of the models that is commonly taught.

However, it is not always being taught correctly. And Strobey and Schutt, who are the academics who created it, we have been working with them to create a really accurate easy to understand, uh, video based around their model. So I think we're going to be talking a little bit about that and what, what we can learn from that model, how it can apply with our clients and with ourselves too.

We're going to explore that. That's absolutely fantastic. And the actual origin story of that is that Whilst Trudy was reading The Grieving Brain by Mary Frances O'Connor, she realized that there was almost a misinterpretation or a Disneyfication of the dual process model. So Trudy being Trudy, did more research, looked at the original work, then created a little video to give it a better representation of the original model and how relevant it was, which was fantastic and an amazing resource.

And then I, being me, got in touch with Maggie and Henk, who willfully engaged with us, and they took it then to another level. And this is what happens when you reach out to the giants of grief. This is what happened when we reached out to Mary Frances O'Connor. They, they, place their full focus on you, give you their full attention, encouragement and support, because they want it done right as well.



And this is the journey that we do. And this is the way me and Trudy collaborate as well. We hope you enjoy this journey with us. 

 Thank you for joining our conversation today. This episode of grief in the room was presented by Martin Roddis and Trudie Bamford. Join us next time when we'll be talking about. If you are a grief counselor or trainee, or you're in the grief field, you're going to be familiar with the dual process model from Strobey and Schutt.

But what we would say is that the version that you're familiar with Even on the great grief charities and the great grief sites and and you know, if you follow people on LinkedIn They're not posting it with the same inference that we're about to present to you. And I just want to interject there it Really matters.

Why? It really matters when we are using somebody else's work To understand what they were trying to say with it It matters for that reason, but it also matters specifically in the context of this as we're going to go through it will become apparent why it matters. So just because something has become understood a certain way, you know, it's not enough to accept that.

If that is not what the original researchers, psychologists, academics, wanted it to say. They worked incredibly hard on this. They, they would have been developing this for such a long time. So it really, really matters if we are learning grief theory, if we are teaching grief theory, if we are supporting the bereaved, it matters to get this right.