Episode 4 - The Language of Loss

Grief is not as simple as grief. Why? Because we’re more complicated than that, as are our relationships. Life is rarely straightforward, death even less so. 

Our next podcast episode dives deep into some of the types of grief that people experience, and what we need to know as supporters. 

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 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 Roddis and Trudie Bamford, grief trainers and advocates and good friends.

We bring warmth. Humanity and humour to the subject. And we're so glad you're joining our conversation today. Please do subscribe to and say hello to us in the comments.

What are we doing today, Trudie?

We're going to talk about the language of loss, which is a really important part of all of the grief education work that we do, is putting, words to the different kinds of grief that may come up, that clients may present with.  This is a really important,  episode because  it's a grief education foundation, knowing the kinds of grief. That people will be going through because grief is a very generic term, isn't it? But there are many different ways that people experience grief. So that's what we're looking at today.

you know, I find most interesting about this.   People have light bulb moments when we explain some of these grief terminologies, because they relate to them. Because many of us, I mean, there's such a societal perception about what grief is, and that's what we do in our grief training courses, to really try and broaden knowledge and raise awareness, don't we?

Yeah. And you know, one of the really important messages that we're constantly trying to get over, whether that is in bereavement support or whether it is in training is that grief is incredibly unique. It is not. The experience that we see portrayed on television or films or in books is unique to each person. And I think one of the reasons why, when we look at the language of loss, it does create light bulb moments in people is because it names, and by naming validates people's unique experience. They went through maybe a bereavement or a significant loss, like the ends of a relationship, and they experienced it in a way that perhaps They don't feel other people experience it internalize that and don't they and think well Maybe I'm doing it wrong.

Maybe I'm doing grief wrong But when you can

Yeah.

this is a common grief experience and this is the name for that It's like oh, okay That was a real experience then and then they own it

Yeah. So we've chosen six and I know as well, some of the courses that we've put together recently, we brought in a couple that we didn't teach at cruise.  And you don't find often talked about. And again, those have resonated with stronger and you've brought those in.

on the back of your, some personal experience and learning. And I think they've been really powerful, actually. 

So the first one, and we've not rehearsed this tool. It's typically typical elephants. It's unscripted, see how it goes, 

so the first one on my list, Trudy is, disenfranchised grief.



Hmm. So disenfranchised grief is when somebody suffers a significant loss of somebody or something that's very, very important to them. that loss is not acknowledged or recognized by those around them.  So for example, could be pet loss. That could be something that is absolutely devastating, world ending to somebody.

Hmm.

yet, because society has this, this sort of griefy Olympics grading system,

Hmm.

them may well be, well, it was just an animal. It was just the pet. Get another dog.

Hmm.

The grief that they may feel be as intense as any other kind of bereavement. That animal may have been their only secure attachment, their only, their only experience for unconditional love, and people's worlds just fall apart. After something like this, I was, I was at the hairdressers once and she said to me I had to take two weeks off work when my, my last dog died, but I had to tell everybody I had the flu was going to accept that I couldn't work for two weeks when it was just an animal. 

Should we talk about some other disenfranchised griefs?

yeah, just thinking of our last episode, bereavement by drugs and alcohol. That is a prime example. of disenfranchised grief.  Because uh, society's got this concept of a good death and a bad death and certainly when somebody dies as a result of drug misuse or long term addiction, substance misuse, that is not perceived in the same way. as a death by other causes. Similarly, death by suicide sometimes. can be disenfranchised grief. Because what we're talking about here is that you are experiencing an intense grief, but the people around you are either unable or unwilling to acknowledge and to support you in that grief. So the result of that is that people just, they, they just internalize, don't they?

They just, they, they grieve in private, they grieve alone because They're not getting the support around them because their grief is being it's like it's being weighed up in the balance by people around them and people are deciding how, you know, whether it's a worthy grief or not.

someone's grief, aren't they? Yeah. Here's another take as well. I've I've really has really hit home to me recently. Um, as you know, I'm doing a lot of training with police and fire at the moment

I've heard some, I've got some case studies together and I've spoken to and spent time with, um, some people who have experienced significant trauma, significant grief reactions, and they openly, and I'm, you know, I don't need to name names, but they openly talk about the maladaptive practices that they undertook of drug, alcohol, misuse, just to function and to cope through the trauma and the PTSD.

Um, and the way they describe it is that. Yeah, people knew that they'd had a tough time, but all they could see was the maladaptive practices of their grief. All they could see was the effects of their loutish behavior, their irritability, their short tempered fuses, their, their excessive drinking or their drug taking.

And again, their grief was disenfranchised even more so because of the way they chose. I'm not sure they chose. But the way their grief manifested with their behaviors, that's another very powerful example 



So we're going to move on to Anticipatory Grief. 

so anticipatory grief occurs before an impending loss, typically the death of someone close due to terminal illness. Okay, well that's, that's quite an easy definition to wrap your head around. It can create a conflict between grieving the loss and hoping that they may still recover and survive.

Cool. Yeah.

back to the previous episode. Your loved one is a drug user or alcoholic, you will experience anticipatory grief. When I think of my brother, who was a heroin user, every time somebody knocked on the door, my mom thought it was the police coming to say that he'd overdosed. She suffered anticipatory grief many, many years.

However, alongside and as part of that anticipatory grief is the hope that as humans, No matter what situation we're in, will be a little tiny spark of hope that things could change that. So you're trying to, you're trying to marry these two opposing beliefs that the person that you love, you know, you're going to lose. Can you change the outcome? If this happens, then you do see this with terminal illness too. 



So, and typically the death of someone, but you're right. It's not just the death, is it? The way I describe anticipatory grief in the classroom, or to clients. I describe it as almost, if you think of a play with three acts, and the first act is when that ambiguous loss comes into a house, and let's say it is a terminal diagnosis, all of a sudden, you mourn the past.

Transcripts provided

That time when you did not know, when you did not have this limitation, it was not around the table, it was not in the house. I've seen this happen so many times when cancer comes into a household, everything starts to revolve around, but you almost lose your footloose fancy freeness because you didn't have to consider that thing, whatever it may be, that dementia, that cancer, that have so many lists that we could put into here.

So all of a sudden you've lost some innocence. That's anticipatory grief, that's the past. In the present, Act two, you've lost potentially, especially if there's an invasive treatment protocol or you've lost mobility. 

And so, you know, the present has changed dramatically, because again, you can't perhaps just eat what you want, go what you want, celebrate what you want, connect with your partner the way you like. And they're all losses. Um, So that's the present, you can't just go on holiday because of treatment protocols and such things like that and that really hit home for me when I was training make a wish foundation, especially a fast track wish where they put something in place to give the, the, the child, the young person the wish and then all of a sudden they can't, you know, they can't go because now they can't leave the home or now they can't leave the country or they can't go away or they can't do the physical activity that the wishes, the granted wish and then there's the future loss, that's act three, because while all this is happening in the present, Whether it be the person that care is caring for that ill person or that terminally ill person.

They are going to start to worry about the future. What's going to happen? The death that's going to come? How are they going to survive or all the future losses that are going to occur? For example, You know, anniversaries, birthdays, celebrations, and all, all that future loss of dreams as well, um, comes into play and comes into fore.

And then guilt and shame also come in because I am thinking about me now, not thinking about my partner that's dying. 

 So the future anticipatory grief. Yeah, and, uh, Trudy, I think, would you agree that this is a grief that walks amongst us all the time and that we don't often recognize, and a lot of people then put their hand up and say, I had no idea, you know, because nobody's died, especially work colleagues and things like that, you know, a bereavement policy won't kick in because of anticipatory grief, 

 and, and lots of people don't even realize they're experiencing anticipatory grief because, you know, you just don't.



One of the reasons why it's really important to recognize anticipated grief is because When a bereavement finally does happen, if it has been anticipated for whatever reason, it is likely that the bereaved person is already at an incredibly low ebb

Um,

because all of their resources, all of their emotional, physical, mental resources will have been absorbed in trying to deal with the situation, trying to deal with the practicalities, trying to manage their emotions, trying to manage the emotions of the other person. And when the death finally happens. They're already at a really low ebb 

so one of the main questions 

we get after presenting this and talking about this as well is, okay, so if I've been caring for somebody and I'm anticipating that death, Because I know it's coming. It's a terminal diagnosis. 



 Does all this anticipatory grief that I'm experiencing help me the day that they die? Do I, do I grieve less?



The answer is no, um, because that conscious knowledge that they've died, I mean you've been nursing them or you've been there in their care protocols and you've, you know, perhaps attended the funeral or been there when they died.

So you've got that lived experience and that conscious knowledge, but the implicit knowledge is still equally ingrained and is as powerful that they're everlasting. So gone, but also everlasting. That will still kick in with such a power that no, your grief reaction will still be very, very much present.

Um, and you will have, you know, you will have your grief journey. I mean, who knows what your grief trajectory will be because we don't know these things until we experienced them, but just because you've had a degree of anticipatory grief in your life. No. It doesn't mean that it's going to all of a sudden be a better experience when they die.

There may be a different route to acceptance, or accepting smaller things, and it may be easier to build that conscious knowledge that they've died. You'll be able to connect the dots more, but, but the intensity of the grief will still be there, very much so. It's interesting, I remember a phone call on the helpline.

Somebody Was looking after their mother and had been for four or five years terminal diagnosis of cancer 

and she'd been looking after her mom for years and she was she was really okay with it But the time she called the helpline You was the time when the cancer had spread to the brain and signs of symptoms became dementia like symptoms.

She started to lose her mother's personality, you know, all that kind of stuff, name recognition and relationship. That's when she hadn't experienced any grief. Her words, not mine. Up until that point when she started to then anticipate the demise of her mum, uh, because she'd lost parts of her mum's personality.

So that was, that was, that was very poignant. That stays with me. 

 It's not just you are anticipating a loss. You are already experiencing a loss in some way. You will have lost some part of the person or some part of the relationship or some part of the life that you had. it's not that we are projecting ourselves into the future. And that's the anticipatory grief, although that is part of it. It's that we are grieving the losses that we are experiencing right now because of what is happening.



Okay.  Should we do the next one? 



 So historic grief, you can also think of it as delayed grief. Um, this is losses that have happened in the past that because of circumstances or perhaps because of age were not, the grieving process was not completed or experienced fully at the time. This very often happens when has lost somebody when they're a child, perhaps. And what happens is that Our previous losses, they get activated

Uh, uh, Uh huh.

So just to try and maybe think of an example, perhaps you're in a workplace and your colleague dies. You weren't particularly close to them, you feel absolutely devastated and, and debilitated by the loss. And that can feel confusing. That can be confusing

Yeah.

that you are experiencing Yes, they will be in some degree related to the current day loss, but primarily They will be the historic grief that is now knocking on the door and saying hey I need some attention.

I need looking at



sometimes people get very, very distressed and grief stricken when a celebrity dies. Sometimes this is part of the picture. This is part of the reason why, because that and the grief that results from that loss taps in. To previous losses and again brings them up to the surface where they require some tending and some attention.

So, and on that note, I remember when the Queen died

one lady phoned up on the helpline and she was angry. She was really, really angry. And her premise was. Why has the world stopped for when his mum died?

Because it didn't stop for when my mum died. And it was huge for her, because 

it really brought the grief back into the present. 

I describe historic grief as grief has no respective time or boundaries and, you know, it has its own time machine.

It will, it will come from the past into our present, and then it will take us into the future in a heartbeat when that grief visits us. 

when we're small people, if we experience a bereavement, we may not be safe emotionally, we may not have the, um, emotional intelligence, we may not be safe physically, you know, um, for all sorts of reasons, we may be vulnerable, so we can't process that.

So we pack up that grief and we lock it down and we know as psychologists and counselors today that to press down these emotions takes time. twice the amount of psychological energy that it does to help process our grief. Cabot Mattei says that grief is An antidote to PTSD, because grief is a healthy process.

It's not pathological. It's not an illness. And if we can process the grief and all the emotions in a safe environment, then we're not going to store them up to come back. And the potentiality of them visiting in the future is less so when doing, when me and you did understanding your bereavement for Cruz, Trudy, um, I clearly again, remember a story of a, of a lady.

Again, at my age, um, fifties, clearly talking about the death of her father, and she would not let any of her family members talk about it. There was no photos. She was suppressing the death of her father, who was, you know, as she described him as her best friend. And she was locking down that energy. She, you know, this was quite in the past again as well.

And it was, it was, It was being brought into the present every time she suppressed a memory. She wasn't continuing bonds. She wasn't making meaning She wasn't you know, it was that historic grief coming straight in and it had been triggered She'd she'd activated her grief and she'd come to cruise for sport because of a contemporary bereavement Because as you've said grief is compound, isn't it?

It just you know, it's all interlinked. 

Somebody that I supported through the trauma team and it was a, it was a, a traumatic bereavement, a loss of a child that had happened than 20 years previously. 

everything in them was pushing the painful grief away because it just felt like it would swallow them whole. 

the metaphor that I use with people is that it's like trying to push a beach ball under the water. You can keep pushing it down. But it's going to take a huge amount of energy and it is going to keep rising to the top, no matter how many times you push it down, no matter how hard you push it down, it is going to keep coming to the top.

So what do you do then? Well, you learn to swim with the beach ball. You learn to swim with it. And this is what we do with, with people with, you know, in bereavement support is. helping them to exist alongside the grief rather than to keep pushing it down and pushing it away because you, you can think that you were doing that successfully for a long, long time,

Um,

eventually you're going to run out of energy, or

Mm.

you may find yourself, and this is something that's important to acknowledge as therapists, you may find yourself finally in a place of safety that allows you, and this is, this is something that will happen the therapy room. Somebody may present not even mention bereavement or grief because perhaps it's something that's happened a long, long ago. So they're not aware that it's part of their process. as you build up that safe, trusting, empathic relationship with them, that might be the first place that they feel safe. It's going to come bubbling up to the surface and all of a sudden the grief's in the room with you. that can be

Yeah.

for the client. It can be unsettling for you. But it just shows that you have now created that place of safety where that grief can now be looked at and examined worked with.

You know, that goes to the point of why we're doing this, this whole series, this Grief in the Room podcast, doesn't it? Because grief comes into the room, even if it's not been diagnosed, if it's not been assessed or identified, it just comes out, doesn't it? 



Okay. 

I would like you to lead with ambivalent grief because you,  brought this to my attention and I love it. 



I think of all of the types of grief that I share with people, 

this is the one that to resonate with a lot of people. On a very deep level. So ambivalent grief is when somebody dies that you had a difficult relationship with. You may have been estranged from them. Perhaps it's a past partner, it could be somebody like an abusive parent. Somebody who you would say, I'm glad that they're gone. I wanted them to die and yet you experience a grief reaction. This is incredibly confusing and disorienting and distressing for people who may, may resent any kind of impact of grief

Um, Uh,

to be the same kind of grief response that perhaps a different kind of bereavement or loss might provoke. So it's going to perhaps be

Uh, Uh, Uh, Uh, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um.

still wishing on some level that they were still around. I have described this from my own experience. It feels like a kind of madness. Because you don't recognize it as grief, so you don't know what's happening to you. And I think this particularly affects people if it is a significant attachment figure like a parent. I have supported people who have come along to, to counselling because they have found themselves in a very distressed emotional state, perhaps with anxiety or depression.

They did not link that up to a bereavement because as far as they're concerned, they're not grieving that person. They hated them. They were estranged from them. They never wanted to see them again. There is a link there all these unresolved feelings. And if you've had a very complicated, painful relationship, you are going to have a complicated grief response to it.

These are not these, these different, we are, we are splitting these up into different little parcels of language, but you could be experiencing ambivalent grief.

That's also historic. And your grief is also disenfranchised because nobody may have known what a terrible relationship you had with that person as well. So it could be disenfranchised, historic and ambivalent. You know, this is not a, you will experience this or this or this. It could be a, Very much so.

You may be experiencing them all. And this is again, what, what we really want to portray to our fellow peers and our colleagues. You may be unpacking so many of these, which is why it's so important to understand the different aspects and natures of them.

And an important part of ambivalent grief is that you can grieve for the relationship that you should have had.

Um, Uh,

didn't have a good dad. can grieve for the person that you should have had and didn't have, and that can be part of that ambivalent grief reaction. Again, I think that comes a little bit back to that, sense of hope refuses to die in us as humans. As long as somebody is alive, even if it's only on an unconscious level, there may be a part of you that holds on to the tiny, tiny 

hope that it can be resolved. they will say

Not

die, hope dies too. You will never get the apology from them. You will never be able to maybe say the things that you now wish that you had said to them.

You can't do that. So that is all part of grief. So yes, you may not be grieving the presence of that person. But you will be grieving an awful lot more.

only does the hope die, but the anger can amplify as well, you know, that that apology will never come, that behavior will never be, there'll never be that reckoning as well. So, yeah, yeah,



this is a very, very important one for us to understand as therapists. the person may not make the connection between the death and the struggles that they're having. They may not accept you making that connection, they may resent you making that connection, but you do need to make a connection. Regardless of how they say they felt about the person, regardless of what they say their responses to the death, it is likely that That they will have been psychologically impacted by the death, to say all the stuff that had gone before it.

So, if you are supporting somebody and you are aware that there was a difficult relationship in their life and that person died, do that. Do flag that up, even if it's only in your own mind, that there will have been significant psychological impact to that person.

Well, this comes back to one of our other mantras as well, doesn't it, Julie? Never assume. And I know that's commonly tripped out, but you know, we do not assume how someone's grieving and how the grief has impacted on them for this very reason. We should never assume, and we don't have to. We can ask questions, you know, we can, we can develop that therapeutic relationship and that bond and that working relationship and, and understand as opposed to just assume.



So what we have now is we have

formatic grief. 



So traumatic loss, is something that I work with all the time because I'm on the traumatic loss team with Cruise Wales. This will happen as the result of a death that is sudden, shocking, unexpected, 

particularly if there are violent circumstances, perhaps a suicide or a road traffic collision, perhaps it was witnessed by the survivor or if the death was seen as preventable.

So a lot of the clients that I support, they, the deaths. are not as the result of an accident, but nevertheless they are classed as traumatic loss because, as far as they're concerned, the deaths were preventable. Perhaps they feel that the hospital didn't handle it well, for example. 

It's to do with shock trauma, and traumatic grief is the result of a shocking death, and it has a massive impact. on the survivors. It really, really does. Traumatic loss can affect people for decades.

You know, I'm not sure I can do it. Um, Is this Um,

And traumatic loss It, it shatters somebody's assumptive world, which I know we're going

Um, Uh, And uh, He's um, Uh, Yeah, I think um, He was pumped to be a man who um, It's important to like, He kind of, I don't know myself, But I'm definitely like, I've never been in the room and I'm like, I've never been in public like I've never, I've never been in a room I'm like, I've never, I've never,

people become terrified then about rest of their loved ones, because now they, it's like death is stalking them in a way. Now they know that somebody in a second can be gone. And also something that this can cause people to struggle with is the Their own mortality when it has been a sudden shocking loss really does bring home to people their own mortality.

So they're not just dealing with the loss. They're not just dealing with the fear for their other loved ones, but they're now dealing with this huge existential fear that at any moment life can end.



If it is a traumatic grief, a traumatic loss or a traumatic death, the ability to continually re traumatize yourself, because it's one thing, and I've had this experience directly, it's one thing to, for example, be bereaved by suicide and to know that, and to know how they did it, where they did it.

But then it's another thing to actually read the coroner's report. again and again and again. And that can be, that can just deepen the trauma. And we're already trauma, trauma makes us so, so vulnerable, biologically, immunology, emotionally, physically, everything. It makes us so very vulnerable. So yeah, I'd like to spend a lot more time on trauma, 

We're going to do a full episode on this for sure, but I think one thing that I would like to just say before we finish this section, again, from the point of view of counsellors, therapists, if you are in the room. So that you don't have to wait until we do the full episode. really important to keep in mind if you are supporting somebody who has suffered a traumatic loss is incredibly sensitive to endings. They have been robbed. the opportunity of a proper ending with their loved one. So be really mindful of the way you handle endings. Stagger them if you can.

Allow them opportunity to go through any unfinished business with you. They don't have that chance with their loved one. You give them the chance in the counseling room. Be, bringing the thought of the ending to their attention long before the ending so that you're softening the edges of it so that it's not unexpected. If you don't remember anything else, just remember that if it's a traumatic loss, be really, really sensitive around how you handle endings in the counseling room.

Yeah, thank you. Good point, Trudy. 

yeah, I mean, we will, we will, we're, we're definitely going to unpack trauma and so many times probably as well. Okay. So next one, 

so,

Prolonged Grief Disorder came into the DSM, the Diagnostics Statistics Manual, I don't know, I think it was version, Five or six, I'm not sure which exactly, but a few years now, there's a lot of resistance as to, because grief is not pathological, grief is not an illness, but it can become one.

This is the way I normally explain it at a very superficial level. Some people argue that it was popped into the DSM in America so that the very monetized pharmaceutical and medical industry over in America could then all of a sudden start to help financially for grief, and that would help. therapists and all sorts of other people.

So a lot of resistance, a lot of positivity about it as well, because some people want that diagnosis and help. Because of the nature of prolonged grief disorder, they had to put prolonged into a timeframe, that timeframe they choose was 12 months and a day, but it's not that. So prolonged grief disorder is a trajectory 

and it's how your grief is having a significant, the manifestations of it are having a significant impact upon your daily life, your ability to function, to look after yourself, to look after others, to work, to communicate, to, you know, live a healthy life.

So it's a trajectory. 

and we do know, we do know that one of the indicators, and there's, there's so much work and Mary Francis, Strobey and Schutz, and all the, the other grief greats around the world are all working on developing an understanding of prolonged grief disorder.

So there's a huge recognition. of more work to be done to understand it. From Mary Frances's point of view, there's different brain structures that have an effect on and PGD. Um, we know from the work that, um, Strobey has done on rumination that a key indicator of prolonged grief disorder can be this mind less rumination where just this constant, and Mary Frances talks about this in the grieving brain quite a bit as well.

Just this repetitive reliving of the experience, unable to reframe. And at those stages. You know, definitely some form of psychotherapy and 

CBT, uh, has definitely been proven to be a helpful way of cognitive restructuring for Prolonged Grief Disorder. And also something as simple as mindful rumination.

And I think we're going to do an entire episode on rumination as well, aren't we, at some stage, Trudy?

so Prolonged Grief Disorder, it is very real. And, again, so much more work being put into it to understand it, but the simple truth is it's real and it's very much, yeah, it can become an illness. Grief is not an illness, it's healthy, but it can become an illness, a diagnosable illness as well.

Trudi, what do you want to say about prolonged grief disorder? 

 Yeah. I've,

we

got very mixed feelings about it because

whilst the concept of it is absolutely sound and it is important to be able to create recognition for people who are struggling with intense dyslexia. Deep grief, a significant amount of time after the bereavement, the way that the way that the framework has been created and that tiny, tiny timeframe that they've put on it, I have, I've got real trouble with that.

You know, if a mum loses their child and they are still deeply, deeply grieving three years afterwards. Some would argue that that is appropriate. So, I think for me, it is the time frame element that I struggle with. But 

 if we set aside the fact that the DSM had to put a timeframe on it and just talk about the broad principles of it, then, you know, it is a really important thing to acknowledge that some people are so significantly impacted by a death.

Yeah.

often this will be kind of tangled up with traumatic loss as well. are so significantly impacted that they are absolutely debilitated. very long time afterwards, whether that is because they are consumed with it or whether they are consumed with every effort not to think about it. That is,

Oh, well,

disorder, or some people will call that complicated grief. 

So a huge amount of research is currently being done and has been done looking at this very, very subject. And I think that in the next few years, we are going to see huge strides in understanding when it comes to prolonged or complicated grief. But what we know so far. is that there are certainly risk factors that may well predispose somebody to go on to developing prolonged or complicated grief after a loss. So this will be things like, if we think

Um,

very supportive or doesn't really acknowledge grief.

So these kind of interpersonal factors may well

Okay.

somebody to, to have the risk of developing prolonged or complicated grief. Also, Obviously, as we've spoken about, if it's a traumatic loss, if it is sudden, shocking, violent, something that was witnessed, trauma of that may well result in somebody going on to develop complicated, prolonged grief.

And certainly this has been my experience supporting clients on the traumatic bereavement team. Many of

Um, Um, Uh, Uh, Um, Uh, Um,

they're already in a low resource state. Perhaps they have got serious issues themselves. They've got poor physical health. They've got mental health problems. They perhaps don't have levels of resilience. They don't cope well with shocking changes

Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um,

or there's only, you know, one thing there, like having a couple of glasses of wine at night, if somebody is experiencing a lot of post bereavement distress, and they don't have. a toolkit of coping strategies and they don't have a support system around them, then these are other risk factors for them developing prolonged or complicated grief.





Okay. I think that is it.

Yeah, no, there's something else I want to say.

Okay.

I think this has been a really valuable episode. I hope it has sounded valuable as you're listening to it. I want to add as a caveat is And this is the case whenever we're talking about anything to do with grief theory. These are descriptions, not prescriptions. We hopefully already know as counsellors, as therapists, that we are not diagnosticians. It's really useful to have this information and it may feel appropriate to share with the person that you're supporting a little bit of an understanding. We know that psychoeducation is an important part of our work as supporters.

at the same time, and I'm just reflecting specifically on prolonged and complicated grief that we've just looked at, at the same time, also isn't our place to diagnose people to impose things upon them. offer things to people and say, you know, sometimes when people suffer this kind of loss, this is the impact.

Perhaps they can certainly do that and it's definitely important that we understand it, but we also do want to, to, to be cautious, and make sure that it doesn't sound like we're telling somebody that they have got this kind of grief.

Yeah, no, I agree. I agree very much 

and I'm going to add about historic grief. You know, we spoke about sometimes our grief gets activated. In a

Mm

way, and it's important to acknowledge that that could happen for us as counsellors and therapists too. we may find our own griefs, particularly historic griefs, we may find those being activated. So

hmm. Mm

supporting somebody who is grieving, you become aware that left their story and you're in your own grief. That

hmm. Mm hmm.

Take it to supervision. Be aware of it. You may well need support with that as much as you are supporting your client.

  📍 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 we're going to be looking at the neurodivergent experience of grief because for the approximately 20 percent of the population that are autistic, have ADHD, any other form of neurodivergence, their experience of grief is going to be quite different from a neurotypical experience of grief and the challenges that come up for them are going to be different.

So as supporters, it's really important that we understand. Where the difference is and what they will need from us when it comes to support.