What Gets in the Way of Supporting a Grieving Person?
By Carly Fleming, M.Ed. RP
Registered Psychotherapist
Grieving people often struggle to find the support they need.
Well-meaning friends and family sometimes miss the mark which can add additional emotional burden during an already difficult time. Friends and family of grieving people struggle to provide the support that their grieving person needs. They want to help but sometimes they don’t know how or why their efforts are not well-received.
Why is this so hard??? Let’s take a look at what’s happening under the surface.
Photo by Priscilla Dupreez on Unsplash
Our grief-phobic culture
The reality is that we live in a grief-phobic culture. Most of us have never been taught how to support a grieving person or to deal with our own grief. Death, grief and loss pulse under the surface of our daily lives but they rarely rise to the surface to receive the attention they need. Most of us were brought up in households that spoke about death in hushed tones, using euphemisms to describe death (“passed away”, “passed on”, “gone to a better place”). Or worse yet, maybe we were shielded from the reality of death by parents and community members who tried to shield us from pain.
How many people can identify with the family pet that “fell asleep and won’t wake up” or the teacher that “went on vacation” and never returned?
It is no one person’s fault that we have been so ill-prepared to deal with grief – it is the result of generations of cultural programming that seep into the way that most people navigate grief when faced with losses in their life.
It hurts
We are all aware that illness/accident/death could befall us or our loved ones at any time, but most of us would rather not think about this – it’s too painful. When we hear of the death of a community member, a friend of a friend or even someone quite close to us, our brains automatically take us to “what if this happens to me?”
We may not even be aware that this happens as it can occur totally subconsciously but us humans see the world through our own perspective and we are constantly relating the outside world to our inner reality and our own circumstances. So when we hear about the death of someone else, we can very quickly have an emotional reaction that feels uncomfortable or painful. And what do most people do when they feel discomfort or pain? They avoid, distract, minimize, evade.
The healthiest thing to do is to recognize the discomfort or emotional pain, pay attention to it and make space for it.
But this is hard, very hard. So we stick with what we know and we don’t go anywhere near the pain. What this means for the grieving person is that when they are in need of the most support and feeling the most vulnerable they often are met with avoidance, denial and evasion when they bring their grief to the outside world. It is rarely intentional but this can be deeply painful to grieving people.
The next time you hear of an accident, illness, or death of someone in your circle, pay attention to the emotions that come up for you. Instead of navigating away from them, get curious about them and see how you can give them some attention. With some practice, you’ll be able to better manage your reactions to uncomfortable emotions and be there for grieving people in a much more supportive way.
We don’t know what to say
This is a very real concern for those of us who want to be supportive to a grieving person but struggle with the “right” words or gestures. Unfortunately the uncertainty about what to say can lead to paralysis and we end up saying nothing or not enough. When someone we know is grieving, it’s natural to want to get it right. We care so much and we don’t want to make things more difficult. But the reality is that each and every grieving person will have different needs at different times. This makes it impossible to plan out the right thing to say. It also means that sometimes we won’t say the right thing. How it’s received is entirely in the hands of our grieving person and we can’t (and don’t want to) take this control away from them.
So we need to be ok with uncertainty. We have to be willing to experiment and change course when new information arrives. And we have to keep our need to be seen as helpful/caring out of the equation. This blog post won’t give you a list of helpful things to say - but instead I encourage you to say something, do something to acknowledge the grief, be curious about it, and invite your person to let you know (either directly or indirectly) what they need at that moment.
Grief is unique
Sometimes in grief the emotions are so stuck or so intense that it can be helpful to work with a mental health professional in order to work through the feelings. If this is the case for you or a loved one, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Learn more about Grief and Bereavement Counselling here.
When you’re ready, we can help.
Book a free 30 minute consultation and let’s talk about it.