Bad Grief, Charlie Brown
(as opposed to Good Grief that Lucy talked about to Charlie)
By Suzanne Carter, M.A., L.P.C.
My teen aged son and I were watching the news following the hostage taking and subsequent shooting death at Platte Canyon High School a few years ago. We heard a so-called expert on Grief suggest that the parents of grief –stricken students from Platte Canyon, not allow their teens to be immersed in their emotion.
As a Child and family therapist with a specialty in grief for children, families and adults, my “ears” went straight up; my son’s did as well. Truly, when a child, teen or adult faces any type of loss, we are, in fact, immersed in our emotions. One definition of Grief is, “The conflicting mass of human emotions that naturally follows any type of loss”. The bigger or more intense the loss, the more overwhelmed one will feel from this resulting mass of emotions. To say that the parents should not allow their children to be immersed in their emotions is like suggesting to parents that they should try to keep their children from getting wet while swimming. The fact is, it is natural to have these feelings and the only way to correctly deal with them is by having someone be present to them and to validate them. Though, this seems like an easy task, it is rarely practiced in this western society. We deal with grief and these emotions by stuffing them. A child learns to deal with grief very early in life by not dealing with it. Thus, when these children who have stuffed their emotions from day one in their lives grow up, they teach their children to do the same. The effect of stuffing ones emotions is this: One can only avoid dealing with their emotions by dis-connecting from themselves. Thus, there are millions of people walking around not connected to their feelings or to themselves. The consequences of this are monumental.
If we are not connected to ourselves, we make decisions based on what everyone outside of is telling us. We do not know how we feel or what we think and we become dis-connected from our own sense of right and wrong.
I would suggest that the correct way to help our children deal with grief is to listen and validate their thoughts, feelings and fears around what happened. The best way to do this is to be willing to deal with our own feelings first. If we have not dealt with our own feelings as adults, the only thing we want to do around another’s feelings is to get that person to stop feeling. The best way we do this is by intellectualizing or saying something that gets the person out of their feelings and into their heads. An example of this would be when a teen comes home from this traumatizing incident and tells their parent how scared they were. Typically, the parent might say: “Well you were safe and there were plenty of police around and the protocol your school followed helped you know what to do”. Actually, this response, though sounding good actually causes the child to not want to continue talking. The best response would be: “I bet you were scared. I would be scared too.” This encourages the child to continue. The parent could add: “What did you do when you were feeling that scared?”
In summary, our human lives our filled with loss. The healthy response to loss is Grief or that conflicting mass of human emotions that follows the experience of loss. If we are around people who can tolerate and validate our feelings, we experience a connection with them and we realize we are not alone. We can heal what we are willing to feel. The healing that results then makes us stronger to reach out in life in ways that we would not have done before the loss. If we stay connected to ourselves, we grow stronger and become more able to deal with future and bigger loss and we are able to be present to others when they face loss.