Takeaways & Reflections from Episodes 18 &19: Children Grieving & Grieving Children
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
The child-griever club is not a very big club, and yet, big enough. 5% of children in the United States have lost one or both parents by age 15.
This episode is a reflection of a shared experience with griever, Lindsay, from episode 18. She lost a parent, her mother, at 13 months old. If you haven’t listened to her episode, and episode 19 with Reena, check those out then come back to this one.
Aside from talking about child grief, and what you can do to support a grieving child you know (and more), I also share some nuggets of wisdom Reena shared from her episode, as well as my reflections around one of the most minimized losses – miscarriage.
Through loss, we learn so much about ourselves. We also have an opportunity to share, from experience, where we’ve struggled and where we’ve triumphed through grief.
Grief unites us all, regardless of the loss you’ve endured. And many of us, like Lindsay and myself, are faced later in life with a choice. We can either resist that which, literally, shaped who we’d become (due to childhood grief), or lean into it and create something good from it.
If you know a child griever in your life, here are six tips for offering support to a grieving child mentioned in this episode:
- Listen with your heart, not your head. Allow the child to express all emotions without judgment, criticism, or analysis.
- Recognize that grief is emotional, not intellectual. Avoid asking “What’s wrong?” Similarly to adults, children often respond with “Nothing.”
- You are the adult – go first. Tell the truth about your own grief. Additionally, don’t try to compare your loss to theirs.
- Remember that each child is unique and each has a unique relationship to the loss event.
- Be patient. Don’t force them to talk.
- Never say “Don’t feel sad, or “Don’t feel scared.” Sadness and fear are normal feelings following loss of any kind.
Resources & References:
- 4-Week Helping Children with Loss Program
- The Body Keeps the Score, a book by Bessel van der Kolk M.D.
- Episodes 18 and 19
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Today is Episode 20. As I said, takeaways and reflections from episodes 18 was with Lindsay joy Taylor and 19 was with Rena Friedman. But I cannot even get my numbers straight today. So yes, this is Episode 20. And I’m titling it, children grieving and grieving children. So the episode with Lindsay, I just wanted to dig in a little bit more, she had the loss of her mother, when she was 13 months old, I believe her mother was murdered. And we dug a little bit into childhood grief in her experience, because that’s the whole idea behind this podcast is to give the griever the platform to share their story, I just wanted to dig a little deeper into childhood grief. And that’s an experience that Lindsay and I both share. If you’ve never listened before my father passed away when I was eight have cancer, and he had been sick for about two years.
So I watched his decline, which was really difficult. So Lindsay, and I share that commonality, although our grieving experiences and our losses are vastly different. It is the shared child loss that we both can connect to. And I want to speak a little bit on that on how losses are inevitable, and the dangers of comparison of losses.
How Losses are Inevitable
So speaking just a little bit about losses in general, which are inevitable and cannot be avoided. And as much as we love our children, we cannot wrap a shield around them and protect them from sad, painful or negative feelings. So the next best thing for is for us to learn how to help them when events and circumstances occur, that create the normal and natural emotions of grief, grief or loss. And establishing a foundation for dealing effectively with loss can be one of the greatest gifts you can give a child and for me growing up and for my loss experience there was no therapy, there was no communication about what had occurred about the death of my dad, it was like, Yes, he died. He’s being buried. And I grew up having this idea or thought that when you die, you just go on the ground and, and that’s it. I really didn’t have an eye you know, and I created these visions in my mind of and through the years actually. I wonder what he looks like now like these are the thoughts that went through my mind. And it’s really difficult because you don’t know how to process those feelings. You weren’t given the tools and the space to actually share.
Now Lindsay’s experience was a little bit different in the fact that it was her mom for me it was my dad and her dad had actually remarried soon after, as my mom into that relationship wasn’t the greatest for her. And so there wasn’t that safe space, as she shared, and the whole family’s still, you know that there’s the family dynamic too, right? Because, like for me, too, there was other people in the household. We all have our different grieving experiences and how we process and the age difference as well. My brother was five years older. Lindsay was the youngest as well, yes, she was the youngest as well. So, and her sister, I think, was five years older than her as well. Maybe even a little bit older than that. Please go listen to that episode, Episode 18 with Lindsay, that it’s an excellent episode, as they all are, because these are people’s grieving stories. We all have a story, right?
So anyway, back to the inevitability of loss, and the importance of a child to be supported through that to have the option and ability to communicate. And for Lindsay, that happened a little bit later for her. She did speak about play therapy, which I absolutely loved that that was something that was offered to her, someone in her, I think it was in her school teacher or some faculty really saw something. And she really couldn’t pinpoint either what it was that led her to be in that play therapy. But it made an impression on her to the point that she still remembers that today. And so it really is important that we allow our children the ability to communicate what they’re feeling, even if it makes you uncomfortable right? I remember having a conversation not a couple years ago, actually, no, it was after I have been certified in grief recovery, I ran into someone who I’ve known for quite a few years. And they had a lot of loss in their life. And he was speaking about his daughter and how, you know, they had added another like her grandpa had passed away and the daughter of the grandpa so her mom, anytime that daughter would bring up the Grandpa, the mom would get upset, she didn’t want to talk about it, she was so hurt in her own heart space. Right, she was still she was grieving herself. And she any mention of her father upset her. And so if the child wasn’t given the space to communicate about her loss, and what she learned in that was that we don’t talk about our losses. And as much as as painful as they are, we stuff them down. That’s what we’re taught. That’s what many of us are taught.
We Should Never Compare Losses
And, unfortunately, and so it’s our discomfort around loss in our lives. This is why that generational learning gets passed down. Because we are so uncomfortable with what we’re feeling. We don’t know how to process what we’re feeling as the adults, the children therefore learn by example, right? And so this is why I’m so passionate about grief recovery. It’s why I’m very passionate about the helping children with Loss Program. I’ll get more into that later. But these are skills and lessons that we carry with us for the rest of our lives. And what lesson do we want to pass on to our children? Along with those lessons, it’s important to that we recognize that all loss is individual and unique because every relationship is individual and unique all loss is experienced at 100% even though the level of intensity is not the same for every loss and each loss can have different emotional intensity for each person.
This is why it is essential to understand that we can never, we never compare losses, neither our own nor those of our children, and never between siblings or friends they’re each individual and unique in will have their own responses to loss. And it can be tough because we need to remember that never to compare losses or each other’s responses to those losses because comparison creates a false hierarchy of loss. For example, when the child whose parents have divorced is compared with the child who had one or both parents die, he is often made to feel that he shouldn’t feel bad or sad because his parents are still alive. Likewise, we shouldn’t compare our children’s responses to lock to a loss. For example, we would not say something like, I don’t know why you’re so upset about this move, your sister is looking forward to it and excited to get there. Now that’s the perfect example of comparing losses. The fact is that the that the child’s heart and life have been massively disrupted by that divorce or the move in their feelings about that loss or as real and valid as any other child’s feelings about any loss. So again, just as we should not compare as adults to each other as losses. We do not want to compare our children’s, to their siblings, to their friends, and to our own because every relationship is unique and individual. Children are like sponges, they watch and listen to us and they hear things we might not even say and they begin to establish those as ways they should handle grief. Think of it about what you’re teaching your children about how to grieve and if you’re listening to this, and you’re feeling I’m like, Oh my gosh, I’m really screwing this up. I’m doing this wrong, my child has no idea. I have no idea how to support them.
Concrete Tips to Help you Navigate your Child Through their Loss
Allow your child to express all emotions without judgment, criticism or analysis.
Recognize that grief is emotional, not intellectual, avoid the trap of asking your child what is wrong? because he or she will automatically say nothing. Isn’t that what we adults do? right? We say I’m fine, you are the adult.
Go first tell the truth about your own grief. Don’t be afraid to say, I remember feeling sad, when but don’t try to compare your loss.
Remember that each of your children is unique. And each has a unique relationship to the loss event.
Be patient do not force them to talk.
Never say don’t feel sad, or don’t feel scared. Sadness and fear are normal feelings following loss of any kind.
The Traumatic Experience of a Child
But I also want to share to how you know there’s grief. And then there’s also trauma and trauma agreement experience can be traumatic. So losing my father, that was a traumatic experience. Death is very finite, it’s when someone dies. That’s it. It’s done, right? There’s no going back. And that can feel very traumatic for a child, even if they have watched their loved ones suffer. And they knew what’s coming. I’m not really sure if I knew what was coming. But I remember hearing the words dad died, and it hitting me at the moment. Children have no choice who their parents are. And this I’m going to read this little excerpt from there’s a book called The body keeps the score, brain, mind and body in the healing of trauma by Bessel Vander Kolk, it is not an easy read. It is a book about trauma and how trauma is held in the body. And it’s mostly about child sexual abuse, and having been abused, sexually abused as a child. This book has not been easy for me to read, I’m actually still working through it like I have to read a little bit at a time. But I want to read this little excerpt which can apply to you know, trauma in general too or just grief in general. Children have no choice who their parents are, nor they can, can they understand that parents may simply be too depressed, enraged, or spaced out to be there for them, or that their parents behavior may have little to do with them.
Children have no choice but to organize themselves to survive within the families they have. Unlike adults, they have no other authorities to turn to for help. Their parents are the authorities, they cannot rent an apartment or move in with someone else, their very survival hinges on their caregivers. And this is the weight we carry as parents because when my father passed away, my survival hinged on my mother emotional, physical, everything, you know, an eight years old, that’s a very formative, I mean, your brain still developing and much of what you’ve learned about grief is actually pretty well set in almost getting to age 12, actually, but much of what we learn 75% of what we learn about grief is actually instilled in us by that age. And so it’s imperative that those early years, we set the stage and foundation for how to process grief. Now, I mentioned earlier that my mom in previous podcast episodes, I’m not sure if I did in this one, but my mom didn’t really know how to process her own grief. So she wasn’t emotionally available to help me process mine. And that created a dissociation because not only to my mother, it was like to myself, like I, you know, I wasn’t connected with what was going on in my body, like how I was feeling. And all of those emotions were like, stagnant were stuck in there.
And I feel like for Lindsay too like we shared that common bond, it does stay in your body, the conversation actually led to that how trauma stays in the body and how it can show up many years later, we can have an experience at age 8,9,10. And it may not show up again in our lives until we’re 12,16,24 doesn’t matter. It’s individual for everyone. But that’s the fascinating thing for me about trauma and what I’ve been learning. But again, we don’t have a choice who our parents are, and and no one helps facilitate processing that trauma. It does stick with us in some way some fashion somehow and shows up in our other relationships as we get older. And there’s that other piece of the family dynamics that everyone has their own way, right? And some family members may be more vocal, others may be more private. Again, that has a lot to do with what we’re taught, like how to process grief.
Having Kids as a Healing Tool
For me it was I was very private about what was going on in my own inner world, Lindsay expressed how she’s more vocal. And perhaps it was part of that play therapy. And you know, earlier therapy that she experienced in her college years to understand how important it was to talk about what she was experiencing. It was interesting, too, that our conversation led into having kids as a healing tool. I didn’t expect that to come up. But I was very glad it did. Because I think it’s easy for some of us to when we’re have not processed our own grief to fill that void, especially if we did not receive love. If we did not have the emotional connection to our own parent, there’s this we desire love, right? We desire affection, and connection is that piece that is a human need. And so if we didn’t experience that growing up, we will try to find it, we will try to find ways to create that for ourselves, whether it’s a sterb short term energy relieving behaviors, alcohol, drugs, things that make us feel good for a time, we will resort to those things, or relationships, we can do that with relationships as well, relationships can be a sterb, always needing to have somebody or this idea that someone else completes you.
And so when we’re thinking about having children, there’s different philosophies around that as well. And for me, growing up, I didn’t want kids into my 20s and it’s probably shaped by my experiences in childhood. And I think too, it’s I didn’t know, or feel like I would be good enough, to be honest, you know, and that plays into on, you know, self worth issues and all of that. But then there’s the pendulum can swing the other way to where we seek that out, we seek having children to fill that need for us. So it can go both ways. And so it was an interesting conversation. And Lindsey shared how she is open to children, but that it’ll happen when it’s ready when it’s organically going to happen. But she understands she has a self-awareness, I think that’s the biggest piece here is the self- awareness to feel like you have laid a foundation to be the best parent that you can be. And I think that’s what it comes down to the self awareness around it. And I definitely didn’t have any of that in my early 20s. I maybe I did, I had the self awareness that Nope, I’m not going to be a good parent. Like I had told myself that also too, like I was too busy living the life and a life of I was too busy getting my throne my life off the tracks and put it that way i was really preoccupied with myself and the disaster of my life I was creating. So yeah, children were not even were the farthest thing from my mind. But you know, once I found somebody in my life who brought out the best in me, who helped me create a foundation who was an integral part in helping me find my faith again, that foundation was laid, and I felt more confident in who I was. And in the relationship I was in feel like I would approach parenthood as a team effort and that I had support right? And I think that’s huge too.
Helping Children with Loss Program
Circling back to what this whole episode with Lindsay was about, you know, grieving children. I just want to share a little bit about the helping children with loss program. It is a four week online group program. It is for parents, caregivers, school staff, clergy, daycare providers, headstart centers, homeless shelters, even like the staff of homeless shelters, military, family groups, veteran groups, etc. It is for anybody who is a leader of child organization who have children in their care, adoptive families, foster families, you name it, like if you are taking care of children in any capacity this program is for you. It is to help you have the tools and knowledge of helping children process their feelings around loss of any kind. And let me just add to that trauma for a child can be as simple as their teddy bear ended up in the dumpster, or you took it away or their baby blanket was taken away. Or you know, it seems so simple to us as an adult but to a child, it can feel traumatic, and that stays in our bodies. Like I said, that’s where communication is huge. And children understand far more than we give them credit for and I think they’re underestimated. Children are greatly underestimated in society.
So I just wanted to share a little bit about that program that it is online. It is four weeks in it, it arms you with the tools to feel confident of knowing what to say, what to do. When you are confronted with a child who is feeling loss, reach out to me, I’m gonna put the link in the show notes as well, for more information. It’s a great program. I’m passionate about it, just like with everything related to grief recovery, and reach out if you have any questions, please. And my question to you too, would be when you hear me talking about this stuff, and the potential of what you could learn in this program. My question is, does it feel expansive, because we don’t know what we don’t know. And knowledge comes from learning and experience. And so if you don’t know, there’s a way to learn, and it’s through this program. So just going to throw that out there.
Multiple Miscarriage Experience and Words of Wisdom
Switching gears to Episode 19 with Rena, which was titled multiple miscarriage experience and words of wisdom. I just want to share a couple stats each year 24,000 babies are stillborn, according to an August 2020 CDC report. And I mean, I was learning a lot I did a little bit of research as I’m sharing with you for this episode. And when the baby dies in the womb prior to 20 weeks that is considered miscarriage. Also about one in 100 women have repeat miscarriage, according to the March of Dimes website. And also pregnancy hormones can remain in a female’s body one to two months after miscarriage. And in that episode, Rena shared a little bit of her experience about the hormones and how it’s like you, you’re supposed to have this child in your arms. And, you know, you feel the heart, you hear the heartbeat and you feel them moving inside. And that’s traumatic, it’s traumatic to the body. It is traumatic to a female’s psyche, it can be I’m not saying it is for everybody, but it can be. And we talked to about the environment in which a woman who goes through a miscarriage is placed in and she was sharing how, you know, you go into this office, and you’re supposed to, you know, she actually had to go in to complete the miscarriage. And, you know, she’s sitting in this office, and these women are, you know, they’re big bellies, and very happy, very pregnant. And that’s heart wrenching for a woman who’s facing the loss of her baby, also too she shared her own personal experience of the nurse who said, well, you’re the abort, and caught herself, caught herself before she you know, insinuated that she was there for an abortion.
You know, that is very hurtful and very harmful to someone who is there actually, because of miscarriage. But there has to be the sensitivity around and first of all, like, really verifying the information. But I think too, it becomes, I can’t imagine working in that environment where day in and day out, you are seeing women who are experiencing miscarriage and who are having abortions and how, how easy that mistake can happen. And here’s the thing, maybe that’s where change needs to happen as well, and how we create an environment that’s safe, that’s holding, holding space for a woman, regardless of what she’s there for, regardless of what she’s experiencing, to honor the presence of her spirit of her loss of what she’s going through. And I don’t know, I just I feel like you know, it’s a clinical type setting. It’s like how can we make that environment. It’s like when you go in for a massage, right? You go there to relax, you go there to feel good to lift your own spirit to care for yourself, you know, the lights are down low, there’s probably aromatics like something is you know, being diffused to, you know, aroma therapy is being used, they’re setting the mood to help you relax and feel comfortable. And I just think there has to be something that can be done for women who are going through either experience to make them feel supported, held and comforted because a loss is a loss.
And grief is grief actually got really kind of fired up at that point in her episode because I really do think there needs to be the sensitivity training around this and but again to I think it’s almost it can be easy too to become desensitized when you’re in that environment day in and day out. Well, it’s just another day you become desensitized. As to what is really occurring when you’re in that day in and day out, and to what does that do to their psyche? What does that do to, to their hearts as well, right? Because we all are human, and there can be this shame as well, in that grief, and it’s an incredibly vulnerable time, you know, if you don’t feel safe with who is there to support you, that leaves a lasting impression on your heart and in your body as well. We shifted gears then to talking about her grandparents she had, she had both sets of grandparents living well into their 90s, I believe. And it wasn’t until I’m not sure of the year, but in recent years, her paternal grandfather had passed away. And we got to talking about her surviving grandmother, and how I believe she was turning, I have 95, in my mind, but that might be incorrect well into her 90s. Anyway, still taking care of herself, well, up until recently had been taking care of herself. And we talked about the end of life experience, and in what she has learned from her grandmother. And in recent years, she sent this quote, and I wrote it down because it was just really good. One thing she’s learned is why spend your time on the people who are going to judge you? Spend your time on the people who love you. I can’t recall if that is wisdom from her grandmother, but all the same. It’s good wisdom, and it’s a truth. And I think it applied 50 years ago, it still applies today. And it’ll apply, apply 50 years from now.
Rena’s Beautiful Story of Being in Jerusalem
We also talked about charity, and she shared this beautiful story of being in Jerusalem. And there was this woman who just asked her for money, every time she passed her, and she would give her money every time she passed her. And I loved what she shared that her dad had taught her early on, and he told her, if God puts them in my path, then I need to help them. And I love that. Now, of course, you want to do that with all safety in mind, right? Like my husband has told me you ever see someone on the side of the road? And you’re alone? don’t you stop. You know, nowadays, everyone has a cell phone, and there should be no reason why they can’t get help. But that is my nature to want to help people. And so he had made it very clear. If you are alone, you do not stop. But when it comes to charity, I just love that story she shared. But anyway, it went She went on to add, though, that I want there was one point though where she was it was the day she was leaving Jerusalem. And she sees this woman again. And she’s sitting down, she’s sitting next sat next to her. And she listened to this woman talk. And she said she had this really crusty sweater, and obviously this woman and living on the streets, but she listened to everything this woman shared and gave her a hug, I encourage you to listen to that episode, because it’s a beautiful story of charity, and how I think sometimes charity is looked at like, it has to be this grand gesture or these big things or you know, given a lot of money. And sometimes it can be just our time and an embrace. And so I really love that story. And I also share a tip for offering a hug in that episode.
P.S. I hope I brought some information that is helpful. And if you have any questions about anything I shared today, don’t hesitate to reach out to me [email protected] you can find me on Instagram @theunleashedheart you can DM me there or my website through my website as well theunleashedheart.com I will put some information in the show notes for your quick reference. But until next time, thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing if you found it helpful, and remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life.