A Child Therapist shares five Truths about How Grief Counseling Helps Kids.
We enjoy a lot of blue skies in San Diego. Our weather gets into patterns of sunny and 75 for weeks at a time. It becomes predictable.
The high and low beach tides also follow patterns. I remember when one of my children was about three years old and we visited the beach. It was sunny, and the tide was low. I walked out to where the water laps onto the sand.
Holding my son’s hand, I turned my back for a moment to the Pacific. While nothing bad happened, a wave knocked him off his feet and momentarily out of my hand. I quickly grabbed him and he was fine. The ocean is unpredictable, and so is the force of the waves.
Waves of Grief are Unpredictable.
I know if you’re searching for grief counseling for children or yourself, your family is not fine. You’re experiencing something you didn’t predict, that has swept over your entire family. Now the waves keep coming.
You have a handful of names of therapists recommended by your friends. You’re not sure if any of those therapists on your list help with grief, or work with children. You’re not even sure if or how grief counseling would help your kids. Everything feels out of control, and it has for months.
Truths about child therapy make it helpful and predictable.
Some factors in therapy are common. They’re common because, over time, these factors have demonstrated helpfulness. While it is beyond the scope of this blog to go into detail about all these common factors, one of the most important ones is the therapeutic alliance. It's the relationship between the client and therapist. In this case between your child and the grief counselor.
1. One of the most helpful and healing aspects of Therapy is the relationship.
If you find a therapist that connects well with your child, that is the most healing part. A therapist is not a relationship to replace you, or other family and friends. It’s an addition to the many other supports in your child’s life. It's an extra relationship during this difficult time to help buffer the stress.
Kids will express things in Child Therapy or grief counseling they aren’t ready or able to talk about with a parent or other family member. Years ago I worked with a child who had the mistaken belief they were the cause of their parent’s death. The child wouldn’t tell the surviving parent for fear that the parent would leave them too. The child was not the cause of the death, and by opening up in therapy, found relief from this burden.
2. A Child Therapy Specialist can teach coping skills and practice them with your child
One of the common requests therapists receive from parents is helping a child deal with big emotions and cope better. No time is this more needed than when a family is experiencing a death or other major loss.
If your child is grieving, you may be struggling, understandably to be fully present all the time, helping them with their emotions. This is especially true for children who tend to hold all their emotions inside. They need to be able to identify what they feel and know what to do with that feeling. To learn it’s okay to feel the way they do. It’s okay to feel anger after someone dies or to feel afraid about the future.
3. In Grief Counseling your child can process aspects of their loss through art and play
It is developmentally appropriate for children to process what is happening in their lives through play and art creation. Some things, like death, are really difficult for adults to talk about. You can imagine the difficulty for kids. During stressful family times, it’s easy for children to get the impression they need to be grown up, or even take on adult roles. Therapy can remind kids how necessary it is for them to finish the important role of being a child for now.
4. A Child Therapist can provide a consistent, predictable calm space
It may sound strange, but meeting weekly, in therapy, with the same person can provide an element of predictability. Your child will know that even though life is unpredictable right now, they have an outlet. A calm space to share whatever feelings or thoughts they’re experiencing.
5. Grief Counseling can restore hope
During a loss, it can be difficult to stay connected with a hopeful future. Hope is harder to hold on to if a death was unexpected or traumatic. Adult and child family members alike may experience acute stress symptoms following the death.
When those symptoms linger over a month or get worse over time, the adult or child is experiencing post-traumatic stress. Part of post-traumatic stress is a sense the future is not good and the world is a dangerous place.
Child therapists trained in grief, loss, and trauma can assess symptoms, and help ease them. They can restore hope that the future does hold good things.