Supporting Someone Who is Grieving: How to do Nothing
We all know the common platitudes that we are learn, culturally, to offer people who are grieving. They’re in a better place. It’s time to move on with your life. They wouldn’t want you to feel bad. At least they’re no longer suffering. These aren’t terrible things to say, and are not problems in themselves, but they often come out of a problem that the listener is experiencing.
It’s hard to hear about grief.
Listening to someone who is grieving is a heavy weight to carry for a few reasons. Firstly, it often reminds us of our own losses, and for many people that can be extremely painful, particularly if we haven’t dealt with a loss to the extent that we have learned how to carry it. It also reminds us in some ways of our own mortality, which can be a very frightening experience. It can make us feel helpless – not really knowing how to help the person we love who is in such pain with their loss to somehow get through it. We can often listen to a person’s loss and be with them for a while, but after a period of time the discomfort of the various fears and painful feelings the experience elicits in us can become unbearable, and that is sometimes the moment that we offer a platitude. It is well-meaning, but it also sends an unintentional message of, “I’m done listening”, not because we don’t care, but because we wish on some level for our loved person to feel better so that we don’t have to keep facing our own pain and helplessness.
One of the things that grief therapists are trained to do is to manage all of our own internal experiences of pain and fear to be able to keep being with people who are experiencing loss for as long as it takes to integrate it (for more about the idea that you don’t have to get over loss see our blog post here). Many people who are grieving (depending on their cultural context) often report that their friends and loves ones are there for them for the first few weeks, but it becomes clear that they don’t want to keep hearing about the loss after that and they gradually lose people to speak to about it. There is no rushing grief, but it definitely helps to have people to speak with as it continues to come up during integration of the loss especially over the first couple of years.
So how do you support someone who is grieving? A core concept is learning to do nothing.
This may sound strange and counterintuitive. Doing nothing it is one of the hardest things to do because it means feeling all of their pain and fear alongside all of your own and learning how to just be with that fear and pain and helplessness without saying anything to try to make it better. One of the ways that we accomplish this in grief counseling is by holding onto the knowledge that the helpful act in being a good listener for someone who is in pain due to loss is in the companionship itself. Just being there for them to listen. It is precisely because it is such a hard thing to do that it is so needed by the bereaved individual. In other words, one of the things that is so difficult about working through grief for people is their experience of isolation in it after the first few weeks, so the helpful thing we are offering is for the person not to feel isolated in it. Courageous companionship. It’s like offering to come and sit with a person in a dark and scary space without knowing the way out and even though that will also scare us. It is a hard place to walk into, which is why so few people are willing to do it and why the person can feel so alone in that place, so having the courage to walk into it and sit alongside the person can be one of the most helpful things for them. Also, we can usually more easily get through a scary experience if we have someone who will simply be with us as we are in it. Continuing to have someone to speak to about grief is what helps a person to figure out how to get through the grieving experience. They primarily don’t need advice or help with their thinking, they just need someone to continue to speak with so they can gradually deal with all of their feelings and experiences rather than having to pack them away and get stuck by not dealing with them.
If you think about when you have a bad day at work or school, or a fight with a close friend, or some kind of distressing experience in your day, what you often wish for is someone to talk to about it. It’s not usually the case that you need advice or ideas about how to fix the issue, it’s just important for us as people to talk about our experience with a trusted person since simple giving voice to the experience helps us to make sense of it and get through it (talking releases our feelings, we find a way to make sense of what happened by telling the story about the event, we make meaning about it, and we then integrate the experience into our overall experience and move on from it with it having been integrated). Grief is more intense and complex and tends to last longer because it is so intense, impactful, and meaningful. People can seem stuck in it, but generally we trust that people will gradually figure out a way through over the first couple of years after a major loss.
As a species we have always dealt with loss so our brains generally know how to get through the experience. As a supportive listener it’s important to continue to make a choice to trust the person’s ability to work through grief over time even when we begin to feel distressed or doubtful.
But even as a listener, you don’t have to be the only one supporting your friend or loved one. If a person seems in danger with their level of distress after a bereavement, or they are continuing not to function after the first couple of months, or if it has been more than a year and they still seem stuck in the same place, then professional grief counseling can help. For more about our grief counseling program see here.
