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A READER ASKS:
While I understand your need to support
parents who have lost their children, what do you do to help children who have
lost siblings or parents? Do they have trouble recognizing messages from the
other side, or precognitive dreams of loss and the guilt from having done
nothing to prevent? Kids tend to feel pretty helpless.
LEARNING FROM EACH OTHER
I am always amazed when parents tell me that
my work has helped support them. I deeply appreciate it, but feel compelled to
share with you that I am learning from them, not supporting them.If a medical
professional, simply by listening and trying to understand what a parent goes
through while grieving, results in support, this is an invaluable lesson in
itself, and contains the answer to your question. So often, as a physicians,
social workers, nurses, or family members, we feel that we have to have the
answer, have to supply the insight to help others.
So, with children, as with adults, it is
important to listen and learn. I have learned the hard way, in my efforts to be
a good husband, that often my wife does not want my advice, or need my high
powered brain to solve her problems. She only wants my time, my nodding head,
my hand to hold. However, there are some specific areas that while you are
listening, you should be particularly attentive to.
MAGICAL THINKING IT'S ALL MY FAULT
Adults and children, when confronted with
tragedy, tend to assign blame and fault through "magical thinking".
Often a child will be angry with an adult. Since they are very concrete thinkers,
they will say or think such things as "I hope you die", instead of
the more abstract thought "I am so angry with you".
Then, when someone they love does in fact die,
the child will often feel it is their own fault.
Many times these magical thoughts can be
dissipated simply by listening to them, and trying to understand them. When I
am counseling a parent whose child has died, I routinely explain to them that
parents often assign meaning to the death based on their own secret fears and
shames. I throw out a few common ones, "the baby died because I smoked
pot", or one of my own "my brother-in-law who died of complications
from drug and alcohol use really died because I was mean to him and failed give
him enough love." I often find this gives them permission to then share
their own guilty secrets. Frequently just saying the secret out loud exposes
how ridiculous it is, and it disappears.
I frequently use the same technique with
children. "I know a little girl who thought that because she was mad at
her mother, the airplane crashed", or "I know a boy about your age
who thought his dream that his mother died made it come true". "I
wonder if anything like that has ever happened to you.
I then drop the subject, and often, with
children, it will resurface when you least expect it, while waiting in line at
the grocery store, or at a party with all your friends around. Seize the moment
and take the time to complete the conversation.
JEALOUS OF THE DEAD
Children frequently are jealous of their dying
sibling, and will often say to me "I wish I had leukemia" or a brain
tumor. They frequently are resentful of the time a parent will spend attempting
to spiritually communicate with a sibling who has died. It often implies that
they, the surviving child, are somehow not good enough. Spiritual visions
without a family belief system often confuse the issue.
TIME, NOT WORDS, HEALS
This can be accentuated when dealing with
premonitions of death or shared dying experiences.
For example, a mother wrote to me of her child
who accidentally drowned in the bath tub, while the mother was out of the room
for a few minutes. She called into the bathroom to inquire about the child (who
drowned), and an older child watching the bath said "oh, she's getting up
out of the tub now".
When the mother went into the bathroom, the
child had in fact drowned.The older girl said that she saw her sister
"standing up in the tub, and being taken into the ceiling by a lady."
This vision only increased the guilt for
mother and surviving child.
No platitudes or wonderful spiritual insights
can help such a situation. As professionals, or family members, it is far more
important to signal that you have not assigned blame. This best occurs with
expressions of love, and the gift of your time.
NO POP TOP TO HEALING
Often, I become filled with zeal and I want
others to understand how healing and wonderful visions are. Rarely does such an
approach work.
My idea of supporting children dealing with such
issues is to return them to normal life as soon as possible, and spend time
with them. Take them to the park, play a game of catch, build a treehouse with
them, read them a book about a child whose parents or sibling died.
And be ready to listen.