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.