Investments in Helping
We help with our hearts. While we bring expertise to our encounters with those whom we work, it is in our relationships that the most good is done.
Sometimes we find ourselves drawn as if hypnotized toward the dark side of life as reflected in the lives of those whom we would help. Our attraction to our work sometimes leaves us questioning whether we are voyeurs. We get "hooked" by stories of violence, twisted sexuality, or destruction. Vicariously experiencing that which both draws and repels us, we are permitted to see the forbidden through our clients’ eyes.
We are transfixed by misfortune like deer in the headlights of life.
Whatever the origin, we identify with the suffering of those we help. Our moral compulsion to mitigate the pain of those we help gains energy from our own humanness, our own vulnerability.
We grapple with the forces of despair. In so doing, we take on risks. We know we are likely to incur damage to our spirits by stepping into the arena of human suffering. But we do so in part because we sense of great prize for ourselves and for all others. If we can succeed in dealing effectively with human trauma, we can only do so by growing at the very points at which we are most limited. Our ability to do sustained and effective work with other human beings depends upon our ability to integrate and balance the light of compassion and empathy with the darkness in our lives.
When we are underresponsive, we dissociate ourselves from the speaker, objectifying and distancing ourselves from the other, and we may experience some or all of the following:
Our feeling response becomes numb, and we lack the emotionally normally expected in such a situation.
We deny and discount the reality and validity of our clients’ experiences.
We minimize the seriousness of our clients’ situations, in our own mind and often out loud.
We avoid thinking about our clients or their needs, often allowing ourselves to become distracted by our own thoughts and fantasies while they are speaking.
We distort our clients’ reality in the way in which we perceive or interpret their circumstances or reactions.
We detach ourselves emotionally from our clients or their situations, withdrawing and intellectualizing.
We become overly "clinical," joke about them, or become cynical about their motives or adequacy.
This is helper shutdown. Caring professionals who are burning out sometimes become underresponsive after a long period of overresponsiveness. They lose their original motivation for helping and suffer a slow decline of effectiveness toward their clients and feelings of diminished professional self-worth.
From Kendall Johnson,
Trauma in the Lives of Children
The Normal Grief Emotions (Dr. James Fogarty)
The Numb and Stunned Reaction
Many bereaved children today also have experienced this strange phenomenon that grief therapists know as a numb and stunned reaction. Often children describe their numb and stunned reaction as not being able to remember their dead loved ones’ facial features, the sound of their voice, or the memories of activities they did together. Numb and stunned is a normal and common grief reaction, which offers a defensive and protective barrier, designed to allow children to gradually incorporate their normal grief emotions. Numb and stunned reactions protect bereaved children from being overwhelmed by all of their intense grief emotions related to the loss experience by offering children a gradual incorporation of the loss. Numb and stunned reactions also signal children that something unusual and significant has happened, and that they will need to make adjustments. Numb and stunned reactions are a way children "brace" themselves emotionally following a trauma.
Commotions
Commotion is behavior exhibited by bereaved children based on the combination of the excessive energy, attentional difficulties, tension, and fear that children display when experiencing grief reactions. Bereaved children exhibiting commotion often appear to resemble children with ADHD. Commotion tells others a child is mourning. Because of a lack of complete cognitive equipment children often cannot verbalize what’s inside. Commotion allows them to express grief through their behavior which gets the adults attention.
Children Attempt to Re-Create
The Purposes of Children’s "Attempts to Re-Create"
The obvious purpose of children’s "attempts to re-create" is that "attempts to re-create" help children realize the reality that their loved one is dead, because "attempts to re-create" are designed to fail. Children’s natural attempts to re-create their relationship with their dead loved one helps keep denial to a healthy minimum.
Anguish
Anguish is a very abstract and difficult word for children to understand. It’s "that empty feeling you have deep inside ever since the death of your loved one."
Parent Suggestion
Children need simple explanations that they feel anguish (the desperate feeling like something is missing and you cannot get it back) because the person who died is not replaceable and that person was very special. Anguish is connected to love.
Power-Based Catalysts of Magical Thoughts
1. Children active in destructive magical thought may believe that they have the power to be responsible for the loss.
I got sick and I touched Grandpa and then he got sick and died.
2. Children with magical thought may believe that they have the power to fix the loss.
If I have the power to kill him, I have the power to bring him back to life.
3. Children with magical thought may believe that they can magically eliminate grief and the process of mourning for themselves and others.
4. If I am perfectly good, my grief will go away.
The Five Tasks of Healthy Mourning
The four tasks of mourning from William Worden are listed below:
Task I: To accept the reality of the loss.
Task II: To work through to the pain of grief.
Task III: To adjust to the environment in which the deceased is missing.
Task IV: To withdraw emotional energy and reinvest it in another relationship. (Worden)
Task V: To convert the relationship with the deceased from one of presence to a relationship of memory.
(James Fogarty)
Disenfranchised Grief
Global Definition of Disenfranchised Grief
…the grief that persons experience when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported.
Three Types of Disenfranchised Grief
1. The relationship is not recognized. Examples include non-kin relationships such as "lovers, friends, neighbors, foster parents, colleagues, in-laws, stepparents and stepchildren, caregivers, counselors, co-workers, and roommates (for example, in nursing homes)…" Relationships that are not socially sanctioned, including "extramarital affairs, cohabitation and homosexual relationships.
2. The loss is not recognized, as the loss in not defined by society as significant. Kenneth Doka (1989) cites examples, which include abortion, pet loss, and psychological death (resulting from coma).
3. The griever is not recognized. A person may be socially defined as not able to grieve. Dr. Doka (1989) offers examples, such as the very young, the elderly, the mentally disturbed, and the mentally retarded.
