298 Grief and Loss Across the Lifespan
the vital importance of the Winnicottian holding environment as a facilitator
of therapeutic grief work.
The clinician’s ability to bear witness to the bereaved’s pain is another
critical feature of intervention with individuals coping with loss. Again, this
requires that practitioners exude a calm, confident presence, implicitly shar-
ing the hope and expectation that the bereaved will feel better by telling (and
retelling) their painful stories of loss and grief. It also comforts and helps when
the clinician can help the bereaved discover ways to continue the relationship
with the deceased (or affirm ways already found).
When grief is submerged due to trauma or because the bereaved has
little support, other problems often appear. Although many individuals and
families who come to therapy present with problems that seem to have little
to do with bereavement, the source of these problems is often an unprocessed
loss. For example, a family presented to C. A. Walter due to the 16-year-old
son’s drug addiction; ultimately, this was traced to the death 10 years earlier
of his sibling. When practitioners bear witness to a family’s story of a child’s
death, they often see family members affected in different ways. Even disen-
franchised maturational losses can sometimes spur anxiety and/or depression
that may bring a client into a clinician’s office. In exploring the context for the
anxiety or mood disorder, unrecognized but deeply felt losses often emerge as
triggers for the current sense of discomfort.Grief and the Clinician: Cautions
You Cannot Bypass Grief
Nothing readers learn from this text will change the way they experience grief.
Many “experts” believe they can use knowledge to bypass painful phenomena
as though to be forewarned is to be sufficiently forearmed. Grief does not work
that way. Grief takes its time and feels as overwhelming for the expert as it
does for anyone else. Just as trauma counselors cannot serve as their own ther-
apists and need to be conscious about being “a healing counselor rather than
a wounded healer” (Rudick, 2012), clinicians of all disciplinary backgrounds
benefit from support (professional or personal) from someone not affected by
the loss and able to intervene as we have described in this text. We coarsen
life and demean our attachments whenever we expect grievers (ourselves
included) to deny their own mourning.Take Care of Yourself
We have included information for grievers about the importance of regular
exercise, exposure to sunlight, proper nutrition (attending particularly to
vitamins B6 and B12 and omega-3 and -6), relaxation and meditative prac-
tices, spiritual supports, and close friendships. These elements of self-care are
just as important for the caregiver, whether friend, family member or clinician
(Rudick, 2012; Vachon, 2015).