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jenny lucas Online
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- Posts: 9648
- Joined: Mon Oct 07, 2013 5:39 pm
Wed Nov 18, 2015 10:46 am
Hi, when I was widowed, I had bereavement counselling from a counsellor provided (completely free) from the hospice who had cared for my husband in end stage cancer.
She came to my house once a week. I can remember saying to her, 'I don't know what to say to you'.....and then I didn't stop talking for an hour!
I did like her, but I noticed two things - firstly, she wasn't just for counselling widows and widowers. So if I'd lost a parent, or even (God prevent), a child, she would have been the one they'd sent. I'm not sure about this, as who it is we lose affects immensely how and why we mourn.
The second thing I noticed was that it was always 'one way' - it was HER being the 'counsellor' the 'professional' (though she was very friendly.) I can recall once asking her what her own experience of bereavement had been, and she got very 'cagey', and wouldn't really answer beyond saying something like 'well, I do know what bereavement feels like', which told me that she wasn't going to be reciprocal' about this. She was going to stay 'separate' from all of this.
Now, that is, fundamentally, my issue with counselling as a whole. It's controversial, I know, because the 'accepted argument' about counsellors is that they DO stay 'out of it' personally. They are not 'involved' they are 'professional' they are 'distant'. They go home and get on with their own lives. They are not 'part of it' with their counselless.
Speaking entirely personally, I don't like that. I come from the 'no man is an island' corner, and in my book, as humans we ALL 'share each other's situation'.
I, speaking entirely personally, do NOT like 'experts' or 'professionals' making me the subject of their 'professional interest', as if I were a thing to be experiemented on in a lab, etc etc.
That said, the counselling definitely helped, and if nothing else, gave me a kind of pathway of time across a nightmare six weeks, and sort of put some kind of 'time line' on my grief during that first hellish year.
What I did find, and which, personally, I prefer, limited and 'flawed' though it is, is the concept of 'peer group counselling' where everyone is an equal with each other and there are no 'experts' just someone who is further down the path than someone else. (Hey, just like a peer-to-peer forum like here!).
For that reason I found several bereavement forums, including one on Macmillan cancer, but the one I went for in the end was Way Up, which is Widowed and Young for the over 50s. They 'jarred' horribly at first, as it was for those widowed who were much further on and intent on developing a new single-handed social life, but there was a section for 'newly widowed' where tears flowed all the time across the Internet, and I found that very comforting, and very helpful. We were all united in our grief, in our utter horror at what had happened to us, destroyed our lives and so on, and that made it very, very therapeutic.
If you do have 'formal counselling' and don't like their questions, then terminate the session, tell them you don't wish to answer, or to mind their own business!
I do rather agree with you that I wouldn't like things doing down about me that were 'on the record' so to speak. The hospice counsellor took NO notes whatsoever, and we just chatted over coffee. She did give me quite a lot of useful 'tips' and 'insights' (such as 'grief is TIRING, it's like a heavy, heavy chain we drag along behind us, day after day', which struck me as very, very true.)
I also read several books on bereavement, including an excellent one I can't quite remember the name of by a lady called I think Elizabeth something. I'll see if I can either find it or find her name. It was very moving, and very 'honest' and helped me a lot. I cried all the way through reading it, and it helped me keep going forward at a time when I only wanted to go back, back, back into 'the happy past'.
