Two reasons why your child may need to go for grief counselling after a family bereavement
Posted on: 6 October 2020
If a member of your family has died, you should book a few grief counselling sessions for your child. Read on if you'd like to know why.
Your child might find it easier to talk about their grief with someone outside of their family
Your child may have questions or fears relating to the family member's death, which they might not feel comfortable talking to you about if they can clearly see that you are grieving. If this is the case, they may not want to make you more upset by asking you, for example, why their relative died, whether they went to heaven after their death or whether they were in pain when they died. If you are worried that your child is repressing their confusion or concerns about this death, in order to spare your feelings, and you're too grief-stricken to handle this, then sending them for grief counselling could be the solution.
The counsellor will give them full permission to ask any questions they want about their relative's death and will offer simple, gentle and child-friendly answers that will satisfy your child's curiosity and alleviate their concerns, without making them upset or causing further confusion. Because they are distant from the situation, the counsellor will be able to do this in a calm, kind and matter-of-fact way that you may not be able to; this is important, as your child will be more likely to accept these answers and not get upset by them if they are stated in an unemotional manner.
In short, having grief counselling should prevent your child from fixating on and becoming increasingly distressed by these ideas and should ensure that, in addition to suffering as a result of their grief, they don't also have to feel (irrationally) guilty about burdening you with their thoughts about this event.
The counsellor can offer your child healthy, age-appropriate methods of expressing their grief
Children can find it much harder to grieve than adults, as they don't always have the vocabulary or emotional maturity to express or process the difficult emotions that grief can stir up. Their repressed sadness may lead to them acting out (by, for example, destroying their belongings, starting arguments with their friends, refusing to go to school, etc.).
If you suspect that your child is having trouble expressing their sadness about this bereavement, you should have them speak to a grief counsellor. This counsellor could guide your child through the grieving process, by providing them with lots of healthy, age-appropriate ways to process their emotions. They may, for example, encourage them to make drawings or paintings that express how they feel or to use the toys to act out the thoughts or worries that this bereavement has generated. This should then ensure that he or she does not feel the need to do things like get into trouble at school or lash out at their friends in order to express their emotions.
If you need help with grief counselling, start by reaching out to local counsellors.
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