A guide for taking care of you and your clients
Grief can be such an overwhelming, powerful, healing, and illuminating experience. Grief is a normal part of our humanity, and during these times there is so much grief to feel and be witness to.
How can we be good stewards of grief? Within each client’s desire to seek therapeutic support is a grief story. A lot of these stories arise from untended wounds, and within systems of oppression these wounds are active and ongoing.
The best place to start caring for your client’s grief is to get curious about your own. What is your relationship to grief? How do you feel it, how do you tend to it? What is your experience of it, and has it changed over time? What did you learn about grief when you were younger, and how have those ideas changed? What stories still live inside of you about grief, perhaps how it “should” be, and how you “should” interact with it?
Grief is not a problem to be solved. Grief is a human expression of hurt and love, side by side. Most of the time, grief wants a voice, a presence- not to be fixed or shoved aside.
We can get curious about our client’s grief in the same way we explore our own. When we know, can be present with and tend to our own grief just as it is- we are able to sit with another’s without brushing it away, fixing, or bypassing (which does not foster healing).
The grief we are tasked to witness and hold is too much to bear in an ongoing way. We need to have ways to release it from our bodies. This involves deep tending of self and body, and a recognition that we are a part of a whole process- our clients have their lives, the collective has it’s trauma and grief, we are in our own process, and in some ways we need to release to magic and something bigger than us- because as we all know our work is never done, things are always left undone and unkept in this work- and so we must recognize and take a leap of faith that our presence and our witnessing and ourselves showing up, that this is enough. My mentor Dana Sturtevant told me to “send it to the light”, during particularly heavy sessions. As we peel away from saviorism we recognize that we are a part of a bigger whole and that we are held, our pain is held, our clients are held by more than just us. In this way we move towards interdependence, and allow our client’s their sovereignty and agency in finding their own way.
Tools for holding Grief:
Grounded presence
Deep care and tending for yourself, before, during, and after sessions
Sitting in silence, witnessing and encouraging what comes up
Support- therapy, consultation, whatever feels supportive and nurturing to you
Recognize your triggers, let them lead you to untended parts of self
A ritual for the grief- light a candle, pull a tarot card, light some incense, spray some rose water (or other clearing spray).
Rest when needed and accessible
Movement when needed and accessible (sweating can be a form of release)
Consider what it means to you to release, let go?
Consider what tools and teachers could help you in the process of release and letting go