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Hello Beautiful,

One of life’s most challenging situations is being needed when someone you love loses someone they love. The truth is many of us don’t know how to help someone grieving.

We don’t realise it, but that extreme discomfort we feel when another human falls apart due to grief right in front of us, is not ‘innate’. It’s years of training in prioritising ‘busyness’. Training to forget what it means to be a person sitting with another person feeling all the feels. Being told ‘sensitivity’ is a failure and that we shouldn’t let ’emotions’ get in the way of… whatever it is they apparently get in the way of.

What does this then mean when we are faced with ‘being there’ for someone who has lost someone else? When everything we’ve ‘learned’ goes out to window in the face of raw deep wild crazy confusing messy heart-wrenching loss? We may find judgement creeping in as we feel annoyed- why can’t they just get over it? Deal with it? And yet… the day will come when it is you in their place.

Something I hear regularly from the bereaved is that other people’s reactions are one of the things that make losing someone so hard. Typical reactions to the news of a death can range from ‘so-formal-it-is-meaningless’ to ‘sobbing-uncontrollably-as-though-it-was-your-loss-and-not-ours’.

Let’s be honest with each other. That’s just not really good enough is it?

Because it is CERTAIN that one day it will be you struggling to cope with a death. In fact, there is nothing more certain. And you’ll notice all these things other people say about what was hard for them.

You’ll feel alone and stuck and wish someone knew what to do.

What if that person was YOU?! Now. Today. Knowing what to do when someone you love loses someone they love.

As a counsellor talking with people as who have been deeply irrevocably rocked by a significant death, it strikes me if we did this dying thing better, we could all have a better experience of losing someone.

Here are some things YOU can do to help ease someone’s struggles in grief:
 

1. When you send a card, do not write ‘i’m sorry for your loss’


Share a memory of the person. If you didn’t know them but you know the mourners, write something about them and how the dead person would have been proud of such-and-such (something unique and specific, not generic)
 

2. If you offer to help, tell the person what you are offering to do.

 

We ALL say ‘if there’s anything I can do…’ but most people in shock don’t know what they want or need. Recall times when you’ve needed support (or someone you know has) and offer that. Cook a meal and bring it over; do a load of laundry; pay for a cleaner for a month; drop off some paperwork for them; book in to go for a walk on a set day/week; take the kids to school or pick them up; stay in their spare bed for a few nights and binge some teev together or clear out a cupboard; arrange to text every second day (and then DO IT. Do not forget. Even if it’s just a dumb gif or a distraction or a ‘hope you’re okish today, but if not I have a free texting hand and a tub of ice-cream’).

Read on HERE

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Did you know I offer couples counselling? (Yes you can do it online). Find out more HERE

And that's all for now rockstar. I hope your weeks aren't travelling by so fast you're missing them, and remember: You Do You. Take care of yourself and each other. Love Nicole. OXOO
Nicole Hind Unveiled Stories Counselling Email
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