On Being a Bereavement Counselor

Being a Bereavement Counselor

    I have worked as a bereavement counselor for a hospice team for the past few years. I often am told that I “must be a special person” to do what I do. Other therapists, with similar training, say “I could never do your job”. At a social gathering when I said I was a bereavement counselor someone said, “that sounds really depressing” and changed the subject. No one wants to talk about grief or death. I will agree that it a difficult job but it is also very rewarding. My clients are very appreciative and in most cases make a marked improvement over time. 

  When I first started as a bereavement counselor I was ok with some types of loss but others really hit me emotionally. These more difficult cases usually were my worst-case scenario of things that if they happened to me I would not know how to cope. These cases usually involved a sudden unexpected death. It is hard to feel comfortable with the notion that on any ordinary day the unthinkable could happen and I could lose someone close to me with no warning.

   Managing my emotional response required me to reach out to others. I would process the with a coworker, sometimes more than once until I regained composure and could focus on the work that needed to be done. I needed the emotional outlet. Focusing on the work and bringing all the available information together also helped.

   Increased knowledge of the grief process and interventions helped me to feel competent. Having a frame of reference of what is helpful with each stage of grief provided guide rails. The most known model for grief is that of Kubler Ross. There are other models that are more recently developed, Alan Wolfert’s approach of companioning rather than treating grief, and William Worden’s four tasks of Mourning have helped me to know which aspects of grief benefit from what type of approach, Every client is different, and no model is perfect, but the models provide a language and toolkit to help the therapist identify where a client is in the process and what kind of supports will be most useful. There is no fix.

  A third way to address the emotional challenge of working as a grief counselor is keeping the caseload low. I was fortunate that the hospice where I worked recognized this. The initial sessions are the most taxing because the client is often overwhelmed and discharges a lot of painful emotions. There is little to offer in the early stages other than being fully present and holding space for the client. It often involves hearing the whole story more than once.

   The part of grief counseling that I like is that clients tend to make progress. There is no fix for a loss but the adaptation process is amazing to witness. Even the clients who struggle the most open up to the process because their lives have been altered in such a way that they must change. 

Clients are very appreciative. The comments I hear from clients are “you have no idea how much you have helped me”, and “this is the only place I can talk about this, not even my family wants to listen to what I am going through”. The job is not complicated. It involves showing up and bearing witness to the difficult experience of another. It involves patience when clients get stuck or overwhelmed. The job is being there and listening when it is difficult for others to do so.