Coping with Anger and Guilt after a Loss - Dr. Bob Baugher

HEALING THE GRIEVING HEART
Coping with Anger and Guilt after a Loss (pre-recorded)
Host: Dr. Gloria Horsley
With guest: Dr. Bob Baugher
January 19, 2006

G: Hello. I’m your host Dr. Gloria Horsley. Welcome to Healing the Grieving Heart. Today we are going to take on an important topic, coping with the emotions of guilt and anger after the loss of a loved one. If you’re listening to this show, I assume that some of you are ready to explore your feelings of guilt and anger and that others of you might want even to consider the idea of giving up your excess guilt and anger, and I’m not asking you to. We have been there and know that guilt and especially anger may be what is currently getting you through the day and deep down you may be dealing with the fear that on the other side of guilt and anger may be depression and despair. Take heart and remember that feelings are ruled by the mind and that there is over time the option of peace and tranquility. We are here today to help you consider the idea of moving from anger and guilt into that peace and tranquility. Negative feelings over time can impede your immune system and cause you unnecessary hardship so join us today in exploring and mining those unnecessary triggers in feelings of anger and guilt. Identifying and coping with the excessive anger and guilt are necessary steps in healing from traumatic loss. Anger and guilt are universal feelings that we all have on a fairly regular basis. In fact, they are normal responses and are part of what makes us human and even humane. While anger is learned early and comes naturally, as seen with babies and toddlers when they’re deprived of food or a toy, guilt is a bit more advanced. Guilt requires that we have an understanding, or in many cases, a belief that in some way we may have had some responsibility for the negative outcomes in our life. Oftentimes, when we are angry, if we look deeply, the anger is really focused at ourselves. If we hadn’t let our child drive in the rain, or if we had gone to the doctor sooner, our loved one may not have died. So anger and guilt for the bereaved can really be intertwined. It is my belief that anger and guilt can also be related to a need to again feel that our world is safe. If I can blame someone else or feel that I have done something differently that would have changed the outcome, in other words I can control my world and the world will be safer for me and my family. Well, I’m sorry to tell you that life happens that even with your best intentions and the best doctors and the safest car, you cannot keep bad things from happening. Harboring anger and guilt can delay your grief and stop you from being the happy person that you are meant to be. My guest today is Dr. Bob Baugher, psychologist, certified death educator. Bob teaches at Highline Community College in Des Moines, Washington. He is an 18-year member of the Advisory Committee of the Kings County Chapter of The Compassionate Friends. Bob has given more than 350 workshops on coping with grief and loss. He is a trainer for the Washington State Youth Suicide Prevention Program and is co-author of A Guide for the Bereaved Survivor, A Guide to Understanding Guilt During Bereavement, Understanding Anger During Bereavement, Death Turns Allie’s Family Upside Down (a child’s book on death), Coping with Traumatic Grief: Homicide, and After Suicide Loss: Coping with Your Grief. Well, Bob, thanks so much for being on the show. I really appreciate your coming on this morning. I know you’ve been in Africa.
B: Yes.
G: And it’s great to have you on. Today we’re going to talk about guilt and anger and I wanted to ask you, Bob, how did you get into the area of grief and loss?
B: Years ago, more than 30 years ago, my father at age 52 is one of those workaholics, probably the listeners know someone like I’m talking about, because he never had time to be sick and one day he was feeling kind of under the weather, didn’t go to work, and decided to go to the bank and had a massive stroke and almost died. So here I was teaching psychology classes and my mother is saying to me in tears, I want you to see about setting up a funeral for your father. I’m realizing, oh my God, even though I had a Master’s Degree back then in psychology, I didn’t know anything about grief and loss and funerals and so then fortunately he survived and lived another 29 years. Then a year after that in 1976 I was asked to create a new class so I said I’d like to teach a class on death and have been doing that for 29 years now.
G: So you just decided to go right into it when your dad had this problem, and 29 years ago, it was quite a thing to go in, wasn’t it? There wasn’t much going on.
B: No, there wasn’t.
G: And you certainly contributed a lot to the field. I know you’ve done a lot for Compassionate Friends and your workshops are wonderful and people really enjoy them. What do you see as being the major issues related to loss in general for people?
B: I think one of the big ones is education, that given I was no exception that even though I knew a lot about people and human behavior, I think we’re not taught about grief and loss. You go all the way through your youth years and high school and even college, you won’t hear the word grief, loss, anger, guilt, those kinds of tough issues that come up when someone dies, and so I think education is certainly an important one.
G: And it’s also something to be avoided, too. Who wants to talk about negative, depressing things that go on that you don’t want to face up to?
B: Absolutely. When I tell people, they say, “Oh, you’re a college instructor? What do you teach?” And I say, “Oh, I teach a course on death.” And then they say, “Oh, you’re talking about deaf people who are hard of hearing?” I say, “no, no, no, death.” Then they have this look on their face so that’s not what people want to deal with.
G: Absolutely. I know I tell people I’m doing an internet radio show and they’re like, “Wow, that’s great, what’s it on?” And then they’re like, “oh, okay.” So talk about anger and guilt. We were talking about that as being the topics of the show today and I know you have taught at Compassionate Friends a wonderful seminar over the years on anger and guilt. In fact, I did it for you last year when you were in Africa. So what about anger? What do you think about it?
B: Well, I’d like to quote – one of my favorite authors is a woman named Therese Rando who, as you know, writes books that are 250, 350 pages, not so much for people who are going through grief unless people really want to devour a book, but for professionals to understand what’s going on. The best quote I ever heard was from her is that anger is a reaction to being deprived of something desired. And when I teach my class, for example, in a couple of hours today, I’ll be teaching my death classes. This is the first day of the quarter for them so they’re all excited and everything. One of the things I say to them is, just imagine a baby drinking a bottle, a one-year-old, and you go up and snatch the bottle away. That kid’s going to be upset and that’s what’s important to understand is that anger is a natural reaction.
G: Right. And I think of it somewhat as throwing a tantrum after you’ve lost a family member and particularly myself losing a child, I literally I think threw a tantrum for the first while screaming, yelling, falling on the floor, whatever, because we’ve been taught that if you want something badly enough you can get it from early on.
B: Yeah, and it’s that protest and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. Years ago when I was co-authoring the book with Dr. Gary Hankins and his wife Carol, we were looking at ways to really emphasize anger so came up with a little acronym – A Natural Genuine Emotional Reaction. You take each of those words and it spells “anger.” I like the words natural and genuine because it comes back to us that this is normal. But one of the things I got from Dr. Hankins and something that I say when I give the workshop on anger is that it’s okay, and I really want the listeners to get this, that it’s okay to be angry but it’s what you do with it. There are all kinds of ways that we know are unhealthy in terms of anger, but anger is a natural reaction and quite often people don’t want us to be angry. It’s scary to watch someone be angry but it’s what you do with it. Be as gentle with yourself as you would be with your best friend.
G: Yes, I would agree with you somewhat, but would you say that some of our listeners are carrying it over years? I actually have an email here from a woman named Brenda from Des Moines, Iowa, and Brenda sent me an email and said I notice you were going to have Dr. Bob Baugher on. I’ve been at some of his seminars. Five years ago, my daughter died from malpractice. We went after the doctor and tried to stop him from practicing and sued him. He was censured by the medical society but he did not lose his license. It’s been five years and I’m really, really angry still and I’m feeling that it’s not good for me. Can you help me?
B: Wow. That’s a great one. Well, number one, I think it’s important to look at where anger, because people want to know, where does it cross an unhealthy threshold, and I think certainly one and you mentioned it earlier was that when people end up hurting themselves or another person, that’s important to realize that you’ve gone beyond. Quite often people feel, as you talked about earlier, anger itself that it’s somehow okay to beat myself up but I like to give, as well as I do when I talk about guilt, the best friend example, that if your best friend had done the same sort of things, would you beat your best friend up? For many people, they say, “Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that.” Well, the question becomes can you be as gentle with yourself as you would your best friend?
G: That’s a great way to put it.
B: And second, with respect to Brenda, the question is, “At what point does anger become a problem in one’s life?” and the answer is, When it begins to disrupt your lifestyle.” When it interferes with what, some of the listeners may know this term, when it interferes with your activities of daily living, then it’s gone beyond, so you’re angry on the freeway, you’re angry at your boss, you’re angry at your family, and it’s just spilling over and I think Compassionate Friends is a wonderful organization and more often people when they go to support groups, they can talk about it, they can hear someone across the room speak words that indicate that they’re feeling some of the same anger in it and it’s really a powerful way to get that out.
G: When I hear Brenda say, “I’m really angry, help me,” she is, I think, at the point where she’s getting ready to give it up. We do have to get to the point where we are willing to do that. Where we feel that it’s more harmful on us to have because anger and rage do give you a certain feeling of power, those adrenaline hits, those kinds of things, and Brenda sounds like she’s ready to give it up, and Brenda, you need to know that there is some peace on the other side. It’s not just depression, but I think Bob made a good point that Brenda may want to go to group or join other people and get some support because it can be a scary thing giving up feelings that you’ve had for five years and hate towards another person.
B: Yeah, absolutely. There have been times when I’ve given the anger workshop and a lot of dads show up to the workshop and it’s very powerful when they come up to me afterwards and shake my hand and thank me for holding up a mirror to them. A couple of dads said to me at workshops over the years, they said, “You know, Bob, for me, as a dad, as a man, it’s easier for me to be angry than it is sad.”
G: Right, exactly, that sadness on the other side. But sometimes you have to move through that into other areas. So we want to take your hand and suggest that you might be getting ready to do that. If you’re thinking about that, you might want to get Dr. Baugher’s book. It’s a wonderful book called Understanding Anger During Bereavement. And how would they get that?
B: They can email me at b_kbaugher@yahoo.com.
G: Great. And if you don’t, if you didn’t get that down, you can also email me through www.healingthegrievingheart.org and I will send you a link for Bob. But it’s a great book and it’s not that long and it’s just got some great ideas about how you can deal with your anger. Let’s talk about guilt now. How do you see guilt?
B: I like what you said earlier that in our life we often feel like we have control over what happens and then a child dies and we realize that we don’t have a lot of control so we look and we try to make sense out of what really is in most cases a senseless situation and certainly the death of a child goes way off the charts in terms of senseless.
G: Well, we’re also supposed to be able to take care of our children.
B: Exactly.
G: So when we get back, it’s time for us to go to break now, and when we get back, let’s talk more about grief and loss and the guilt. We’re talking about anger and guilt today and how to cope with those and my guest is Dr. Bob Baugher, psychologist and certified death educator. He teaches at Highland Community College in Des Moines, Washington. Bob has given more than 350 workshops on coping with grief and loss. He is a consultant for The Compassionate Friends and he has co-authored A Guide for the Bereaved Survivor, A Guide to Understanding Guilt During Bereavement, Understanding Anger During Bereavement, Death Turns Allie’s Family Upside Down, and Coping with Traumatic Grief: Homicide, After Suicide Loss Coping with your Grief. Please stay tuned for more.
Bob, welcome back to the show, and when we went to break, we were talking about dealing with loss and dealing with guilt. Do you have more we wanted to say about guilt? I think we covered anger a bit.
B: Sure, I have a quote that I thought was helpful by George Kelly, who is a psychologist. He says, “Guilt is a sense of having lost one’s core role structure.” In other words, we feel guilty when we behave in ways inconsistent with our sense of who we are, and so for a parent, you’re right. A parent, our job is to protect our children. Our job is to have some control over our lives and their lives and when the death occurs, it challenges our whole thinking.
G: I also think there’s another word we haven’t met here with anger and guilt. There’s also shame. A tremendous amount of shame for a parent that they would “lose” their child.
B: Well, and when parents talk about running into old friends or other people and them asking about how their children are and they see the look on that other person’s face when they say, “My child died,” and they suddenly feel again responsible. “What kind of parent am I?” Certainly, they pick up or perceive facial expressions from other people and that sense of shame may settle over them. Can I talk for a little bit about some guilt statements that might help the listeners identify when they’re feeling guilty?
G: Absolutely.
B: So when people say things like, “If only,” or “Why didn’t I?” or “I should have” or “I shouldn’t have” or “I’m not worthy of” or just “I feel guilty,” those are indications that there’s some guilt going on in this person’s life. And I think the word “should have” is an important one because when you really think about that term, “should have,” you can never should have. I always say to my students, “How many of you were in this room last night at 6:00?” And they all stare at me, like, what is he talking about? And then I say, “Well, you should have been here.” And they kind of chuckle, and I say, “Can you do anything about that?” And they say, “No.” And I say, “Well, you can never should have.” Now, I want to caution the listeners, next time you’re in an argument with someone and the someone says that you should have done something, at that moment, you may not want to say, well, I heard on the radio that you can never should have. You’re probably not going to win the argument at that point. But really, that’s a lot of what guilt is. It’s I should have done this, should have done that.
G: What we’re saying to our listeners is, “Watch yourself.” You were talking about holding up a mirror. When are you saying that your self?
B: Exactly, you’re catching yourself.
G: There was a wonderful old book years ago, I’m a tennis player, and it’s called The Inner Game of Tennis. And The Inner Game of Tennis said, one of his main things was you shouldn’t say anything on the tennis court to yourself that you wouldn’t say to your partner.
B: That’s great. And again that goes back to the best friend thing is how can you treat yourself well. Let me talk for a little bit about some types of guilt that might help the listeners identify with what’s going on. One that you mentioned earlier is death causation guilt, that is the belief that I did something that directly, indirectly somehow contributed to my child’s death, and that sense that people carry around with them.
G: Or I didn’t do something.
B: That’s right. Or I failed to do something. I was giving a workshop at The Compassionate Friends conference a few years ago with 65 parents in the group and a woman raised her hand as soon as I said death causation guilt and she said yes, I have an example of that. My son died in an auto accident. He was 16 years old and he was just walking out the door and turned to me and said, the last thing I saw of him, he said, goodbye Mom, and I said, oh, goodbye. He left and he got on the freeway and a truck hit his car and killed him. She said, I should have said, be careful.
G: Isn’t that incredible how small we can get with that? When I was working at University of Rochester’s Strong Hospital, there was a little girl whose father had died and she said to me, “You know what, if I hadn’t asked my daddy to help me with my homework, he wouldn’t have been in the car at the time that the truck crossed the intersection.”
B: Exactly. And so, again, that’s our brain trying to make sense out of the senseless situation and so we have that. Another one and related to parents is role failure guilt that I wasn’t a good enough mother, I wasn’t a good enough father, and if only I had been more vigilant and better and, of course, I think in many cases, people are saying if only I had been psychic and known ahead of time that this was going to happen, and again we beat ourselves up.
G: We see that a lot with families where the family member has died by suicide and they take on that role, and one of the things that we know as therapists is that you cannot stop people in the end from doing what they do.
B: Yeah, it’s a hard one, and I teach this suicide intervention class and one of the things I say is, you’re learning all these skills which you now know more about suicide intervention than probably 98% of most people and yet despite all your best efforts at times, you might stop a person one time but it could be that a week later, a year later, that they still may take their lives and that’s a tough one.
G: We always have to remember that we did the best we could at the time.
B: Yes, I have a friend who investigates suicides for King County here so he’s on the scene just after a suicide has occurred and he’s standing there with the family members and he has to ask them, what were you doing at the time? Where were you? because he has to investigate, and of course, immediately, the person is feeling defensive and guilty and so on and he said is that what you normally do? And they said, yeah. He said, well, sounds like you were doing what you were doing at the time and how could you have known or would you have gotten off work at that time? Another one is unmentionable guilt. I think this unmentionable guilt is a huge one because I want to appeal to the listeners that if you have some type of guilt inside of you at this point that you’ve not really been comfortable in sharing, I think it’s important you decide (a) if you’re going to share it, and (b) to pick a safe person that you’re going to say it to, because people often will relate some action in the past. This is overlapping what was called moral guilt as well. I was this terrible person and this is why my child died. Or I thought of this or I failed to do this and these thoughts or actions somehow or failure to think and act resulted in my child’s death, but I can’t tell anybody, and I’m asking you to get that out of your head and sit down with a safe person and say there’s something I need to say to you rather than it rolling around and around.
G: It’s amazing. I think of that as being unresolved loss, and when I used to see that a lot was when I worked in the hospital. I consulted to a surgical service and I would see people who had automobile accidents or other things happen in the hospital and when they got medicated and they were kind of down, all this unresolved grief would come out. These things that they’d never told anybody about past losses and it was a pretty amazing thing to see this happen.
B: And that’s the beauty of support groups and especially with Compassionate Friends and being able to sit in a group that’s safe with a facilitator and other folks who have been through somewhat similar situations and to be able to
G: And by the way you can go ten years later to a Compassionate Friends group.
B: Yeah, I tell my students, it doesn’t matter how long. Yeah, you can be 10, 20 years later and you walk into a Compassionate Friends group and say, “I’m here and my child died 10 years ago,” they will not blink. They will gesture to a chair and say, “Welcome and sit down.”
G: Right, and you don’t have to stay forever. If you want to go tell that story or just get to know the group and see where you are, you can do that.
B: Certainly a big one that everyone knows is survivor guilt. One of the first talks I gave to Compassionate Friends in 1987 was a man came up to me afterwards, he was like 75 years old and his 50-year-old son had died. He said, “You know, my son was 50 when he died and that’s wrong. No parent should survive their child.” And so just existing every day, day after day, parents feel this incredible survivor guilt.
G: And the other people we see a lot are the siblings. A lot of survival guilt with the siblings. I should have been in the car. It should have been me. They were the good one. Why am I here? A tremendous amount of survival guilt because sometimes the child who died gets glorified a bit and so the other one’s feeling like I’m unworthy and they were the best. The good die young, you know.
B: A good example of that if the listeners haven’t seen it, it’s a difficult movie to watch, but it’s still a classic is Ordinary People in which the sibling experiences significant survivor guilt. Absolutely. A couple of others I’ll do briefly. One is grief guilt. I wrote an article years ago for Bereavement Magazine that said, What if I grieved perfectly?, which is the whole idea that we have to grieve right. And I think that goes back to the education thing that you and I talked about earlier, the idea that we don’t know what our grief is like. You’re going to grieve how you’re going to grieve. The idea that there’s some perfect or right way of grieving is just that. It’s not. It’s just however we’re going to do it.
G: And also people may hold on to some things longer. Some people may hold on to anger longer. Some people may hold on to guilt longer. When you recognize it, that’s when you’re saying, “Oh, I see it. I may want to be able to do something with it.” And it may be years. It may be after you’ve had an experience similar to what happened years before and you’re ready to say, okay, there it is, and maybe it’s time that I give it up.
B: One last one I want to mention is, I call moving-on guilt. I’m sure any listener can identify with the fact the first time that they laughed after the loved one died. This sudden, oh my God, I’m forgetting my loved one. What’s wrong with me? The point is that I think the important issue in dealing with our own grief is how do we then let go of some of that grief and still hang on to the memory of our loved one and keep them in our heart, and I think there’s this tug of war going on that if I let go of my guilt, let go of my anger, let go of my grief, I’m letting go of my loved one and that’s where it takes some untangling that Compassionate Friends counseling, talking to a friend, or whatever, getting it out of your head, talking about it can help out.
G: Yeah, one of the things that we do when we work with that, I work with 9/11 firemen families, and one of the major things where the father was killed in 9/11 and one of the major things we do for them sounds very strange, but we give them permission to have family fun time, and we make it as part of their assignment.
B: Excellent.
G: So I think I’ve said on the show before to all you listeners out there, Bob and I would like to tell you to have some family fun time and give it as an assignment. It can short. It can be just getting an ice cream cone, walking around the block. We’re not asking you to do a lot. We’re just asking you to take a moment out of peace.
B: And your loved one would want you to do that. And it doesn’t mean you’re forgetting them.
G: No, in fact, we’ve said before that memories get very strong later on because you enjoy them so much.
B: Yes, exactly.
G: So if you had a piece of advice that you could give a bereaved person after the first year, what would it be during the first year?
B: I think permit yourself to grieve however you’re going to grieve. We’ve talked about guilt and anger today. Sometimes people hear this and then they feel guilty for feeling guilty or they feel guilty for feeling angry. You’re going to feel whatever you’re going to feel, but it’s important then to find ways to take care of yourself and be good to yourself and that may be going to a group, reading a book, listening to shows like you have on here, Gloria, but realizing that you’re kind of a zombie going through this step by step and that the important thing is to take it as we hear that cliché, one day at a time.
G: Absolutely. It’s time for us to go to break now, Bob, and when we come back, I’d like to talk more about advice to give people for beyond the first year, and also I’d like to talk more about what people can do if they’re willing and ready to give up some of that anger they have.
B: I want to give some suggestions for coping with anger and then a couple for with guilt. There’s certainly much more to this, but just some things for the listeners to consider. One is for anger, to identify your anger behaviors. To actually sit down and write down and maybe the listeners have a piece of paper right now and they can do this, take out some paper and pen and write down when I’m angry what words come out either out of my mouth or into my thoughts that indicate anger just to kind of get them out so that when you see them, you go, there it is, I’m angry. And what actions do you exhibit? You might want to ask the people you live with, they’ll probably give you some great examples of what actions you indicate that show your anger. Second, to identify, and I teach a class in human relations and I say to my students if you’re going to change a behavior, one of the important things to do is not only define it, but come up with reasons why you absolutely must change your behavior. So in this case, reasons why I must find ways to at least reduce my anger. Maybe I don’t want to let go of it entirely, but all the reasons, all the good things that will come from it, all the negative things that will come from continuing with this anger.
G: And I think this is the time when our audience is ready to do this. I wouldn’t say that they’re probably going to be ready to do this in the first couple of years, especially the first year, and the second year, too, I think coming up on the third year, they might start to be ready to do this.
B: You get people at six months and try to say, well, come on, you need to let go of it and so on, well, they’ll look at you like you’re crazy because that’s not where they are yet. And then list some of your targets of anger. Who are the people that you are more likely to take it out on? How can you find ways to communicate more effectively with people?
G: That target of anger thing is important early on because in the first couple of years, if you’re targeting and getting angry at family members or particularly married couples, if one of the spouses is really angry at the other one, and that can happen very easily, you know, why didn’t you wake me, or why didn’t you tell me, or why did you let them take the car, or why didn’t you let me see the body at the hospital. There are really anger issues that are not functional early on.
B: You did one of my workshops last year when I was in Africa on expectations and how important they are, and I invite listeners to sit down with the person that you’re having the most problems with in your life and write down all of the expectations that you have for this person, all that you wish they would do, hope they would do, would like them to do, and whether they’re unrealistic or not and write them all down and then go back through them and say to yourself, which ones do I have some degree of control over, and therefore, is there something I can do about some of these and the other ones then your job is, as we all know, to work on letting some of that go. The whole serenity prayer that everyone knows about.
G: Tell us the serenity prayer so that everybody knows it. I’m not sure they do.
B: Well, basically, to be able to sort out what I have control over and channel your energy into that, and what I don’t have control over and find ways to begin to let go of that. And sometimes, the letting go process is more difficult than the channeling back. Back to Brenda’s example, if she were a client of mine who came in for counseling, I would say to her, Brenda, what would it take for you to begin to let go of some of this anger?
G: Help her identify it and then ask her what it would take for her to let go.
B: Yes, exactly.
G: That’s pretty simple when you think about it. Our audience can just say the words that you’ve just said to themselves and what would it take to let go. I think one of the issues is people sometimes are not ready to let go. When I taught your class at Compassionate Friends, I was very interested that there were people who came there because the title was anger and they just wanted to be with anger. They were not ready to give it up, they just wanted to talk about anger. I thing we’re going to have people listening to our show today who archive in and they see the topic is going to be anger and they want to hear what we have to say about it. But they want to be with anger. And you know what, if you’re out there and you want to be with anger, great, but I would say to you, if you re drawn to it, it’s because you’re thinking about giving it up. You’ve recognized it. That’s the first step. The next step is letting go, and Bob’s got such great ideas for doing that. And again I would suggest that you get his book, Understanding Anger During Bereavement, if you’re interested in letting go because it’s a great book with a lot of great ideas in it and you can get it through – do you want to give us your website again?
B: b_kbaugher@yahoo.com.
G: Great, and if you email him, you might even get some tips on giving up your anger for free, right?
B: Yeah, for free.
G: So, it’s a great thing to do. So we were talking before the break about if you had one year to give a piece of advice, and what if you had somebody three or four years after a loss, what would your advice be regarding anger and guilt?
B: One, I would make sure that they’ve educated themselves about issues related to anger and guilt and that if they feel that they’ve started to move on a little bit, then I would ask them what might be a healthy way that you can channel some of this anger. We all know about Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Every person out there who’s been a Compassionate Friends group facilitator or chapter leader, bless you because what you’ve done is you’ve gotten to a point in your life where you’re ready to take some of that grief and that energy and channel it into helping other people and I think we all know how good that feels.
G: Service is really something, isn’t it?
B: It is. It’s great. And sometimes sitting down and writing a letter to the person who died or writing a letter to the person that you’re angry at and not mailing that letter. I’m always hesitant for people who sit down at an email, write a letter, and then hit send and then, oh, my God, I can’t retrieve that.
G: Aren’t we all sorry for some of the emails we’ve written.
B: Absolutely.
G: Pat Loder had a great suggestion, too, and she’s the Executive Director of Compassionate Friends. We were talking about writing a letter and she has people write one back from the dead person. You write to them and they write back to you, which is kind of a lovely thing to do.
B: Yes, and what they would say to you. Let me give you one more especially for guilt, and I do this in my workshop. I want you to think about the person who’s died and in a moment I want you to imagine them standing in front of you and for ten seconds, they’re going to say something to you about all the guilt and all the anger that you’ve been carrying to this point. In this case, I have parents in front of me and I say, I want you to imagine your child standing there and I’m going to be silent for ten seconds. I just want you to listen to what your child’s going to say to you.
G: And I just did that and you know what I got?
B: What?
G: Stupid.
B: Is this your son talking to you?
G: Right.
B: Yeah.
G: Or maybe give me a break.
B: Yeah. And I’ve had parents come up to me or raise their hand in the workshop and say, you know, a mother whose 20-year-old son had died. She said, I heard my son, I actually heard his words in my brain saying mom, chill out. Or dad saying, my daughter is saying, dad, I know you love me and it’s not your fault. It’s very powerful to go back to that person and say what would they be saying to me right now about all this guilt and anger that I’ve been feeling.
G: Darcie Sims says something which I think is really wonderful which is, people are angry or guilty that they didn’t get to say good-bye, and she said well, what if you had your child standing there before you? Would you say good-bye? No, you’d say I love you.
B: That’s great. I love Darcie. Great, great, great.
G: Are there any special resources that you’d suggest for people who are feeling angry or guilty? Compassionate Friends we talked about.
B: Yes, and most all communities have grief support groups and you have to be cautious to make sure that it’s a legitimate one and one that’s going to help you move on and understand what’s going on with your guilt. Sometimes bereaved parents reported walking into a general bereavement group and not seeing another bereaved parent in there and that was difficult for them. Or someone who has experienced a suicide and no one else has experienced a suicide. So you may want to tailor where you’re heading on that and really find the right group that’s helpful for you. But there are books out there, there are websites, there are in this case your radio show, and finding ways to gather that information so that you can get a mirror held up to you and look at your own grief and say, what’s going on with me and what are some ways that I can find a way to be more healthy as I’m coping with my grief and loss.
G: It’s time for us to go to break now. One of this things that I’d like to talk about before this show ends is bereavement as a career because I know that there are some people who are interested after the death of a child in moving into this area or another family member and I wanted to talk about that.
B: Good. You mean bereavement work as a career not bereavement itself.
G: Yes, let’s talk about bereavement as a career. In fact, I think that might be a good idea to mention that because some of the people have said on this show before that they think it’s important not to identify yourself as a bereaved person for the rest of your life. Do you have a thought about that?
B: That’s a tough one. Parents always come up with years later when they meet someone and how many children do you have? Each parent has to practice a little bit on how they’re going to do that. But bereavement is something that we all experience and heaven knows that it could be today that another loss is going to occur, but I think we have to ask ourselves, what’s important in my life right now and I am alive and my loved one would want me to be living and doing things and finding ways to be happy.
G: And the fact is you can give up a lot of your fears. The worst has happened and you go on to do amazing and wonderful things as many of our guests have. David Daniels is a psychiatrist that was on who made the point – he said that death and life go together.
B: Exactly. I think for people to think about that, but it is true. If people are interested in the bereavement field, I think, number one, to understand that most colleges do not, I know you know this, Gloria, do not offer a course on death. And so what you have to do is find ways to not only find some books out there but also if a workshop comes to town on grief and loss, we all hear of physician heal thyself, and if you have your own issues relating to grief and loss, it’s important that you work on those before you can jump out and help other people. Many people then move into getting an undergraduate degree in psychology or a related field and then they go on and get a master’s degree in counseling or family therapy and then within that, and they are often able to specialize and find a graduate class, or in some rare cases like here at Highline, an undergraduate class on grief and loss. But getting on a website and pulling up what college course are offered out there can be real helpful and taking a college course. I’m obviously biased because I’m into my 29th year, but it can be very much life changing because it really forces you to look at books and to do homework.
G: And look at research. There’s some very interesting research.
B: Yes. There are a lot of very talented people in the field who have done a lot of very good research on issues. Last year I gave a talk at a conference where I gave my results of looking at long-term bereaved parents – parents whose child had died between five and ten years prior to that – and I looked at what words they used and didn’t use and they didn’t use words like “heal” and “recover” and “getting over it” and “moving on” and things like that because you never get over the death of a child. You have to adjust to it and deal with it, but getting over it was not part of their vocabulary. There is certainly a need out there for people who at times have to sit down face to face with a counselor. A group is fine but for some people they need that one on one and being able to offer that to a community is wonderful.
G: And having had the experience – you can work in the field without the experience and you can work in it with the experience. It doesn’t matter. It’s the kind of person you are. I was a therapist before my son was killed, and there were some people who didn’t think I should stay in the field and I actually was in the field of grief and loss. I did my dissertation on hospice work as I was a nurse. There were people who really didn’t feel like it was appropriate for me to be doing this work. So as I say, it depends on the individual. You shouldn’t stop from considering this as a career, or if you’ve been bereaved, I think at three years you can start a Compassionate Friends group, and there’s also the Dougy Center model working with all sorts of bereaved people. So there are wonderful things to do for service in the field. Talk about bereavement in general, Bob. Before we close the show, is there something else you want to say about it or should we just talk about helping people who are in bereavement.
B: Well, let me give another couple of examples for guilt. I think people are certainly in need of what else is out there. I think a helpful one to think about is to sit down and put together all the memories that they have of their child. For some people, even if they have a baby who died, you sit down and think of all the little things you did for your child and with your child and their smiles and the places that you took your child and the things that you did and I think at times it’s so easy to focus on what we did wrong and what we failed to do and when we yelled at our child and when we were upset and so on. There are hundreds and hundreds of memories and things that we’ve done over the years and also sometimes after a child dies, we look at pictures which is wonderful, but we need to be aware that other people have taken pictures of our child as well and so sometimes just putting out a call and saying, does anyone else have pictures out there that you can get those pictures and put together a memory album and using that to really feel like I did a lot of good things as a parent, as a brother, as a sister, as a grandparent. I am a good person.
G: Focusing on the happy. That’s one nice thing. How would a person know when they need to go into therapy or would you recommend that they go to a counselor, because I was thinking what you’re saying is something a counselor can bring out in people.
B: Yeah. I think when a person’s anger, like I mentioned before, is spilled over to other people and when it’s beginning to take over their life, when they quit their job, when they quit church, when they’ve quit social activities, when they’ve shut out friends. Sometimes that occurs during the first several months and so on after a death but as that continues on and the support group isn’t helping and their church or their group base isn’t helping, then I think they need to consider seeking out someone who is going to be able to help hold up a mirror to them.
G: I love that, hold up a mirror. So if you need to have a mirror held up, think about getting some professional help. Well, it’s time to close our show and I want to thank my guest, Dr. Bob Baugher. You are fantastic and you do so much in the field of grief and loss and I very much appreciate it. And I hope you will email me or Bob about getting some of his books because they’re great.