How Can I Help Them? Adolescents Grieve, Too: Dr. Heidi Horsley

HEALING THE GRIEVING HEART
How Can I Help Them? Adolescents Grieve, Too
Host: Dr. Gloria Horsley
With guest: Dr. Heidi Horsley
July 28, 2005

G: Welcome to Healing the Grieving Heart. Our topic today is: How Can I Help Them? Adolescents Grieve, Too. My show today is dedicated to grieving teens and their parents. If you’re listening to this show, you’ve probably lost someone that was very important to you and to the teen in your life. Your teen is probably feeling angry, sad, empty, confused, exhausted, anxious, or all of those things at once. So it’s natural for bereaved teens to think things like “nobody understands what I’m going through” and questioning “why did this have to happen?” Each teen loss is different and no parent can know exactly what their teen is feeling. But sometimes hearing from families who have gone through the loss of a sibling and how they handled it can help. My guests and I want to share some ideas on how you can make the best of the worst. Not by sugar-coating the reality for your teens or by avoiding it, but by taking care of yourself and your teen. Taking small steps that will make the road a little less bumpy and the hills a little less steep. When my son, Scott, died at age 17, I had three other children, Heidi, Rebecca, and Heather. The question I asked myself was, “How can I keep these three remaining girls safe and happy?” It was about control. While their questions were, “How can we be normal teens and have our freedom and still grieve for our brother?” Today on Healing the Grieving Heart, my guests and I will give you tips and advice on helping those grieving adolescents. We know it’s not easy. Adolescence is a stormy time at its best, and each of us is unique and special as are our stories and our relationships and our responses to loss. Healing the Grieving Heart is about nourishing the heart and removing the blocks that slow the miracle of renewal. Have hope. My guests and I are here today to tell you that the heart can heal even after the tragic death of a sibling or a child. You may think your family will never be happy again, but we’re here every week to tell you that you and your teens will be happy again. You will find satisfaction, fun, and enjoyment. True, life may never be the same again, but you’ll find a new normal. We did it and so can you. You can love, open your heart, and be happy again. Please join us on the show by calling our toll free number 1-866-369-3742 or by emailing me at gchorsley@aol.com with questions or comments regarding the losses in your life. Today, I am very honored to have as my special guest, Dr. Heidi Horsley, psychologist, bereaved sibling, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, co-author of the book Making the Best of the Worst: A Message of Hope for Grieving Teens. Dr. Heidi Horsley is also primary researcher on the Fireman Family 9/11 Columbia University Family Assessment Program, and Heidi, best of all, is my daughter. Good morning, Heidi, welcome to Healing the Grieving Heart.
H: Thanks, Mom. Good to be here.
G: And I think we’ve got a really important show today, How Can I Help Them? Adolescents Grieve, Too. Heidi, could you talk to our audience about when your brother was killed and what the circumstances were around it with our family?
H: Sure. When I was 20, my 17-year-old brother was riding in a car with my cousin, who was driving. My cousin was driving, my brother was the passenger, and they were in Washington, DC, and they were driving over a bridge and it was a rainy night. The car skidded out of control and hit a bridge abutment and it blew up. So basically I found out in the middle of the night suddenly that my brother had been killed and my cousin had been killed.
G: And I was in Rochester, New York, and you were in Utah with your Dad, right?
H: I was in Utah with my father and my two sisters. At the time, they were 19 and 14, and we were just on vacation there. I was at the University of Utah going to school there, and they had come up to see me on a vacation. My 19-year-old sister was also in college with me there. So basically we found out in the middle of the night that my brother had been killed, my cousin had been killed, and my life was turned upside down. It was completely turned upside down. Our siblings are people that have always been in our lives. My brother, since he was three years younger than me, he had always been in my life, always. And we were very close and we were supposed to grow old together. When he died I lost a part of my history. We were supposed to go through our entire lives together and, in fact, being his older sister, I was supposed to die before him.
G: Wow, that really goes a long ways out there. How did you think your dad and I handled it? Do you have any thoughts about parents and what how we handled the situation?
H: At the time, since I was the oldest, I really felt like since my parents were so overwhelmed, you and Dad were so overwhelmed with your own grief understandably, and you were grieving so much for the loss of your son, I felt like I kind of took over in many ways and did a lot of stuff that maybe you and Dad might have done. I really grieved alone a lot because I knew how much pain you and Dad were in and I could see it all the time. I knew how much you were grieving and I didn’t want to cause you any more pain.
G: What kind of things did you see with us that you found, what signals did we give, do you remember?
H: Well, I’d always seen you and Dad as very strong and as being in control in all situations and after Scott died, I really lost the parents that I once knew, because all of a sudden you guys were grieving a lot and I’d never really seen Dad cry. He cried sometimes, but not like this. Maybe he’d get teary-eyed. I saw you and Dad really cry a lot and fall apart and grieve and it was a little bit scary, I think. Even though I was 20 and I was independent, I still depended on you. I think I didn’t want to cause you any more pain so I really grieved alone and tried not to grieve in front of you guys and tried to help you out as much as I could. I remember after Scott died taking his address book out of his bedroom and calling all his friends and letting them know he had just died because I didn’t want you and Dad to have to do that.
G: That’s interesting because those are the things you really never, I’ve never heard that, so it’s interesting to hear a lot of things happen in the background that we don’t realize during the time that there’s a lot of help. Your sister was 14 at the time, a real teenager. Did you notice in retrospect any difference in her grieving?
H: Any difference in her grieving versus my grieving?
G: Yeah, being a teenager, too.
H: We were all angry and upset. I think her anger was a little more because all of a sudden, here she had been raised in a family with four kids and Rebecca and I were college, and she had Scott at home and all of a sudden she goes from having siblings to being the only one left in the house with two grieving parents and no teenager, no child wants to be the only one in the house with grieving parents. So I think she seemed a little angrier than we did. We were all upset but her anger was more obvious, I think, and just feeling like why am I alone? This is not fair. This is not the way my life is supposed to be. I’m not supposed to be an only child all of a sudden in a house of grieving parents.
G: And there all the time while you guys were in college. However, I think it’s really hard for the kids who leave home, too. Can you talk a little bit about that? Who come back to the funeral or whatever and then go back?
H: I felt like my loss was very unacknowledged and even more so because I was in college. For some reason, people felt like you’re at college so your loss must not have been as significant for you. And it was very significant. Scott and I talked on the phone constantly. We were very close. We were only three years apart. He was one of the closest people in my life and yet because I wasn’t living at home, people felt like the loss wasn’t as valid and wasn’t as significant. And nobody knew him in college. So I didn’t have any support because nobody knew Scott and nobody knew our family and people expected me after two weeks to get on with my life and to get over it. All of us who have had a death in the family, especially of a sibling or a child, know that you don’t get over something like this. You learn to live with it. And things can get better over time but it’s not that you get over it. Your life becomes different. You create a new normal.
G: Now we’re going to come up on break in just a moment and when we get off from break, Heidi, I would like to talk with you about your work and how you got into it and about your work with grieving teens and what you’re finding out from those teens. So we’re coming up on break and our topic today is How Can I Help Them? Adolescents Grieve, Too. Please stay tuned to hear from Dr. Heidi Horsley, psychologist, bereaved sibling, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University. Heidi is my daughter and co-author of the book Making the Best of the Worst: A Message of Hope for Grieving Teens. Please stay tuned.
G: Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria. Our topic today is How Can I Help Them? Adolescents Grieve, Too, and my guest is adolescent expert, Dr. Heidi Horsley, psychologist, bereaved sibling, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University. Heidi is my daughter and co-author of the book Making the Best of the Worst: A Message of Hope for Grieving Teens. If you would like to call in to our show today, our toll free number is 1-866-369-3742. If you would like to email me, my email is gchorsley@aol.com. Well, Heidi before we went to break, I was asking you if you would talk to our listeners about how you got into the field that you’re in as a psychologist.
H: After my brother died, I became very depressed, and I really wondered why I was on the earth. I didn’t want to be on the earth. And it wasn’t that I wanted to commit suicide, but I wanted to be out of the pain I was in and I wanted to be out of the suffering. The pain was indescribable. It was overwhelming. I didn’t want to go on feeling this way and I felt like this was the way my life was going to be for the rest of my life. I decided to go on a program called “Outward Bound” in Colorado because my brother had been on it the year before over his birthday, and I was going to announce that on the following year on the same program that I was going to be there on his birthday as well. So as I was getting on the airplane, my family was living in New York at the time and I was getting on the airplane and my father handed me the book, Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. It was a very profound book and it was given to me at the exact right time.
G: The local therapy book, yeah.
H: While I was on Outward Bound, I read it and I grieved the loss of my brother every day and everyone on the program thought oh, she’s just crying because the program is so hard. Little did they know, I was crying because of the pain of losing my brother.
G: Did you tell anybody on the program, so did they know or they did not know?
H: Everybody knew. Everybody knew that Scott had died but they felt that because it was three months ago, the grief couldn’t possibly still be this big since it was three months ago because they had not had the death of a family member and they didn’t realize that three months is a very short period of time. Basically, I read the book, though and Viktor Frankl talks about how he lost his entire family in the concentration camp and how he was able to find hope again and meaning.
G: And he said wasn’t it, “If you have a why you will find a how?”
H: Right. If you can find a why to live you can bear with almost any how and basically he felt that part of the way we heal ourselves is to create meaning in our suffering. And that really struck me, and I said how am I going to create meaning out of this loss and out of this suffering? How am I going to find the light at the end of the tunnel? How? And I really searched my soul and really thought about it and contemplated it and I realized that I had to help others that were grieving, and that I was going to devote my life to bereaved siblings and to bereaved family members and I was going to spend my life helping others heal and helping them through their healing journey and that’s what I’ve been doing.
G: So you work with the Firemen Families, the 9/11 Families, in a longitudinal study for Columbia.
H: Right. I currently have been working for the last three years as has my mother, with families that have lost a firefighter in the World Trade Center. I work with the widows and the bereaved children at this point, and I also did my doctoral dissertation on the death of a sibling.
G: How could people get a hold of that? Is that published?
H: My doctoral dissertation has actually been turned into an article and it will be in the American Journal of Marriage and Family Therapy this fall.
G: Great. And we’ll also have a website that we don’t have quite up yet. That will be the same name as the show. Hopefully, we’ll have it up in a couple of weeks so you’ll be able to get articles off of that. Well, Heidi, I wanted to go on. I know now you’re a psychologist and you’re working not only with the Compassionate Friends but also on this longitudinal study with adolescents and when I was at the last Compassionate Friends conference, I asked parents to give me questions that they might be interested in having answered on this show, and I’ll start out with the first one from Mary from Toledo, Ohio. She asks, “how do I know if my teen is grieving. He never cries.”
H: Oh, Mary, that’s such a good one. Parents are always telling me that. They say is my teen really grieving, and when I speak with parents and I speak with teens and the teens I speak with tell me over and over and over, please let our parents know that we are grieving. They may not see us grieving but we are grieving. We’re grieving alone. Sometimes we grieve with our friends. We grieve in private. We don’t want to cause our parents more pain so we grieve by ourselves.
G: I think you talked about that, that you didn’t want to cause Dad and I more pain so you were grieving, being strong.
H: The teens are actually being good kids, not bad kids. We’re trying to be good kids by not showing you any more pain, by not giving you any more pain. That’s why we’re grieving alone. That’s why teens grieve alone.
G: And it sounds like this lady, she realized that her teen is grieving. Here’s another question. Ruth from Montana. How do I know if it’s grief or depression? Now, I thought you made a good point, Heidi, regarding this when you said you wanted to join your brother. That you didn’t want to kill yourself or anything. I know sometimes families get very upset and it’s my experience when the teen says something like, “I really wished I’d been there,” or “I should have been there.” In fact, Heather said that. “I wish I would have been with my brother in the car.” It wasn’t that she was going to drive a car off the cliff or have an accident, so my thought is that’s one way you know, is that they don’t have a plan or anything. Have you got any more thoughts for Ruth?
H: Absolutely. When it’s grief, all your sadness, all your sorrow is based around longing, yearning and searching for the dead person. You want them back. If they came back, you would feel better. All your sad feelings are around the loss. With grief you do not feel hopeless, helpless, and worthless. With depression, you feel hopeless, helpless, and worthless. If you ask a grieving teen or a grieving person, do you feel like a worthless person, they’ll think that’s a really strange question. They’ll say, of course, not. Why would I be worthless? I miss my brother. I miss Scott. I want him back. That’s why I feel depressed. I don’t want my life like this. I want him back.
G: Now we’ve got another question from Judy in Idaho. She wants to know, what about drugs, sex, and high-risk behavior? I’m concerned about them because she seems to be getting a little closer to her boyfriend since my son died and I feel like they’re drinking. Do you have any thoughts on that?
H: This is a tough one and one that’s common among teens. When your sibling dies, there is a need for intimacy. Oftentimes, you do seek out an intimacy with other people and you might also self-medicate through drugs and alcohol. It makes yourself feel better.
G: As a parent, I wanted to say that at the time, this was a big concern of mine. I think that you are so lacking in energy and somehow you have to try to keep those rules with the teens because a teen’s job is to move away from the family and the family’s job is to hold the teen in and give them limits. Give them something to act out against and the wider you make that net, the more they’ll act out against it so you need to have your hours, you need to still have the same rules you had before they died. It’s difficult because you were talking about the anger, Heidi, that Heather had at the time that we see in a lot of teens. That anger causes them to maybe strike out a little more and a lot of it, it’s hard to say, but try not to take it personally.
H: Right and the anger is very legitimate. Anger is grief. It’s all right to be angry and it’s a legitimate emotion that teens have. Oftentimes parents take issue with that and think there’s something wrong with it. It’s a legitimate emotion. You just want to make sure that your teen does not have any destructive behavior around the anger. It doesn’t turn the anger on themselves or against others in a destructive way.
G: I think also Compassionate Friends can help a lot with this or finding a grief group. Not only parents where you can go and talk to other parents about how they’re handling it, but also teens have a teen group. And I think another issue is don’t frame your teen as being abnormal. You really need to realize they’re going through a normal process even though they are acting out because labeling them as problem children which you can find in the therapy community as a therapist, if therapists don’t understand what’s going on, they don’t understand the grief process, they may label your child’s behavior as excessive and that can be a problem.
H: Well, I worked with a teenager that was not concentrating or focusing at school at all, and the school had labeled him ADHD, and when I talked to him
G: Which means, ADHD is
H: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And when I talked to this teen about what was going on, he said how well would you concentrate if there was a picture of a firefighter and a statement that said never forget 9/11 in your classroom every day and you were supposed to take a test and you were supposed to concentrate and you were inundated with that photo? So I think it’s important to get information from the kids about what’s going on in their lives. What’s going on in their thoughts, in their head, and why can’t they concentrate, and lack of concentration is normal initially after you’ve lost somebody.
G: And let me say, though, we are going to talk probably in the next segment about talking to your teens and when Heidi says you need to get information from your teens, you have to get it in short sound bites. And I think, Heidi, it might be worth it in the next segment if we spend some time talking about how to talk to teens. I want to read one more. Sue from Washington, DC. What do I do if my child doesn’t want to leave for college? That is a very interesting one. At Compassionate Friends, we see panels of teens, and one of the things they talk about is that they thought they were going away to college, but they’ve decided they can’t because they need to stay home because their parents need them. And that is something that you might think about or want to talk to your kids about, because maybe they do need to go to junior college or maybe they do need to continue with their plan and they’ll be okay. Do you have any thoughts on that one, Heidi?
H: I think you’ve covered a lot of the points. Like you said, the teens I talked to said they were worried about leaving their parents. Parents need to give their kids permission to go away from home to go to college, and they need to let them know, look, we are grieving and we are sad, but we’re going to be okay. We’re going to be okay. It’s okay if you leave and go to college. We’ll be okay without you here.
G: And it’s okay if you need to stay and go to junior college this year. That would be good, too. Whatever you need to do, but you need to know that we’re going to be okay because I don’t think parents realize the reverse. We are so concerned about our teens. I was so concerned about you all, concerned about Heather at home. There was no information for me on it. I didn’t know what was going on. This was 22 years ago. Hopefully, there’s more out there, and hopefully our new book will be helpful for families and teens.
H: And it’s okay to move back home. When Scott died in April, I was in Utah, I moved to New York in December. I moved back near the family.
G: And there was a way that you could do that. You went to design school so that got you back there.
H: I needed to be near the family.
G: We’re coming up on another break and please stay tuned. I’m Dr. Gloria. My guest today is Dr. Heidi Horsley, psychologist, bereaved sibling, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University. Besides being mother and daughter, Heidi and I are co-authors of the book Making the Best of the Worst: A Message of Hope for Grieving Teens. Our topic today is How Can I Help Them: Adolescents Grieve, Too. Please join our show by calling our toll free number 1 866-369-3742 or email me with questions or comments at gchorsley@aol.com. When we come back from break, we will be discussing how to talk to your adolescents.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria, and my guest today is Dr. Heidi Horsley, psychologist, bereaved sibling, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University. Heidi is my daughter and co-author of the book Making the Best of the Worst: A Message of Hope for Grieving Teens. Our topic for this show is How Can I Help Them: Adolescents Grieve, Too. If you would like to email me about this show or upcoming shows, my email is gchorsley@aol.com. If you would like to participate in this show today, our toll free number is 1-866-369-3742. If you would like to visit our website in probably about a week it will be the same as the show, Healing the Grieving Heart. Now, Heidi, we’re back on the show and I wanted to read an email and after that, you were saying during the break that we probably ought to talk a little more about drugs, sex, and high-risk behavior. So first, here’s the email.
Gwen from Alaska. I know your daughters were saddened as hardly any of their peers acknowledged the tragic loss. I don’t think they knew what to say. Now the cheerleader teen who lives around the corner from my house, her death seemed to be handled differently by her friends. They brought yellow ribbons and white polka-dot ribbon, her favorite color, and tied them around their wrists. They met for vigil and talked a lot about it. The pediatrician who lives nearby talked to all the grieving friends and explained the death to them. It was all quite helpful. Good luck on the program. Gwen.
That was a wonderful tribute to this girl. Do you have any thoughts about this email, Heidi?
H: I think it’s fabulous. And I think those were wonderful rituals and an amazing pediatrician. I think that is very rare that those kind of rituals would be set up and things are changing. When Scott died, death was more of a taboo topic. It’s been 20 years and things are changing and thanks to the people like you and the show and books that are out there and Compassionate Friends, death is not such a taboo topic nowadays, and I would love to see more rituals like this in place. This is a great response to a death, very healthy.
G: I know there were some rituals at the school. Scott’s football team wore black arm bands, no, I guess the baseball team. So there were things that went on. One of the things I think is true that there may be things going on now, but long-term, I just don’t think kids may want people to get over it. This is my thought.
H: Absolutely, although I should say there are rituals, oftentimes there’s still not the acknowledgment. People are afraid to acknowledge a sibling death and afraid to go up to children and say I’m sorry about your brother or sister. And so they don’t say anything. The worst thing you can do is not to say anything. If you don’t know what to say, it’s great just to go up and say look, I have no idea what to say. I’ve never lost a sibling. I don’t really know what to say. That’s an acknowledgment and that’s a wonderful thing for us to hear.
G: Especially employers and people like that oftentimes say it’s the wife or whatever but they don’t go on to say it to the kids, which I think you could even call a teenager if you’re an employer and say, “You know, I’m sorry about your dad,” as adults who know the family in the larger world. Teenagers are kind of in a double bind, though, Heidi. When we see them at Compassionate Friends, on the one hand they want people to acknowledge it and on the other hand, they want to be normal teens and they don’t want to talk about it. So they themselves are somewhat ambivalent.
H: I totally agree with that. It’s very true. Teens want to be normal. They don’t want to be different than their peer group. It’s very important that they just appear like every other teen. They don’t want to have a non-normative event. They don’t want to have something that makes them different and so while they want acknowledgment, they don’t want people to focus on them too much and to keep asking them, how are you doing? How are you doing? Now a lot of teens say to me, I wish my parents wouldn’t ask me so much how I’m doing. I feel like I’m being micromanaged. I need my space.
G: Yeah, let’s just talk a little bit about the mistakes parents make. Some of the kids at Compassionate Friends, I asked them for some ideas on mistakes and they are also in our new book. One of the mistakes that they felt parents made was idealizing the dead child. The idea that only the good die young.
H: Right. And that’s a big one because we can’t compete with the memory of the perfect deceased sibling. And there’s some voids and roles like in our family that my sisters and I filled, and there are other roles that will never be filled. He’s the only brother we’ll ever have. No one can fill that role. So if you idolize a sibling like he was perfect, we can’t compete with a perfect sibling.
G: What about parents not accepting the range of adolescent feelings? Some of the adolescents felt that their parents weren’t dealing well with their anger or there was survival guilt or that life is unfair. They didn’t want to hear that.
H: I think parents feel like sometimes that the teens aren’t grieving and feeling guilty, feeling rageful, feeling angry like life is not fair. That’s all grieving. That’s the way teens grieve and it’s very normal to feel guilty when your sibling dies and you’re still alive. When my brother died, I felt very guilty because there were three girls in our family and only one boy and I kept thinking why could it not have been me? My parents have three girls. They only have one boy. Why am I the one that’s alive? I wish it had been me that died. That’s a very normal way to feel. Survival guilt.
G: Could we talk a little bit about how to talk to your adolescent? The adolescents said these are some of the things they don’t want. They don’t want lecturing.
H: That’s a big one. I think that what parents can really do, what the teens are telling me, what’s been really helpful is when parents go to them and say, “Look, I know what it’s like to lose a child because I’ve lost a child, but I have never lost a sibling. I have no idea how to help you or what that’s like. I want to be here for you. Is there anything I can do for you?” And if the teen says “no,” then the parents can just say, “okay, well, I’m here for you if you ever need me.”
G: That’s just such an incredible thing. I wish I’d known those words because those are fabulous words. The thing is I’ve heard you say this before, just put it out in the air and don’t expect a response.
H: Absolutely. Because the teens hear it. And the message you’re giving the teens is I’m here for you. And they might not come to you for years maybe, but they’ve heard it and they know that if they every really need you, you’re there.
G: And the fact that you don’t know their loss. We haven’t all had the same loss. You’ve lost a sibling. I’ve lost a son. Those losses are different and it’s wonderful to tell them, “I know I don’t know your loss.”
H: And teens say to me over and over, we don’t want our parents being experts on our loss. They’re not experts on our loss.
G: So I guess one of the things we’d say from this show today, if you’re listening and you’re a parent, even though you listen to the show, I’m not an expert on Heidi’s loss, and she’s not an expert on mine. It doesn’t matter how much information you collect, when you’ve had the experience, it’s a big thing. What about saying the dead child’s name, Heidi? What do the adolescents think about that?
H: I think they like that. They like to know that Scott or whoever died is always going to be remembered and they’re always going to be a part of the family even though they’re not there. The memories will always be there. They like to have it casually thrown out into the air and casually mentioned in the house.
G: One thing that happens for these adolescents is there’s a natural competition with kids and they don’t have a chance to play that out, so they may have tried to do better than them in school or competed with them in different ways and they’ve lost that competition, and also you can say this more than I, Heidi, but you remember the bad things you said to him, or the negative thoughts you had, or you should have said you loved him more or whatever.
H: Absolutely, because all sibling relationships have ambivalence and fighting and arguing. Even in the best of sibling relationships, we argue with our siblings and fight with them. It’s normal. When a sibling dies, you feel really guilty about those times and feel like you shouldn’t have had those times. It’s just normal when you love someone a lot, they’re worth arguing with, they’re worth having emotional energy around. You love them and so of course you argued and disagreed at times. It’s just normal.
G: Before we go to break, we’ve got time to talk about drug, sex, and high-risk behavior. Maybe we didn’t spend quite enough time on that.
H: I just wanted to say that there are times where there are red flags and it is very situational, but if you have real concerns about high-risk behavior and drugs and alcoholism and promiscuous sex with many partners, I think you do need to go to a professional and seek outside consultation and get help, because you don’t want your kids to get into a really bad situation. If you feel like they’re isolating a lot and they’re really doing some high-risk stuff, I think you need to get a professional opinion.
G: And you would do that if a sibling hadn’t died. So you have to look at what’s happening. You have to allow for a certain amount of leeway, but if it goes too far, absolutely, you need to get some kind of professional help. And again I’ve said it on other shows, make sure, talk around, ask, find the right professional. Maybe a school guidance counselor can help you to find somebody. Try to find somebody, interview them, and make sure that they know something about the death of a sibling so that you’re not sending the child in to somebody who can’t handle the situation and doesn’t understand which behaviors are normal and which aren’t.
H: Absolutely. You need an expert in bereavement to help you. That’s very important.
G: If you need me to help you find someone, you can email me and tell me the area that you’re in in the United States and I would be glad to help you track down a professional person to work with you. There are many people in the bereavement field now. All right. We’re going to come up on our last break, and before we do our final break, I would like to say that Heidi and I want you to know, if anything on this show, that we have survived, that our family is happy, wouldn’t you say, Heidi?
H: Absolutely, which I never ever ever would have believed could have been possible.
G: So we’re going to take a break now and stay tuned to Dr. Gloria. Mr. guest today is Dr. Heidi Horsley, psychologist, bereaved sibling, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University. Besides being mother and daughter, Heidi and I are co-authors of the book Making the Best of the Worst: A Message of Hope for Grieving Teens. We hope that you’ll stay tuned and call in. Our toll free number is 1-866-369-3742 or email me at gchorsley@aol.com.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host Dr. Gloria. Our topic today is: How Can We Help Them? Adolescents Grieve, Too. My guest today is Dr. Heidi Horsley, psychologist, bereaved sibling, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University. Heidi and I are co-authors of the book Making the Best of the Worst: A Message of Hope for Grieving Teens. Heidi is also a primary researcher for the Fireman Families in New York City, the 9/11 through the Columbia University Family Assessment Project. If you would like to email me about this show or upcoming shows, my email is gchorsley@aol.com. Heidi is also my daughter, I am happy to say, and Heidi we have a couple of phone calls that I want to take.
H: Okay. Before that I just wanted to say that Mom, you were saying earlier that there’s hope that again you will be happy and life will not be as painful. I just wanted to add to that, you will not only survive this, but you will thrive in the future, and there is hope that you will feel better eventually, and you will always remember your loved one. You’ll always remember your sibling, but you will feel good again.
G: We just have a wonderful family and wonderful kids and I just can’t say enough about how I never thought it would be like this again. Let’s take a call now from Preston from Carmel, California.
P: First of all, I want to congratulate you on this wonderful show. It’s very, very useful. My son was killed in an auto accident several years ago. I have a question for both of you. At the time we had and still have two daughters, one was in high school and one was in college. And I know that during that time as I look back on it and listen to your program, I realize I was caught up so much in my own grief that I failed to acknowledge the grief of these daughters. Although it’s been many years, I’m sure that I’ve made a lot of mistakes in that time frame, and I just wonder if there’s any way you could suggest that I could make it up to them?
G: Well, I’m going to give this to Heidi because she’s a sibling but I want to say this, Preston, as a bereaved parent, I can say I still feel the same way because I feel that I was so incapacitated that I really did a lousy job of parenting at that time but somehow it seemed to work out because I’ve got wonderful kids. But, Heidi, would you go for that?
H: Wow, Preston. I am very impressed that you have come out and said this and I think that if you went to your two daughters and said exactly what you said on the show to them, that would be amazing and that would be all that they would need to hear. You did the best you could at the time and is there anything at this point that you could do to help them because you realize how much they’ve been through and you had no idea the significance of a sibling loss and is there anything you can do now? I think that would be amazing gift to give them.
G: Are you up for that Preston?
P: I am, yes, indeed. Thank you so much. That’s wonderful advice. And again, I appreciate the work you’re doing. There’s a wide audience out there that needs this help. Thank you, again.
G: We’ve got Eliza.
E: I’m from Palo Alto, California. I’m 16 years old and last year my sister was killed in a car crash and it’s definitely been very difficult for all my family, but I think because of it, my parents aren’t letting me take driver’s ed this summer. They’re considering it in the fall but I really want to take this driver’s ed so I can learn how to drive and get myself around.
H: Okay, Eliza. That’s a tough one. I hear that over and over and over from teenagers saying look, my sibling died, I deserve to have a normal life and my friends are driving and I want to drive. While I can understand your parent’s concern, I also understand what you’re going through. You’re 16 and you want to learn how to drive. I’m wondering if there’s any way to compromise with your parents? I do a lot of comprising when I work with teens and their parents and find a way maybe that your parents could allow you to drive in the fall and maybe they could drive with you and you could reassure them that you’re going to be safe and wear a safety belt, and that you’re going to be a good driver so that their fears could be less.
G: As a parent I can say that those fears are very normal. I remember when Heather went out just to a party, some time after one of my son’s, Scott’s friends went out to find her to come back. He went to the party to see if she was okay and then came back to tell me she was okay. I was so terribly, terribly anxious. So there is a lot of fear and I think parents normally feel concerned about their kids driving but under these circumstances, it is nerve-racking for them and I can certainly understand that but we do have to let our teens do their thing.
H: And this is why it’s so hard to lose a sibling during your teenage years because you are separating, individuating, and becoming an adult, moving into that age, and your parents now are pulling you back in the system because they’re afraid another child is going to die and this is the time when you need to be able to move out of the family system a little bit.
G: But we certainly understand what you’re going through. Get your parents to listen to the show, Eliza.
H: Absolutely, that might help them. And like I said, try to compromise if they’ll do it.
E: Thank you very much for the advice.
H: Good luck, Eliza, take care.
G: Well, Heidi, I wanted to give some families some ideas about some of the things that we did, some of the things that are in the book, and some of the things they might do to work with their teens and with the family, and I know some of the tips we’ve got in the book are letting kids know that they have the right to grieve. Have you got a thought about that?
H: Acknowledging and validating sibling loss and letting kids know that now that you’ve heard the show, you realize how hard it must be for them, and how hard the loss is.
G: Could you talk a little bit about family fun night because I think that’s really important, it’s kind of amazingly important.
H: I think what happens is when a sibling dies and a child dies, we feel guilty about having fun again. We feel like I don’t have a right to have fun. I don’t have a right to enjoy myself because my brother’s dead. And so we need to give families permission and I actually go into families and I give them a homework assignment. I say every week, you have to go and do something with the family. You can start out doing it small and you have to go and have fun.
G: And this is with the 9/11 Fireman Families? I work with Heidi on that, and it’s interesting because that’s one of the biggest interventions is just giving them permission to have fun.
H: Absolutely, and the families come back. We only say do it once a week. Go out and have fun once a week. If they can do it more, wonderful, but we tell them that the assignment is once a week and they come back and thank us. They say we needed permission to take a break from grief because we feel guilty if we take a break from our grief.
G: So what we want to do on the show right now is we want to give all you people out there permission in fact, as a homework assignment, to have family fun time, but make it small. The first time it may be getting their favorite ice cream and having a bowl of it together, or maybe just walking around the block or maybe watching them skateboard or going bowling, maybe to a movie. But make sure you don’t make it like we’re going to do this whole weekend thing together at first. They may not be ready for it. How about rituals, Heidi?
H: I think rituals are very, very important because sometimes teenagers don’t want to talk about the loss but they want to have rituals in place. The whole family is remembering the person. In our situation, my parents would put a rose in the front hall on special occasions so we could go into the front hall and see that and we knew, oh, wow, it’s the day Scott died or it’s his birthday, but we didn’t have to say anything to each other. There wasn’t that pressure to speak, we just knew that that rose symbolized an important occasion that related to Scott. Also moving pictures around the house on certain days. People tell me they take their sibling’s photos and move them to important places in the house on their sibling’s birthday or on holidays. Balloons. You can get hot air balloons and let them go on the sibling’s birthday, the sibling who died.
G: And you can make up your own rituals, and you can email us with rituals, we’d love to use them on the show. Please email us the things you are doing in your family. It’s time to close our show now and I want to thank my guest and my daughter, Dr. Heidi Horsley. Heidi, I believe you’ve addressed many of the concerns of parents regarding their bereaved adolescents. Your messages of hope, courage, and finding a new normal really inspire me even as your mother. You’re a perfect example of how a child can go on to survive, thrive, and do amazing things, even after living through the death of a sibling. It’s a privilege to have you as a daughter and it’s been a great pleasure for me to have you on the show. I’m sure you’ve been a great help to all the grieving teens and their parents. Thank you so much, Heidi.
H: Mom, thank you for giving bereaved siblings a place to feel acknowledged, heard and validated. I think that’s very important. Thanks for having me on the show.
G: Please stay tuned again next week. Our topic is Suicide Changes Hearts. Hear Joyce Harvey, registered nurse, author, and Member of the Screen Actors Guild discuss the death in 1995 of her only child, Jennifer, by suicide. Joyce will give us hope in dealing with the stigma and grief of suicide. This show is archived on www.Health.VoiceAmerica.com as well as www.thecompassionatefriends.org websites. This is Dr. Gloria. Please stay tuned again next Thursday at 9:00 Pacific for more of Healing the Grieving Heart, a show of hope, renewal and support. Remember, you need not walk alone.