Breaking the Silence

A Guide to Helping Children with Complicated Grief - Suicide, Homicide, AIDS, Violence and Abuse

Linda Goldman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781583913123
• eBook ISBN: 9781317756705
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The second edition of this bestselling book is designed for mental health professionals, educators, and the parent/caregiver, this book provides specific ideas and techniques to work with children in various areas of complicated grief. It presents words and methods to help initiate discussions of these delicate topics, as well as tools to help children understand and separate complicated grief into parts. These parts in turn can be grieved for and released one at a time. A new chapter is included, called "Communities Grieve: Involvement with Children and Trauma." It includes information on The Taiwan Earthquake and how the community worked with children, a school bus accident in which 36 elementary school children witnessed the death of the bus driver that was driving and how the school system worked with these children and their families; a boy who was running on a cross country team and got hit by a car, which was witnessed by teammates; and how a non-profit community grief agency worked with family, school, and community. The last study is from the Oklahoma bombing and the outgrowth of a place for the traumatized children and how they still work with kids and family today. This chapter then contains new activities to work with traumatized grieving children. The new edition also includes updated resources, books, curriculums, websites, hotlines and another new chapter on bullying and victimization issues. The chapter for educators has been expanded, including the coverage of topics such as at-risk students, gay and lesbian issues, and self-injurious behaviors.

P A R T I

Complicated Grief

C H A P T E R I

What Is Children’s Complicated Grief?

TERRORISTS BLOW UP BUILDING AND MURDER KIDS AND ADULTS MOM KILLS DAD • DAD KILLS MOM • BROTHER IS STABBED OUTSIDE HOME • FRIEND HANGS HIMSELF • UNCLE MURDERED IN DRIVE-BY SHOOTING • SISTER GETS AIDS • DRUNKEN DRIVER KILLS TEACHER • GRANDMOTHER DIES OF SUDDEN HEART ATTACK CHILDREN KIDNAPPED FROM HOME AND MURDERED GRANDFATHER SHOOTS HIMSELF IN HEAD • TEACHER ARRESTED FOR RAPE • MOM DROWNS TWO CHILDREN BABYSITTER BEATS INFANT TO DEATH

---

A Look at Grief

My first book, Life and Loss: A Guide to Help Grieving Children, concentrates on normal grief work with children. The four tasks of normal grief—understanding, grieving, commemorating, and moving on—are presented and explained. The emphasis of Life and Loss is on recognizing and understanding the denial that so often accompanies loss and grief.

Death is viewed culturally as the enemy of life. Even though we know death cannot be avoided, we generally push it out of our minds and live in denial of its everyday presence. Consequently, we are unprepared to deal with death and become shocked and traumatized when we are forced to face it. Sooner or later, adults and children will be called upon to face the loss of a loved one. Our culture does not always provide the support and openness needed to accept normal grief, and the complications involved with issues of suicide, homicide, AIDS, abuse, and violence cry out for a new way of seeing in our society. If we, as a society, can see differently, so can our children.

The goal of Breaking the Silence is to provide a guide for caring adults to help children with these complicated issues. The scarcity of children’s works on the topics of suicide, homicide, AIDS, violence, abuse, bullying, and terrorism only magnifies the need to create a resource that gives adults and children the words to break this prison of silence and denial that is so much a part of today’s culture. This prison of silence and denial was not created by the children. They were born into it. A 12-year-old who refuses to tell her friend that her father died for fear she will have to tell her friend how her father died faces a prison of silence locked shut by society. An 8-year-old who continually runs away from school, shouting and screaming to teachers and administrators his desire to not live any longer, is told by the health care system that there is no hurry for him to be seen because he is just being manipulative. Couldn't suicide be the ultimate manipulation? And who would ultimately be responsible? We (society) would be. Let’s get these kids help.

We need to open a door and allow the children to breathe freely the fresh air of truth. By bringing these subjects into the light of day without fear and shame, we can create a healing environment for communicating loss and grief.

Hopefully, Breaking the Silence will help accomplish this goal. First, adults are given specific ideas, techniques, resources, and materials to use with children in each area of complicated grief. Second, adults are given the specific words to use with children and ways to initiate discussions of these anxiety-producing topics. Third, caring adults are given the information and tools to help them separate the child from the circumstances surrounding his or her loss and grief. These complications of grief must be recognized and dealt with before normal grief can be acknowledged and released.

Despite the complicated circumstances of suicide, homicide, AIDS, violence, and abuse, the underlying process of grief is universal and timeless. As horrendous as these circumstances are, they could happen to any one of us at any time.

Photographs of nature, animals, and children are interwoven throughout this book to continually remind us that the cycle of life and death is ever present and ongoing. The death of someone or something we love is a normal and natural process of life that we all will experience.

The photographs in this book are intended to provide an ongoing reminder that suicide, homicide, AIDS, and other “unnatural events” exist in daily life and need to be addressed and dealt with openly. The “unnatural” has become a very common part of the world of today’s children. By recognizing this, caring adults can break through the silent shame and stigma of complicated grief issues with children and help them reach the underlying feelings of loss and grief that everyone shares.

---

What is Normal Grief?

Grief is defined as a normal, internalized reaction to the loss of a person, thing, or idea. It is our emotional response to loss.

Bereavement is the state of having lost something, whether it is a significant other, significant things, or our own sense of will.

Mourning means taking the internal experience of grief and expressing it outside ourselves, It is the cultural expression of grief as seen in traditional or creative rituals. Traditional rituals are ones that are culturally sanctioned, such as funerals. Creative rituals can be writing a letter to the deceased and then destroying it.

Rituals are the behaviors we use to do grief work.

Goldman, Life and Loss (2000, p, 25)

---

These definitions are explained in my first book Life and Loss: A Guide to Help Grieving Children (2000), A brief overview of normal grief is important in order to differentiate between normal grief and the many complications that can occur, Sandra Fox, in her book Good Grief (1988, p. 21), defined the four psychological tasks of grief as:

Understanding

Grieving

Commemorating

Going On

The first task is understanding. Kids need to make sense of loss at whatever developmental stage they experience it. Children have different developmental perceptions of death. Young children feel death is reversible, and many times their magical thinking makes them feel that they may have caused the death, A cliche such as “your Mom is better off dead; she was suffering so much” can only inhibit the normal grief process of a child who misses his or her mom.

The second task is grieving. Children will experience physical, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral symptoms in normal grief. These normal grief signals range from stomach aches and nightmares to poor grades and hostility towards friends.

• Child continually retells events about the loved one and his or her death

• Child feels the loved one is present in some way and speaks of him or her in the present tense

• Child dreams about the loved one and longs to be with him or her

• Child experiences nightmares and sleeplessness

• Child cannot concentrate on schoolwork

• Child appears at times to feel nothing

• Child is preoccupied with death and exces...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the Second Edition
• Preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Complicated Grief
• Part II Breaking the Silence
• Part III Techniques
• Part IV Resources
• References
• About the Author
• Author Index
• Subject Index