In this podcast, Dr. Jordan describes how to normalize a child’s grief and support them through the process of grieving instead of pathologizing, diagnosing, and medicating these normal emotions.
See links to previous related podcasts by Dr. Jordan:
- Embracing and Learning from Our “Dark Feelings” of Anger, Anxiety, and Grief
- 8 Mistakes Parents Make When Listening
- A 10 is a 10 is a 10: Understanding a Girl’s Emotional Roller Coaster
If you would like more information on understanding and dealing with your daughter’s emotional life, check out Dr. Jordan’s online course: Parenting Girls: The Challenges Girls Face Today with Their Feelings and Friends and What They Need.
—
Listen to the podcast
How To Support Girls Through Their Grief
In this episode, I have a more sobering, deep conversation that I want to have with you about the concept of grief. If you’re wondering why I’m talking about this, it’s because I see lots of girls in my counseling practice and also sometimes my retreats, this whole issue of loss and how we as a culture and as families deal with that issue. A lot of times, we don’t do a very good job of it. I saw a girl recently whose parents wanted her to come see me. She was a junior in high school. She had been sad. A lot of it was about the fact that she had lost two high school friends in a car accident a year previous. She had gone through some grieving, but she still was grieving. She was still sad.
The anniversary of their death had come up, and that had triggered another outpouring of grief from her. She was upset because none of her friends were still sad. Most of them looked at her like she was crazy, like, “It’s been a year. Move on.” Her parents thought she was too depressed. She needed to go see somebody. That’s why I got to see her. I think what this young lady needed was this to be heard. I think what she needed was for her emotions to be normalized, for her grief to be normalized, and for someone to tell her it’s okay to still be grieving. It’s okay to do it in your way and in your time. Too often, we don’t give kids that permission.
Cultural Handling Of Grief
I think the whole culture does a bad job of grieving. We do a bad job with all of the “dark emotions.” I did an episode where I interviewed the author of a book called Night Vision. I talked about all the emotions, especially things like anger, sadness, anxiety, and depression. I didn’t spend too much time on grief. I thought I would talk about this since I see it as an issue for many kids. Losses come in different packages. Sometimes it’s a loss of friends like this girl had. Sometimes it’s from the suicide of a friend. Sometimes it’s a loss of a friend group because somebody gets ditched, they get left out, and their friends move on.
Understanding Grief In Various Situations
Sometimes it’s because a friend moves. They move out of the city, so they lose their best friend, and they’re alone for a while. Sometimes it’s the loss of a pet. Sometimes we somewhat minimize that loss. For a lot of girls, their pets are important to them. For some girls, that’s a person who they go and talk to. That’s the one who always is there to listen. The loss of a pet is a big thing for lots of kids. It could be the loss of a parent. A loss of a parent, meaning a parent may pass away, or the parents get divorced, and this girl doesn’t see one of her parents be after the divorce, or she may see a parent sometimes, but not as much. Sometimes one of those parents will get remarried, and then they have other kids, and they have less time for them.
There’s a sense of, “I’ve lost my mom. I’ve lost my dad.” For some kids, it’s a parent who’s neglectful. I see kids sometimes whose parents have addiction issues, are alcoholics, or parents who work all the time and aren’t there. There’s a loss of that. For some kids who have been through divorce, it’s that loss of the family that they wish for, like their fantasy family.
I also see losses in things like moving on. I’ve done an episode about touch points, times in our lives when we’re about to go through a big leap in development. If you’re a senior in high school or a senior in college, there are times when you’re about to embark on a new leg of your journey that involves going towards your new adventure, the excitement of a new phase of your life, but it also means leaving behind the potential loss of friends, family, the relationships that you had, your nest, your safety zone. All that is, in a sense, loss for kids, which is why there’s a lot of emotional turmoil that comes up prior to big changes like that.
Big transitions. Big leaps in development. There are lots of ways that kids experience loss. I want to talk about a few things. First of all, I think the whole culture needs an adjustment as far as how we view grief. Let me read up on some of the ways that people express when people are sad or grieving and how people describe that. The girls I see themselves may describe this way are the people around them as well. They’ll say, “I’m falling apart. I’m falling to pieces.” People say, “She’s losing it,” or sometimes they’ll say, “I’ve been breaking down a lot. I’m a mess because I’ve been crying a lot. I’m down in the dumps.
Grief is often pathologized. We need a cultural shift in how we view and talk about sadness and loss. Let's change the narrative. Share on XI read this expression where people say sometimes, “My face is like a wet weekend.” I thought that was a funny one. At camp, sometimes when kids are missing their parents, we don’t say they’re a little bit sad because they’re missing home. They’ll say they’re home sick. Notice the word “sick” in there. We pathologize grief a lot of times. We talk about people who agonize and people in anguish. Sometimes we’ll see people grieving, and we automatically go to, “They’re depressed, despairing, and suffering. They’re down in the dumps. They’re miserable.”
We use expressions like, “They’re wailing. They have the blues. They are becoming brokenhearted, having a heavy heart, being heartsick.” Again, that’s the “sick” word. We talk about people who are crying, blubbering, bawling, and they’re turning on the waterworks. They’re sniffling and whimpering. We want people to keep it together. I think even the way we describe a lot of times the sad emotions and the grieving emotions tell us how we view them.
A lot of judgment, even the way we talk to people when they’ve lost someone, if they’ve lost a friend, an aunt, or a grandparent. We talk about their person being in a better place. We tell them like, “Everything was for the best,” or if someone loses a child with a miscarriage or something, they’ll say, “You can always have another child.” You won’t always feel this bad. You’re stronger than you think. Everything happens for a reason. A lot of those expressions that are well-intentioned send some message that, “I want you to stop feeling because you’re making me uncomfortable. I don’t like being around sadness. I don’t like being around grief.”
Those expressions are like, “Move along because you’re stirring up a lot of emotions in me. I don’t like that. I’m uncomfortable.” We try to push people too quickly through their grief as if grief is a problem to be fixed instead of an experience for them to have to pass through. Sometimes kids, who are doing normal grieving, become classified as being depressed.
Grief became classified in the DSM as a mental health disorder. They even created a new concept called Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder. A lot of times what happens is we pathologize it. I’ve read somewhere that one of the fathers of psychiatry, Emil Kraepelin, decided in 1917 that grief was an illness. It became physicalized, pathologized, and then it started to become medicated. Now it’s all those things over, all those things way amped up, especially the medication thing. We’re medicalizing normality.
The Importance Of Allowing Grief
All those judgments that we have about people who are grieving, even judgments about people who are sad. I think sometimes we see people who are sad as being, “People who are grieving as being sad.” We see people describe them as being lazy, sometimes self-indulgent, broken, self-pitying, and weak. That’s still in the culture, especially for boys, but girls as well. They’re having a pity party. They’re wallowing in their pity, and we oftentimes shame them for having normal emotions. A lot of those dark moods, as I said, have been classified as mental illnesses. They’re classified as diseases and pathology. It’s an illness that needs to be treated. It’s a problem that needs to be treated as opposed to an experience that needs to be experienced and passed through.
In this culture, it’s easy to stay busy with our emotions. It’s easy to stay distracted from them with our busy schedules, devices, and our social media. People don’t oftentimes have the will or the courage or the time to sit down and allow themselves to feel things and allow themselves to go through that. I talked about that in the previous episode. Even when people offer people tools for their emotions, it suggests that something is broken. We want to cheer people up. We want to do it to make other people less uncomfortable. Not only does it make people feel ashamed of having those emotions, but it also makes them feel misunderstood and more alone. They feel bad about feeling bad. They feel like they’re disappointing people around them. There’s a sense of if you loved your family, if you loved your friends, you would hide those dark emotions so you don’t make them sad.
Feeling bad about feeling bad can make us feel like we're disappointing others. It's important to allow ourselves to experience our emotions. Share on XIn the episode I did about the book Night Vision, I talked about how having emotions like sadness and grief is a way for people to connect in a sense because most of us have experienced losses. There’s a chance for people to say, “I know that feeling. I know you. I understand.” If people talk about how misery loves company, that’s because misery, sadness, and grief want company. We want to be seen and heard. We want to be understood. We want someone to hug us and put their arms around us and say, “I know this feeling. It’s okay. I get you. I am here to listen.”
I give a lot of talks and things, so sometimes I forget when I said. There was a sweet children’s book called Rabbit Listened. It’s about this little boy who gets upset because these birds come by and knock down this beautiful tower of blocks and Legos he had taken so much time to build. People keep coming by. He’s sitting in his room looking at a frown on his face. People come by to try and cheer him up. He doesn’t want to be cheered up. His parents come by. Different animals come by and offer different kinds of things.
Creating Space For Grieving
A hyena wants him to laugh about it. None of those things helps. He’s still angry, then a rabbit comes into the room and sits down next to him and doesn’t say a word. He just sits there and allows him to be, and feel, and to be exactly where he is, then the boy does open up. He does start to talk about it, but only because the rabbit created that space for him. We all can do that because 1) We can all be empathetic listeners, but also, we all know how that feels. Those expressions of sadness and grief are meant to trigger compassion and connection within us.
Connecting Through Shared Experiences
We’re wired for connection. We’re wired for a sense of belonging. We’re wired to be with people. That’s one of the valuable things of my weekend retreats and summer camps for girls. We have circle time in the weekend retreats and the summer camps, where the girls are all the same age, either grade school, middle school, or high school. They get a chance to talk about their lives and experiences, and sometimes something like loss comes up, and then people get to hear about all the different losses that other people have experienced.
All the ones I mentioned, about parents, friends, death, the loss of their childhood, and about moving on, not wanting to grow up. There are all kinds of losses. Having the ability to sit in a safe circle with your peers and to share your grief, feelings, and experiences, you’re not judged and nobody tries to fix you, they just listen, then they also end up sharing their own stories often. They say, “I get you. I see you. I understand. I’ve been through something similar,” and then they share their story.
What girls will say after having a weekend of those kinds of sharing experiences is, “I used to think I was crazy. I always thought I was the only one. Now I know I’m not alone. Other people can’t understand. Other can see and understand me.” That’s a very deep level of connection. In our retreats and summer camps, we also connect through high-intensity and fun in lots of ways. That deep sharing in those circle times is one way of connecting.
All of your kids need to have an experience like that, either with their mom, dad, uncle, a counselor like me, or a camp experience like ours, instead of being pathologized, labeled, and medicated. There’s an old story that I use sometimes in my retreats in camps. It’s about a little girl who’s upset. She goes to her grandfather. She tells him about having all these negative, angry, sad thoughts in her head. The grandfather says, “I know what you’re talking about. I have the same thing going on in my head. It’s like I have two wolves in my head. One wolf is very angry, pessimistic, and upset and says negative, critical things to me, but there’s this other wolf in my head who’s very optimistic, positive, encouraging, loving, and nurturing. Those two wolves are always fighting to see which one’s going to win out.”
His granddaughter said, “Which one of the wolves wins?” The grandfather said, “The wolf that wins is the one that I feed the most.” Now, I don’t want that to mean that you only feed positive feelings because sometimes I think kids in our culture have gotten the message that you should always have positive feelings. You should always be cheerful. You should never be angry, sad, and anxious. When in reality, being fully human means you feel all those things.
Being fully human means feeling all emotions, not just happiness. Kids should know it's normal to feel sad, angry, or anxious. Share on XBeing fully human doesn’t mean you’re supposed to be feeling happy. It’s about being able to feel everything in its time. The wolf story doesn’t mean don’t feed or don’t think about, or don’t process through or express those emotions. It means don’t dwell on them only and forget about the other stuff because I want kids to be able to express and to be in those emotions. I’ll talk about that a little bit more in a minute.
First and foremost, we need to do a better job of understanding those emotions. We need to stop labeling, pathologizing, and medicating at the first sign of any grief or sadness. We need to allow girls to know that it’s normal and healthy for them to grieve at their own pace, in their own way, and in their own time. That girl who’s in high school, who I saw, I told her, “It’s okay for you to still be grieving.” She’s doing fine in life. She’s not sad all the time. Sometimes things get triggered, some things at school, or she’ll hear about a car accident or she’ll think about her friends and it’s okay.
I usually tell kids that, “For the rest of your life, there’s going to be a soft place in your heart about that experience. It’s like your life is a tapestry. That’s one of the little squares in your tapestry. Sometimes it’ll be triggered and sad feelings may come up, and that’s okay. That’s being fully alive.” I try to normalize it for kids, that’s it’s okay to do it in their own way and time.
I saw a girl in my counseling practice several months ago who had her first real boyfriend. This girl is now a junior in high school. They dated for six months, and then he ghosted her and then within a couple of days, he was dating one of her best friends. She felt sad, angry, disappointed, and she was confused. She had a whole myriad of emotions, which is normal. Now I saw her, it’s been six months and people are upset with her because she hasn’t moved on. She should be over him. The truth is, unfortunately, that she has to see her ex every day at school and her ex-best friend for that matter, then she’ll see them at things as she saw them at prom. Things got triggered again. She bumps into them because he doesn’t live too far from her house.
Every day at school, she’ll see them walking down the hallway holding hands. She’s going to be triggered. That makes it a lot harder to grieve and to be able to process through and move on because it’s still right in her face. It would’ve been a lot easier if he went to a different school or something. I want her to know that it’s okay for her to still be grieving that loss. She never got closure. She’s going to have to create closure within herself because he will probably never do that for her, but only when she’s ready.
I let her know that, “When you’re ready, I can help you through that process of not only letting it go, but maybe a process of forgiveness.” She’s not ready for it, and that’s okay, but at some point, she’ll probably want to let that go because, otherwise, she will keep being triggered. In a sense, she’s giving him the power to change her moods. I had a different girl who grew up in a home where her mom was an alcoholic. Starting at about the age of four, her mom became pretty neglectful because she was drunk a lot at home.
When she was around her daughter, she was very critical and snapped at her a lot and took out her anger on her daughter. This girl became very close to her dad and she did a great job, by the way of being there for her. She experienced her mom’s behavior as a loss. She lost her mom or the mom she wanted her to be. When she would go to friend’s houses and see them with their mom, it always made her sad because that’s what she wanted, and she didn’t have it.
Her mom has been sober now for one year. Her mom wants her to just forgive, forget, and move on. This girl is not quite ready to let go of all those emotions. She’s still feeling the loss of what once was, or could have been with her mom. She’s also still angry. I think the sadness and the loss is even bigger. That’s like the more the root feeling. I told her it was still okay for her to not be ready to forgive. She says her mom has never apologized. That sticks in her craw. Her mom may never apologize. Her mom may never be willing to face that because of probably her shame, etc. She has not been through a twelve-step program, which may have helped her through.
That’s one of the steps. Even so, I let this girl know it’s okay for her not to be ready. I can help her through that process of learning about forgiveness and all that, but when she’s ready, it’s okay for her to have whatever feeling she wants. There’s a cost to her of hanging on to anger because she gets triggered a lot. There’s a cost, but she’s willing right now to experience the cost. I told her, “When you’re ready to not be triggered much and all that, I can shepherd you through that process.”
It means that our kids need healthy ways to express their emotions. I talked about this prior to the need for our girls, and boys for that matter, to have regular, quiet alone time where they can process their thoughts and emotions and express their emotions in healthy ways. That can look like having a good cry. It can look like talking to someone like their mom, dad, or their best friend, coming to someone like me and talking about stuff if they need a safe place outside the home.
They sometimes need the stuffed animals that they talk to. Sometimes they talk to their pets, which is why the loss of a pet for some girls is devastating. They need to get that quiet alone time so they can go inward and know what they’re feeling. I’ve talked before about how many times girls’ emotions stack up, fill up to the point of overload because they don’t express them. They stuff them. They get busy from them. They get distracted by them. That emotional overload and overwhelm is when things start to leak out.
Sometimes what leaks out is depression. They need to be able to go inward, to know what they’re feeling and to express it in healthy ways. I encourage girls to write in their journals, write down their emotions, and anything that they’re feeling. It should be a private journal so they can write anything. It may be hate and curse words. I want them to blow it out. Let it all hang out, to get it out and not judge it. This is stuff that needs to come out. I’ve talked to them about the value of if they’re missing someone, writing them a letter.
I have girls sometimes in my office, and I have them close their eyes. I do a visualization with them where I have them imagine someone they lost, who comes to them. I have them imagine they’re sitting in the middle of a clearing in the forest, like sitting on a big stone, and their grandfather, aunt, or their best friend who they lost will come and sit by them. They have a conversation in their mind. They tell them what’s going on in their lives. They tell them how much they miss them. Sometimes they have them ask that person for a piece of advice. That’s touching for kids. They go there and feel it. It feels good for them to know that, “That person is not here in person in my life, but they’re still in my heart. They can be in my memories. I can bring them forward and be with them for a little while.”
There are lots of ways for kids to express emotions, journal letters, stories, write songs, and write poetry. The written word is a healthy way to express emotions, as is using art. I’m going to see if I can get some art pieces that girls have done for me that are hanging in my office. I’ll try and get a good enough picture to put on this show. I have about twenty pieces of art on the wall. They’re all different, expressing their emotions at home. Some are abstract. It’s amazing. I’ll take a picture of all of them. Hopefully, it’ll show up on the show.
Drawing, painting, sculpting, dancing, and playing an instrument. There are lots of avenues and ways to experience the release. Talking with the safe listener. I mentioned it before. I think parents can be that person. I hope they are. I would love for your daughters to feel comfortable and safe enough to talk to you about their emotions and grief. It means you have to be a good listener. Learn to mirror. Listen for a while and then say, “What I heard you say is, blah, blah, blah. Is that right? Tell me more. I don’t understand. Tell me more about that.” It’s valuable for kids to know that, “My parents are trying to get in my shoes, walk around in my shoes, see things from my point of view without judgment and without going right to advice.”
A safe listener is vital for kids to talk about their emotions. Parents can be that person, providing comfort and understanding. Share on XHow many girls I talk to talk about how their parents interrupt. They go quickly to fix-it mode, especially dads, but moms too. A lot of girls complain their moms go to this place of, “What about me? You think you’ve had such a hard day,” then they make it about them. To the girl, that’s hurtful that, “I’m opening up to you. I’m being vulnerable. I want you to be there for me, and now you want me to be there for you.” That’s an unhealthy way for people to be there, learning how to listen, be a good mirror, not to overreact, not to judge, not to fix, but just to be there. That’s like the rabbit who listens. It’d be good for us to normalize their emotions. Becoming aware of the cost to them when they stuff their emotions.
I talked about those in previous episodes. Headaches, stomach aches, getting sick a lot, anger, being angry at yourself, having problems falling asleep or staying asleep, depression, anxiety, and being distracted. There are many costs to holding onto things. For a lot of kids, they feel ashamed about how they feel. That shame builds. It’s devastating to hold onto shame when it is normal and should be normalized for them. I talked about those safe spaces like my camp.
They need safe spaces somewhere. For some kids, that’s when they go to grandma and grandpa’s house, they may have a grandparent they feel close to or an aunt or an uncle. That could be a church group, or it could be a camp like we have for girls where they have a safe place to let it go. I run a group for high school girls every semester. Usually, I have 8 or 10 girls, and they love the group. They like to sit in a circle of their peers on the ground in my little meditation chairs. Every two weeks they have a safe space to let it all hang out, talk and share.
Sometimes it’s anger. Sometimes it’s sadness. They’re looking for feedback from their peers. They’re looking for feedback from me, but having those safe spaces is valuable for kids. I think most of us as adults can look back on our childhoods and remember somebody who was there for us, somebody we would go to. Oftentimes it’s not a parent, but somebody we could go to and they would be there for us. They would mentor us. They would take us under their wing. It’s valuable. It’s good for kids to have people outside the home. It’s good for them to have people like you inside their home, but sometimes it’s good for them to have people who aren’t in the home.
Sometimes, some kids may need more help than just their mom or dad listening to them. I think if you see your daughter isolating herself, if you see her with a lot of changes, she’s not talking to her friends, she’s lost interest in her normal interests and passions. If you see her not wanting to go to school and she doesn’t feel safe talking to you, and you notice that not only does she look a little depressed, but it’s been lasting for weeks, she hides in her room. If you see signs like that, that’s different from normal grief. At some point, then she might need to talk to someone like me, a counselor.
It’s not a verdict about how good or bad a parent you are. Kids want to talk to someone outside of mom and dad. It means sometimes they need someone different, an outsider’s point of view. Please provide that for them in some way, shape, or form. We need to normalize emotions. We need to stop being afraid of grief. We need to let kids know that those are normal feelings. There’s no timeline. It isn’t like it’s been a month, you should be over it.
Stop using those express expressions like “she’s losing it” and all of that, as I mentioned earlier in the show. Stop talking like that. Stop going right to fix mode and say things like, “It’s all going to be fine. It’ll pass. They’re in a better place.” Those are things that keep girls stuck in their emotions. It adds a level of shame to disappointing people, “Maybe I shouldn’t feel this way.” I don’t want girls feeling that. I want them to know that grief is a normal process. Those emotions are normal emotions.
They do need to be heard, understood, have an outlet, and some time. It does get easier, but I wouldn’t throw that at them right away. It does get easier when you’ve broken up with your boyfriend. I tell kids all the time that there’s something called self-compassion, which I’ve talked about previously. Self-compassion is when you’re having a hard time coming to terms with something. You imagine in your mind, if your mom, dad, therapist, or best friend was in your head, what would they say to you in this moment? Would they shame you? Would they judge you for feeling what you’re feeling, or would they be understanding and nurturing? I would imagine what they would say, then I would say that to yourself.” That’s one big part of self-compassion.
Encourage self-compassion in kids. Remind them that everyone experiences loss, and it's okay to feel sad and take time to heal. Share on XAnother part of self-compassion is remembering that everybody in the world probably has gone through a breakup. Your mom, dad, and most people have gone through a breakup. It is tough and it’s horrible. It’s a deep loss and eventually we do move on and we find other people. We get married, et cetera, et cetera. There’s a sense I can connect with this universal experience that losses are tough. Losses are hard to get through. It takes a while. But if all those people can eventually process through and move through it, that I can too.
At some point, it’d be good for girls to rely on and lean on their self-compassion, but not at the expense of first listening and letting them have their emotions. Let’s all do a much better job of supporting our girls and boys through their grief and through all the different losses that they experienced throughout their childhoods.
If you have other ideas for episodes you’d like for me, other topics for episodes, then you can, mail my wife Anne@DrTimJordan.com with comments, feedback, and requests for future topics. I enjoy doing these. I love doing these. I love the feedback that I get, and I appreciate that you take the time on a walk, driving in the car, and however you read this to read. I will see you all back here in the next episode.
Important Links
- Night Vision – Past Episode
- Anne@DrTimJordan.com
- https://DrtTimJordan.com/2023/05/Parents-Listening-Empathize-Distracted-Emotions-Teenagers-Mirroring/ – Past Episode
- https://DrTimJordan.com/2021/09/Girls-Emotions-Feelings-Loss-Parents-Daughters-Girls-Pets-Expressing-Emotions/ – Past Episode
- https://DrTimJordan.Teachable.com/P/Parenting-Girls – Past Episode