I’m lucky that I have never had to cope with the death of a child myself, although I have counselled parents who have been through this trauma. I created a new download session ‘Death of a child’ for hypnosisdownloads.com not with the aim of stopping parents from grieving but just, hopefully, as a useful tool to get them to take a rest from the exhausting process that grieving can be.
I have noticed that many grieving parents (or any people who are grieving, for that matter) can get caught in a kind of a guilt trap.
Guilt and the grieving parent
Losing a child, of course, is terrible, whatever the circumstances. Parents may feel guilty, traumatized and desperately worried about the state of siblings and other relatives of the child who died. But of course eventually the parent needs to come through the worst of the grieving process.
Now a parent may find themselves just naturally thinking about the child less sometimes, or even enjoying themselves, as they begin to feel more re-connected to life. This may cause them terrible guilt. In this hypnotic session I talk about the need to ‘rest from grieving’. I suggest that, like anything that people do, grieving can be done well. And part of ‘doing it well’ involves resting from it. An athlete, to be truly good, needs to train and think about their event, but they also need to rest and switch their mind to other things sometimes. It is this resting which makes their training better where they do focus on it. So to grieve really well one needs time away from the grieving – time to rest and relax. By approaching it like this we can break free of the ‘double bind’ of ‘If I’m not thinking about them as much, it must mean I love them less!’
The session uses deep relaxation and a metaphor of hope, and I truly hope is an opportunity for grieving parents to recharge their batteries. I have found the approaches used in this hypnotic download to be very helpful to grieving parents.
Mark
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