Dr. Dan (00:00):

Grief is sad. A loss, a significant loss is sad. It is always sad, right? That doesn’t change. I think our ability to relate to that sadness does change. So sometimes the sadness is actually a really healthy sign of moving in that right direction.

Dr. Sarah (00:22):

As parents and caregivers, we want to protect our children from pain, so when they experience a profound loss like the death of a parent or a sibling, we can struggle to know how to support them. Joining me today is Dr. Dan Wolfson, a clinical psychologist specializing in grief. Dan is the founder and director of Wolfson Psychology Group, a private practice in New York City, and the Clinical Director of Experience Camp’s Adult Grief Retreat, a nonprofit organization where he also spent a decade as the clinical director, the regional summer camp program for grieving children. In this episode, we’ll offer valuable insights for navigating this difficult experience like the importance of finding spaces where kids can feel normal, recognizing that grief doesn’t have a fixed timeline and can resurface in unexpected ways and strategies to help kids make sense of and integrate their feelings of sadness to allow them to process their loss without making it be what defines them. We’ll also dive into practical strategies for determining when a child is ready to return to activities like schools, sports, birthday parties, and the resilience building skills that allow children to grieve in a healthful way. If you or your child or a family that you know are navigating profound loss, this conversation is here to remind you healing isn’t linear and you don’t have to do it alone.

(01:53):

Hi, I am Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology, and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights so you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is Securely Attached.

(02:22):

Hello everybody. We are back with the Securely Attached podcast. We have Dr. Dan Wolfson here today, so thank you for coming on the show.

Dr. Dan (02:34):

Yeah, I’m excited to be here and looking forward to chatting a bit. Appreciate you having.

Dr. Sarah (02:38):

Yeah, I’m so glad you’re here. So you’re a psychologist, you have a group practice in the city, correct. But you also specialize in a very specific type of work, and so I was hoping you might talk a little bit today just for people who are listening and what you do and how you got into this line of work.

Dr. Dan (02:57):

Sure, yeah. So yeah, my practice, we have a small group practice and we specialize in grief. I’ve worked in grief in a number of different settings, and I guess I should say today when we’re talking about grief, we’re talking about it specifically in relationship to a death loss. Obviously grief can apply to all sorts of losses, and I think that’s applicable to how I think about working as a therapist more broadly with clients who aren’t not necessarily impacted by a death loss as well. But for today, I think our conversation’s going to focus on bereavement, and I think there are a lot of therapists who might kind of put grief on their website is something I do super well-intentioned. All therapists I hope, are caring and able to make space for emotions, but not everybody necessarily has an expertise in grief and really kind of understands the trajectory of it or the ways we can support people in adapting to loss. So that’s something we’re going to talk more about today in terms of how we think about the arc of grief. I’ve been working in the space for a long time. I’m also very open in sharing. A big part of what brought me to this work is my mom died when I was 18, so I do have that felt experience as well, which I think can be important in this space, especially in just letting people know they’re sitting with somebody who does get it and have a felt experience of it as well.

(04:31):

Long before I had my doctorate, I got involved with a nonprofit organization called Experience Camps, which I know will speak about some today as well. That’s a nonprofit that runs one week overnight camps for kids who have experienced a loss. So I started there as a volunteer, went on to be a clinician, and then eventually a clinical director. It’s an organization I’m still involved with and I’ve gotten so much out of it. I’ve learned so much from it, and it’s really given me the opportunity to see firsthand how people can, and children can lead joyful lives and have amazing moments even when they’re experiencing and have been impacted by loss. So often when we tell people that we work for this, when I say my wife and I are both very involved with this program, my wife Jenna Wolf’s a social worker herself, they’re like, that sounds so sad. You’re at this kid sad camp and if you walk onto camp at any moment, kids are laughing and playing and hanging out together and they have this deeper bond because there is this shared experience of loss, and I can talk a little bit more about the kind of structure of the week of camp.

(05:52):

But they’re also there to have fun and do a climbing tower and make some mores and all those amazing campy things, and it’s just really beautiful to see how acknowledgement of the loss and the grief related emotion, sadness, all of those things goes hand in hand with the importance of feeling kind of like a hopefulness for yourself and being able to actually have an experience of having fun as well.

Dr. Sarah (06:18):

And I imagine honestly those things together in such a, because at camps it’s like everything’s volume up, it’s amplified, it’s intensive, and I think having those two things paired together in such a rich and intensive way might actually wire the brain a bit to help them have associations of if we only associate grieving with sadness and pain and loneliness or whatever, all these things that can come with it, if we only associate with that and we don’t pair it with celebrating life and even just things unrelated to death, just being fun, being playful and joyful and having a good time. When you wire those things together, I imagine it can also help with just the healing process.

Dr. Dan (07:08):

Yeah, I think something that people sometimes don’t realize is in order to adapt to grief and to metabolize it and process it, you can’t just fully be in that lost space you need to have, we talk a lot about oscillation of leaning into the grief and then taking a step back from it. And I sometimes talk about the right way to study isn’t to cram for a test. You need to give yourself time to kind of process it and digest it. And so when you’ve had an experience that kind of changes the foundation from which you are living your life and the way that you see the world, and in a moment everything can change that is going to take some time to process. And so we really do need to have that experience of both leaning into what I think people think about when they think about what grief looks like, the sadness and talking about the person and the loss of it and all the changes that come in their lives and all of those things. And then to also take a step back from it and to be experiencing positive emotion like we talked about also to just be reengaging with the world in a different way. I do think that being able to see yourself in relation to peers, especially with kids, is so important to be able to have your experience normalized because grief can also be really, really isolating and maybe that’s a good place to dive in. Just thinking about the kids’ developmental experience of loss.

(08:46):

If a kid is in a classroom of 20 kids, statistically they’re probably the one kid in that class, maybe one and a half kids in that class, his experienced loss, and we know everybody, but especially children, especially teenagers, we want to fit in. We want to feel normal, we want to feel like a part of the group. And so when you have an experience like grief that’s so isolating, you can feel really othered. And I think that having these peer based models and being able to see yourself in the context of, oh, this doesn’t make me weird or abnormal in some way. I’m here with these other kids, we’re able to hang out and talk about Minecraft or whatever the stuff kids want to talk about might be talk. And we’ve had this experience that’s really, really impactful.

Dr. Sarah (09:37):

That makes so much sense to me because I haven’t, I’ve been very lucky and I’m mindful, I’m thankful for this regularly, but I have not yet experienced a very significant loss. I’ve lost both my grandparents, but I was an adult when I lost both of them. But my dad lost both his parents when he was, by the time he was in college, he had lost them both. And so I’ve grown up knowing sort of adjacent to the experience of grief, but it’s so different. And I know too with kids, and I would love to talk a little bit more about just the developmental kind of what’s typical. And obviously all kids are different, but sort of generally speaking across the different stages of development, how kids handle and process group grief differently. But I can also think about it from the perspective of the kids who have not even very young kids, but also that middle school age and older, they can be so well intentioned but not know what to say or say or just knowing they don’t know what to say can create this sense of disconnect. And I think that can add to the sense of loneliness too and isolation when you are the one experiencing the grief, just knowing obviously you know what you’re going through, but to also be in this dynamic where you’re watching kids struggle to connect to you because they don’t know.

(11:09):

There really are not a lot of social skills yet. This is something we learned just through going through. And so even that empathy is really, there could be an intention of empathy, but I’m aware I have no idea what to say to you, and so I’m going to just kind of avoid this or I’m going to be clunky or maybe I’m intrusive and I just feel like then it sits on the child who’s experiencing the grief to have to regulate themselves and even regulate everybody else around them, which is such a burden for a kid who’s grieving.

Dr. Dan (11:40):

Yeah, I mean what you’re saying applies to adults as well. Adults don’t know how to talk about grief when they experienced it, and we’d like to think adults have a bit more social skills and cognitive capacity and all of those things. And I think we as a society really stink about talking about grief. And so how do we expect kids to get it right? And you’re right, I think a kid often feels like, all right, now I’m the grief kid. And so either what happens is they don’t talk about it and it’s just set aside and they are kind of grieving privately and they’re just trying to kind of hide it because again, kids want to appear normal, and I’m putting normal in quotes, whatever that means or what might happen. Something we kind of talk about at camp is what are some of the worst things people say?

(12:36):

And you might have a really well-intentioned peer who says, yeah, I know how you feel. My dog died. And that’s coming from a place of trying to connect, and I will also acknowledge to all of the pet lovers, but the loss of a dog is a significant loss. We care about our pets, all of those things, that’s not the same as losing a parent or sibling. So now all of a sudden you also have someone who’s trying to connect with you, but you just feel even more, oh, you really don’t get it. These kids really don’t understand what I’m going through and now I might feel minimized in my experience. There just isn’t the space to really be able to feel acknowledged and feel seen. And so that is where I think, again, the group model is really, really important. Being able to talk about grief at home with your family and your community and the people who are sharing in that loss is really, really important. Or having a therapist who gets it and can help, especially with kids, start to kind of scaffold and build that narrative. So that is a big part of grief too, is kind of figuring out how you understand it. Again, to take a step back and do a quick kind of grief psychoeducation, if I can.

(13:57):

For kids or adults, we talk about acute grief and integrated grief as these kind of two presentations. So acute grief is what we think of when we think of what a person’s experiencing immediately after a loss. So the grief is raw, it’s intense, it overshadows everything. And I’m sure for our listeners who have experienced grief, that kind of resonates, right? We talked about your world is shaken, so then the lens through which you’re seeing everything is stemming back to that grief. It’s really persistent. It’s this cloud that is following you every day. It’s really heavy and you don’t really have the capacity to necessarily regulate it. You’re reminded of it all the time. You’re thinking about the person, you’re missing the person, all of those things. And if we think about ourselves or somebody we know who’s a loss and say, we picture that person five years later, they’re still impacted by their grief.

(14:56):

They’re still impacted by their loss, but it looks different. It is not as much on the front lines of their day-to-day experience. We hope that people still have an ongoing relationship and ongoing connection to the person who died, but maybe you can talk about them in more of a bittersweet way or even kind of a fond way of sharing memories or remembering things you learn from the person. There might be certain times of the year, mother’s Day, father’s Day, a birthday, the anniversary of the death holidays we’re just past the holiday season, which can be a really challenging time for people impacted by loss. So it’s still going to show up. It’s still a part of you. Another thing we don’t like to hear people say is that you never kind of get past your grief. I don’t talk about moving on, I talk about moving with.

(15:49):

And I think that’s a really important distinction. How am I continuing my life even with the presence of this grief and having experienced this loss? So that’s what I’m talking about when I talk about integrated grief where it is a part of you, it’s a part of your identity, but it’s a part, it’s not everything. And I think in acute grief it feels like everything we talked about a kid, it feels like that’s this defining characteristic versus with the right processing, the right support. And I will say I do think time is an ingredient in this. It’s not the only one. So I am careful with cliches of time heals everything. That’s an oversimplification. But time matters because we talked about it takes time to process and to figure it out and to think about where this grief exists in the broader context of my life and who I am and my identity and the ongoing relationships I have, the ongoing things I’m pursuing. So as a therapist, as somebody who specializes in working with grief with children or adults, my goal is to kind of help facilitate that process of adapting from acute grief to integrated grief.

Dr. Sarah (17:07):

Yeah. You were talking about earlier this idea of oscillating in and out of some of this. And I’m curious, I often talk about in any type of therapy that I’m working on with people, I will often, and you won’t be able to see what I’m doing, but I often say the trajectory is more like this, which is if you can’t see my hand, it’s not a straight line up like a graph, like a diagonal line, but it’s like a wavy line that goes up and down. But in that general, the goal is for it to be moving in that general upward trend.

Dr. Dan (17:35):

Three steps forward, one step back, two forward, three back, five forward, two back.

Dr. Sarah (17:41):

But when you’re in the downward dip, it feels like you’re going backwards. And I’m always like, you got to zoom out though and look at like, okay, where have I gotten to over time? And often it’s like when you zoom out, you can see, oh, well yes, there are hard moments and ups and downs and I oscillate in and out of these moments of anxiety, depression, grief, whatever it is. Would you say people oscillate in and out of between acute grief and integrated grief, or are they distinct periods? Once you’ve exited acute grief, you’re in integrated grief, but even that can have its kind of a highs and lows.

Dr. Dan (18:21):

Yeah, I love that question. I actually don’t think I’ve been asked it that way before. I think of acute and integrated grief as distinct things, distinct states. However, integrated grief, you can still feel what might feel like acute grief, but it’s different because it’s not as persistent. It’s maybe not as long lasting. It’s not as frequent. You’re more familiar with it. I do think sometimes it can be a little discouraging because people, there’s almost kind of plateaus and you almost feel like you level up of, oh, now I’m back at work, or I’m back at school and I’m not thinking about it is often I don’t walk into the math test and feel like I can’t focus on the paper and then holiday season rolls around and it feels like a backslide. And so what I try to remind people when they are getting to those kind of new level ups, and I’m hesitant to even use that language because there isn’t just a good or bad to any of this.

(19:26):

It’s just people going through their process, but just that the grief is not linear, and that’s something we say frequently as well. And that just because we’re experiencing grief is sad. A loss, a significant loss is sad. It is always sad that doesn’t change. I think our ability to relate to that sadness does change, and I think it’s really important to be willing to lean into that sadness sometimes as well. So sometimes the sadness is actually a really healthy sign of moving in that right direction. Sometimes early on in grief, some people might have a really different response of, I’m just avoiding it all together. It’s too much, it’s too painful, I can’t go there. So with adults, and it’s a little different in children, and I’ll talk about that in a moment of how grief might look different in kids than in adults, but with adults, I worry about the person who it’s two days later back to work, got to just keep putting one foot in front of the other, or I worry about the person where it’s three months later and I’m in bed every day looking at pictures for hours and hours and only crying. We need to find some balance and some version of it’s okay to go back to work. It’s healthy to have that, but you can’t ignore the grief entirely. And it’s okay to look at pictures and to feel sad and miss the person, but we can’t only engage with that side either. So part of our work is finding the balance there.

Dr. Sarah (21:03):

And what are some of the, you were saying the ability to relate to the sadness, which is I imagine a skill you develop over some time with some support perhaps, or maybe some people are just innately better at that than others, but something like that or are there other skills that you find help people to be more resilient or more capable of finding that middle space where I am I able to relate to my sadness. I give myself permission and space to grieve and I’m conscious and present for it, and I am able to have movement in my life. I’m able to engage in, be integrated in my world still and have grief be a part of my life rather than sort of all consuming. What are some of the things that either predict better outcomes or that you can help build in a person you’re working with to get them to those capacities?

Dr. Dan (21:56):

Yeah, I really like how you spoke about permission and space. I think that’s an important piece of this. Grief is not pathological. Grief is not anxiety, grief is not depression. It’s not something that we’re trying to fix or make go away. And I think that’s an important distinction as well. And maybe something, one of the reasons why as a therapist working with grief is a little bit different than working with some other presentations that we might see, depression or anxiety, where anxiety is something we want to be able to challenge and work in a different way.

(22:35):

Grief is something that you do want to make the space for because again, it is healthy, it makes sense to experience sadness. So I think being able to invite it in, have that safe space, recognize that there is nothing that is unhealthy or wrong with me because I’m experiencing sadness and I can tolerate it. And so I think there’s some psychoeducation there talking about emotions as a wave. I think sometimes people fear if I get too close to it, it’s going to take over. I’m going to go back to that acute grief place that I was in for months and it felt so hard to get back to my social relationships or get back to work and I feel like I was making progress. I don’t want to go back there. And it’s important to remember that just because I think most of us probably know it feels good to have a good cry sometimes, and then there’s a bit of a release, it’s cathartic. So that’s definitely a piece of it. We do kind of talk about emotional regulation within grief where again, we’re leaning in and then we’re taking a break and taking a step back. So often if I have a difficult session with somebody and we spilled this into the structure of camp, we have our sharing circles, you’re leaning into the grief, you’re talking about it, and then you’re going to go play tennis or go on a slip and slide or do something fun.

(23:57):

With adults. I’ll talk about if you go do something nice for yourself, go get a piece of cake tonight. Go easy on yourself. You’ve done difficult work here, so now be gentle with yourself. Almost like after you exercise, you need to have that recovery as well. Then there are the pieces of being able to stay connected to the person and talk about them and share stories. I think I spoke about how grief does take time. It doesn’t mean we just have to be passive and sit back and let the time happen. I do think it can be active grievers and intentional about our grief. So again, structuring some time to talk about it, to think about it, making space for emotions, doing an activity like journaling or writing a letter to your person. We do a lot of art and I think everyone is a different type of learner, certainly with kids, we want to build in different ways of expressing yourself and relating to the grief. And then also these more kind of restoration oriented work or where we talk about building in activity for yourself or taking, I mean this is the self-care bucket and it’s also the re-engaging with your life bucket.

(25:16):

If we’re talking about you’ve had this really difficult experience, you do want to do some kind of back to basics, make sure I’m sleeping right and eating and exercising, finding the right balance of socializing. Sometime it can feel overwhelming and you might not want to go to a birthday party that feels like too much. I’m not just feeling all celebratory, don’t go to the birthday party, but have a friend over to just sit together, watch a show together, whatever it might be, go for a walk, anything like that. And then again, with the right pacing, and this is where it takes a little bit of being gentle and figuring out on a person to person basis, figuring out what kind of activities you want to be reengaging with. Again for kids, extracurriculars for adults, whatever their hobbies are, reengaging with work, all of those kinds of things, but not allowing grief to stop you from living your life. That’s really important.

Dr. Sarah (26:19):

Yeah, that’s very helpful to think about too. I think sometimes I can imagine people feeling guilty for doing those things, taking care of themselves or enjoying themselves or reengaging with life. And so I think normalizing that this is actually a really healthy and important step and we have to go at our own pace and our kids’ pace and your pace and your kids’ pace might be different. And so that’s going to take some playing with right to attune to your child. They might be really ready to go and you’re not or they might not be and you really worry that they need to be. So I wonder if it would be helpful to talk a little bit about the different ways that kids can show up in grief developmentally, but also just flavor wise because kids are different.

Dr. Dan (27:11):

Yeah, thank you for bringing this back to that. I think it’s really important and kids are often quicker to reengage with their activities and I think that they’re hungry for it. An adult might say, I’m not ready to go back to work. I’m not ready to go to that birthday party. I don’t want to do it. It doesn’t feel right. And so they might think that it should be the same thing for their kid and they’re like, why is my kid playing on the playground and laughing and running around? Are they not feeling it? Are they not? What’s going on here? And that’s totally normal. And a really common reaction is kids long for structure or predictability, stability and loss in the family makes their life really, really unstable. So I think one of the best things that we can do for kids is try to develop our sense of new normal or maintain some normalcy.

(28:13):

One of their first questions might be, who’s going to pick me up from school tomorrow if mom died and mom always picked me up from school and in this picture I’m painting, right? Dad’s like, I can’t believe that’s what you’re asking about. I don’t care about school. I haven’t thought about that. But they’re kind of trying to figure out what their life looks like and again, being able to, especially with maybe elementary middle school age as well, really addressing some of those more concrete things, maintaining their activities, giving the opportunity to socialize. Like you said, Sarah, it’s different person to person. And some kids, again, I think especially as we get more towards the teenager age, might be very aware that they’re less ready to do those things. But in elementary, kids let them go play, they need it. We talked about that oscillation and that’s going to be really healthy for them, especially home might now be this place that is surrounded by the grief. And that’s where I process that and that’s where I feel that I also need to have my time with friends. None of us can just sit in the grief all the time. It’s too heavy, it’s too much. So we want to give that space and allow that sense of normalcy we’ve been talking about.

Dr. Sarah (29:37):

Yeah, and I know you work mostly with kids who are able to engage in talk therapy, right? Like what, 9, 10 and up?

Dr. Dan (29:47):

Yeah. 10 plus into the teenage years? Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (29:51):

And I’m not a grief specialist, but I do know a lot about really little kids and what I’m hearing you say and what’s clicking for me is you were talking about regulation, emotion regulation, but also this ability to attune and know where my regulation is and where my kids’ regulation is and the idea of oscillating in and out or titrating that you can feel it. And then you come out with older kids and as language gets more developed and as our sense of tolerance for emotions and tolerance for talking about emotions gets greater, I imagine the amount of time we could spend in the grief can grow or expand and then of course we still need to pull back out and reset and allow that grief to allow our nervous system kind of recalibrate a little bit, ground it for little kids, I would imagine that the time in is going to be shorter and shorter and shorter the younger they get. And that this idea of them kind of flitting in and out of grief and needing to play and reorient and anchor themselves to their secure base or their attachment figure or a safe grownup and not in grief would probably happen way more frequently. Almost like could be very rapid in and out, in and out.

Dr. Dan (31:10):

And they probably don’t even have the language for that either. So yeah, I totally agree, especially with younger kids, adults are there to offer that containment and that kind of co-regulation and to be with them and to be that secure base. I think that’s one of the biggest needs we all have, but especially younger children affected by grief is we are looking to be taken care of and to feel safe. They also need modeling. And I think sometimes parents are hesitant to show their emotion, and I think it’s really, really important and really, really healthy that parents do show their emotion because like we talked about, grief is sad, it’s okay to feel sad. We don’t want to be uncontrollably sobbing to a point that it could feel out of control or scary for a child, but to be tearful and to acknowledge your sadness is hugely important.

(32:16):

Kids learn through social learning and so we want caregivers to model that. Again, it’s one of the things I think that’s so beautiful about the group model and some of the biggest models of grief support in children are often these peer-based models. So I’ve spoken a lot about experience camps and the bereavement camps, also a lot of year round peer-based support groups that exist all over the country, which is really wonderful that there’s so many resources available like that. And I think that that group model has emerged for a reason of that, helps kids learn, helps kids scaffold, helps kids kind of compare to peers. Maybe there’s someone who’s a little bit older and has a little bit more language or there’s someone there who’s a year and a half into their grief and I’m only two months in, so I can get a sense of a bit of that trajectory or how other people are moving with it.

(33:22):

But yes, going back to what you said, I totally agree that we’re not going to expect a younger child to be just narrating and verbally expressing they don’t have the language for it. So it’s probably not going to be all about the conversation, it’s more going to be, I think supporting those younger kids especially is again, making their lives predictable, showing your care, being consistent, taking care of yourself. And I don’t want to lose that in the course of this conversation today. As parents, we do have to make sure that we are resourcing ourselves as best we can to be able to be there for our children. And you can’t really reverse that order. So often parents just want to make sure the support is in place for the kid, but if you don’t have your own resources and you’re not able to have your own outlets, then it’s going to be really, really hard to be there for your kids in the ways that they might need.

Dr. Sarah (34:28):

Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And I think parents can, the idea of grieving your own talking, I mean obviously grief can happen in lots of different ways and sometimes it just affects a parent and not the child at all, right? But typically the kind of grief we’re talking about, the loss of a parent or the loss of a sibling, that’s a family system loss that impacts the ground. We all stand on together. And so you want to be there for your kid, but you’re rocked and I can’t imagine how difficult it is to have to hold both, hold all of it, especially if you’re the only parent now that’s massive.

Dr. Dan (35:17):

Even more reason to make sure you’re resourcing yourself. I totally agree. I think when we haven’t experienced these things, it’s really difficult to put yourself in those shoes. I also want to remind everybody you don’t know what you can do until you’re in it. And the work that I have done over my career makes me a huge believer in resilience. I deeply believe that we all have the capacity to cope with really, really difficult things and to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives. Loss is tragic, especially if we’re talking about loss outside of the normal developmental spectrum. We’re not talking about an 80 or 90-year-old grandparent here. Something I sometimes say is death is always sad, death is not always tragic. And if we’re talking about the death of a parent in their thirties, forties, fifties, the death of a child, those are tragic losses that exist beyond the scope of what we kind of expect to developmentally. And so yeah, it changes everything. It rocks everything, and I believe we can do it and be okay and be there for each other and stay connected and we can experience joy and we can experience meaning even with the presence of that tragedy in our lives.

Dr. Sarah (36:47):

I think that’s so hopeful and reassuring because like you were saying, one of the biggest things you’re trying to help someone do is help them create a relationship to their grief, to be able to relate to it, not to be consumed by it or afraid of it, but to be able to say, this is sitting right next to me. I’m in relationship to it, and that requires some separation and some confidence that you can separate from it. I can be whole even with this as a part of me, which I imagine there that comes in waves, right? I’m sure that there are moments where you feel shattered pieces and can’t imagine feeling whole. So I think that’s very helpful to remember that piece. We are very strong and we don’t realize how strong we are until we have to be that strong and then we shock ourselves.

(37:47):

With kids, I’m curious too, do you find in the camps or in working with younger kids in your group practice in therapy, are you finding that kids are able to craft the same kinds of narratives as grownups? We talk about a trauma narrative or a grief narrative. Not all grief is trauma, but telling the story, creating a coherent narrative, being able to put all the pieces together is a really important piece to processing really challenging things and making sense of them. But with younger kids, how does that look different? And what are things parents can do to encourage that coherence without necessarily feeling like they have to force their kids to always talk about this because kids don’t talk about stuff the way the grownups do?

Dr. Dan (38:40):

Yeah, first things first, I think kids are more adaptive than adults and more resilient than adults. And it’s important to remind that too. I know as a parent we worry about our children way more than we worry about ourselves, but the kids are going to be okay, especially with the right support around them and the right care. They have love, they have safety, they have a parent who’s taking care of themselves or a caregiver. I want to make sure that I’m being careful about my language here because families look all different and loss exists in all different ways. So we want there to be the right supports in place. But it’s another thing that I think can surprise caregivers is that their kids often seem more okay than them or move in a different pace or that it comes up less frequently or in different ways.

(39:41):

And we also, grief is something that we relate to throughout our lives. And so the way an 8-year-old is crafting their narrative or thinking about grief or experiencing grief is going to be really different than the way that same 12-year-old, that same 16-year-old, that same 25, 30 5-year-old is talking about. I mean, I work with adults who lost a parent when they were six years old and we’re here putting the pieces together from the lens through which they see the world now and kind of going back and unpacking and processing the way their childhood was impacted, the way their family structure was impacted, all of those things. And so I think we have to keep that kind of zoomed out perspective of this is something that we are going to have to relate to for our whole lives, and that’s okay. We don’t have to fast forward our way through it, but it also means you talked about those kind of peaks and dips, there’s going to be long dips where the grief doesn’t seem as at the forefront.

(40:43):

And it can be if we’re talking about, I think we’re talking a lot about parent loss today, which I will say that is in experienced camps, about 70% of our campers experience the death of a parent. So again, just when we think about statistically what the most common kind of loss that would impact kids, that would be it. So I think it makes sense that we’re using that as an example today. So a surviving parent is going to have a lot more memory of their partner than a younger child might have. And it is, losing a mom or a dad is a different kind of a loss than losing a husband or a wife. It’s a different relationship. I think that can be challenging because it’s like we both lost the same person and so we want to be in it, but the relationships are different.

(41:37):

I do think that’s an important thing for parents to keep in mind and to recognize, going back to your original question that the development of that narrative kids don’t have the same language skills. So that’s going to look different as a kid gets older and for younger children. And I think part of the reason that it might feel easier for kids to adapt is they’re still building their lives in different ways and they’re still adding a lot more pieces to it. When I’m an adult, my kind of identity is pretty formed. The way I kind of think of myself as a professional, where I exist in my family, these kind of big pillars of how we identify ourselves, they’re there. Whereas for a kid, that’s a thing that’s constantly moving and growing. And so a seven to 10-year-old who loses their parent, their identity is one thing, and then they get to add pieces to it and they get to, they’re growing more and so fluid, there’s more. Yeah, and there’s more room for evolution there.

Dr. Sarah (42:49):

I would imagine too that younger kids, even kids who talk like middle school, elementary age school kids, but especially very, very young kids, they process things, yes, older kids through language, but also still through representation and symbolic representation. And I just think, I imagine that there’s a lot more ways that their grief and the signs of their grief, but also the signs that they’re processing their grief. Grief can show up in ways that might not look obvious to a parent the way we might be like, okay, I’m thinking about this person, or I’m talking about this person, or I’m crying about this person In kids, it might be, I am really fixated on this storybook.

(43:38):

But it might have nothing to do with death or dying, but it just reminds me of something. It reminds ’em of something. Or there’s an object or a type of play they continue to turn to. We always see in play therapy children turning to themes over and over and over again, and it’s not always obvious what they are working out in the play. It’s not always a direct one-to-one representation of the thing they’re really working out. So I just wonder if you want to talk at all about just the indirect nature and symbolic ways that kids kind of work through these things?

Dr. Dan (44:12):

No, it’s very much true and they’re trying to work through something, right? With kids and kids of all ages, we see a lot of regression and that’s important to recognize that that’s totally normal. And again, it might not just be so grief isn’t just going to show up as sadness. Don’t think it only shows up as sadness in adults, but certainly in children you might see more acting out behavior. You might see sleep difficulties, you might see more clinginess where there is a regression there. And in the play also, kids are trying to work through something and maybe have some sense of control in their life that feel like there was a loss of, and so they’re trying to rebuild in some way. We talked about that importance of connection. And so like you said, they might be playing or latching onto some idea that was a form of connection to whoever is their person that died that we might not even be aware of. So that could be difficult to see there. They’re also working on understanding their emotions. So even if it’s not directly related to the loss, we might see them through art, through narrative, through play, doing things with anger, if there’s sickness that might be something related to how they’re playing doctor or things like that that they’re trying to understand and figure it out. They’re trying to figure out the world and in a world that is now very changed.

Dr. Sarah (45:53):

And so I just think the importance of play cannot be understated. And also just because kids can do talk therapy or are old enough to talk to you, you’re their parent. I think creating opportunities for play and normalizing that even big kids play and maybe it’s just you get ’em a Lego set or maybe you just leave some drawing stuff in their room one day. Kids need that white space, that negative space just as much as they need the sort of direct processing. And sometimes kids, especially older kids who haven’t done that kind of play, they’ve learned, kind of been trained out of it for whatever reason, they need it more than I think we might realize. I would imagine, and I imagine we haven’t even got to screens totally other issue, but I imagine screens can displace a lot of processing direct and indirect processing of grief in kids because it’s really easy to turn it all off if you just get on a screen.

Dr. Dan (47:05):

Right? I mean screens, it’s a longer conversation, right? There can also be opportunity for connection or connecting to community in those ways as well. But yes, that can just be a form of avoidance. And for adults, for children, for anybody, we don’t want to just avoid. We can take a step back and that’s okay. Sometimes distraction healthy just is there balance there. But I totally agree, and I was just going to say with the play and the importance of it for older kids, sometimes we’ll do an activity at camp and I’m like, I don’t know if this is going to work with the 14 year olds. We’re doing something about with color and with emotion, or we’re going to read a book about the grief dragon and then we’re going to do some creative thing. And they love it because kids also want permission to be kids. And I think especially sometimes something we do see with our older campers is older kids can get parentified if there’s a younger sibling, all of a sudden they feel this responsibility to take care or to get a part-time job or do something where it’s like the same way a parent might feel like there’s not room for my grief. I think we often see that in older siblings of this, I’ve got to be strong for the younger kids kind of a thing.

Dr. Sarah (48:25):

Or for the parent, I could see a situation where a child could feel, even if the parent wasn’t trying was being careful about this, but where a child might feel responsible for taking care of the parent. And that parentified dynamic.

Dr. Dan (48:40):

Absolutely. Often we hear a kid will say, well, I don’t want to bring up the death because I don’t want to upset my parent. They seem okay. And the parent will say, oh yeah, of course I’m thinking about it, but I don’t want to bring it up at home because the kids seem okay. And then we’re just grieving in isolation. So remember everyone’s impacted by this, everyone’s thinking about it. And again, there I think it is more the parent’s responsibility to kind of model and bring it in and make the space for it. And we’re talking about that protection of the parent and also being parentified. I often see it kind of mirroring if there’s an adolescent girl who lost a mom, she might take on more kind of maternal expectations. Same with a boy who lost a dad. They might feel kind of a man of the house kind of expectations. So it’s something really important to watch for. And again, just to give permission to play and creative play and creative processing, all of those things.

Dr. Sarah (49:38):

Yeah, I love that’s such good advice. And are there books that you recommend or you like for different ages?

Dr. Dan (49:45):

My kind of go-to, and I think it works for any age, even though it looks like a younger kid book is called Invisible String. It’s about the ongoing connection. It’s pretty popular. So that’s one of my first recommendations and that’s something that we use a lot. And again, you talked about crafting the narrative, those kinds of books and that storytelling or again, hearing from other kids or from adults who have experienced a loss and their kind of sharing their story, that’s going to be really helpful. Scaffolding and helping kids build that language for better or for worse. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. Our society has been impacted by grief forever. So there are some things that we know about and there are other people who have been through it. And so it is important to be able to connect with those people and find your community around it.

Dr. Sarah (50:39):

And if people want to connect with you or get more information about the kind of resources that you have at your practice or at experience camps, how can they connect with you?

Dr. Dan (50:47):

Yeah, so my website is wolfsontherapy.com. I can be reached at dw@wolfsontherapy.com. The camp we’ve been talking about again is Experience Camps. It’s just experiencecamps.org. Our kind of central program is these one week overnight camps for kids who’ve experienced a loss. It’s totally free to families including transportation. So that’s an amazing resource. And then they’ve got a great Instagram and TikTok as well. There’s some more online resources through experience camps as well. I run an adult grief retreat weekend through experience camps that we just started. This is going to be our fourth summer. So that’s for any adult 21 plus who’s experienced a significant death loss. So whether you lost a parent, a sibling, a partner, a child, again, it’s amazing to be able to be a part of that community and find your grief people and adults have the right to play too. And so we kind of bring in some of that camp fun to being off the camp for weekend and having our space to connect around loss as well.

Dr. Sarah (51:56):

Oh, you do such important work. I’m so grateful that you came on and shared all this with us.

Dr. Dan (52:01):

Thank you. I appreciate you having me, and I’m so glad to be a resource. Like I said, this is really what I do and there are good resources out there and I think it’s important to know they’re there and be able to find them. So I’d be really happy to connect with our listeners.

Dr. Sarah (52:13):

And I do, I think having specialized, finding someone who really knows this inside and out, it is important, especially for kids. This isn’t…

Dr. Dan (52:26):

And for the parent as well, so they don’t feel like they have to be an expert.

Dr. Sarah (52:30):

Exactly. It’s, it takes a burden off the family system. It’s, it’s important. Well, thank you and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.

Dr. Dan (52:37):

Appreciate it. Thanks so much.

Dr. Sarah (52:44):

Navigating grief. Whether your own or your child’s can feel overwhelming, but it’s not a process you have to go through alone. Having the support of a trained mental health professional can provide guidance, reassurance, and tools to help you and your family move through loss in a way that fosters healing and resilience. If today’s conversation resonated with you and you are looking for support from a therapist who specializes in grief, child development and family dynamics, you can reach out directly to Dr. Dan Wolfson or to my group practice, Upshur Bren Psychology Group, where we have members of our team who are trained in the specialization. Our multidisciplinary team uses evidence-based to help you or your child process your grief and navigate the complexities of parenting through difficult emotions with therapeutic services in New York State as well as virtual coaching nationwide. You can just go to the episode description wherever you’re streaming this podcast to get links to both our website and to Dan’s practice. We offer everyone a 15 minute free consultation call to learn more about the challenges that you’re facing and give you our recommendation of supportive resources that best align with your unique needs. So once again, thank you for listening and don’t be a stranger.