Listening to Grief: How to Help Someone Who Needs to be Heard (Part Five)

Part Five: Maintaining Objectivity

For the bereaved, grief can be paralyzing and overwhelming. After losing a loved one, a griever’s capacity for logic and reason can be eclipsed by a tsunami of emotional chaos. 

For some, the fog of grief is a sojourn of irrationality and crippling sadness. 

Passive Engagement

As a peer grief supporter, it is vital to bear witness to another’s pain. Yet, more importantly, it is critical that you do not internalize and replicate the grief of the person you are helping. While their pain is enormous, you cannot carry it for them. 

Navigating this terrain requires a balance of discipline and empathy. 

If you become engrossed in another’s grief, your ability to listen with accuracy may diminish greatly or disappear entirely. This highlights the importance of disciplining yourself to remain grounded and to not get swept up in the emotional chaos.

On the other hand, if you are too detached and guarded, they may sense this, dismiss your trust, and withdraw into isolation.

Balance is Key

An effective way of walking this fine line is to perceive the dynamic between you and the griever as a yin/yang symbol. You can be attuned to their swirl of emotions without mirroring their intense feelings. You can establish a balanced exchange of energy without fostering codependence. 

You can be fully present through a connection that is complementary to the inertia of their grief rather than being drug under by the rip curl of their sorrow. 

If the two of you are exactly the same, objectivity may be lost.    

Once you have established an objective viewpoint, you can quietly and gracefully maintain that position through the lenses of logic and reason. 

Dispensable Cargo

Once the balance between you and the griever is in motion, you can objectively acknowledge the potential for blame, guilt, and stigma to arise. These can be overtly or covertly assigned by the griever’s family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers. 

Often, a griever will self-apply these judgements as they process their loss and search for answers. Your role is to recognize these unnecessary punishments so that you don’t inadvertently reinforce them. 

Additionally, through a clear viewpoint, you can suggest to the griever that blame, guilt, and stigma only complicate matters, and can be excluded from the circumstances entirely.

As an objective supporter, it is vital to remember that you are not there to judge. You are there to listen, to support, and to calmly counterbalance the weight of their trauma.