Participants' additional messages for counselors, supervisors, and counselor educators
“Speak less, listen more. Try and be as present as possible because change is going to come.”
- Lynn
“I think the biggest thing is to talk about grief in counselor education classes and supervision, to acknowledge that that's a part of life. Grief doesn't even just come from bereavement, it comes from a lot of transitions and identity shifts. I think modeling the importance of having that discussion, because with the parallel process, if we're doing that with our students and our supervisees, they can do it better with their clients.
​
I think finding ways to bring it in and talk about their own experiences in a professional way. Our students and supervisees are going to lose people when they're working with clients. So if we can’t even talk about that, in the context of when we're teaching or even share about how we maneuvered it when we were seeing clients, that's a huge disservice to how we're training our students and supervisees. I would say talk about it a lot more. Talk about their own experiences, talk about how students might lose someone in their life, talk about how clients might lose people, or they might lose clients. Talk about it, so that when it happens, our students and supervisees can talk about it, too.”
- R.Lynn
“People don't broach race and it's the one thing that walks in the room with you. With my own counselor, I had so much uncertainty and so many feelings because we never talked about race. I never really knew exactly where she stood and it bothered me a lot, especially with all the racial content that was going on. I feel like we do an injustice to our clients when we don't have those conversations. Grief can be difficult and affect so many aspects of your everyday, it helps when the client and the counselor have a resolve with aspects of the relationship.”
- Maya A.
“I'm big on boundaries and knowing how your response can impact or influence your clients and how important it is for you - if you've experienced grief - to keep your own values in check. Grief is complicated, because there are so many factors that influence grief. I think what's important for the grief counselor is to meet the patient where they are and for them to understand that it's complicated. There's no one right or wrong way and you've got to help that person understand what their resources are. Or what they grew up with, with the idea of death, and how that impacts their ability to grieve today, sometimes it could be negative, and they need to reframe that. There's a lot of work that can be done with uncovering family issues or patterns that impact a person’s ability to grieve.”
- Mia
“I think it's really important for counselors to make sure that we make time to take care of ourselves, allow ourselves time to grieve. Because I think a lot of us are not so good at taking care of ourselves and yet that's what we preach to our clients, and we need to practice what we preach.”
- Christine