Listening to Grief: How to Help Someone Who Needs to Be Heard (Part Four)

Part Four: Debrief and Decompress

Self-care is essential to the sustainability of peer grief support. It is important to take time and make space within your personal boundaries to process your experiences and replenish your energy. 

By maintaining your personal sense of balance, you can continue to effectively support others in their time of need. 

Unpack the Pieces

Debriefing is a way of processing the cumulative effect of listening to other people’s emotions for extended periods of time. The traumatic nature of grief can impart echoes of the speaker’s stress and anxiety onto the listener. 

Taking the time to release these emotions can help prevent you from carrying the weight of someone else's grief, allowing you to maintain your own emotional balance.

Reflect and Reveal

Debriefing is a form of peer support, as it involves interacting with others. Joining a support group for peer grief helpers is a great way to engage with people who understand the challenges of grief support.  

Unpacking your experiences as a peer grief helper should not involve specifics about the lives of those you help. It is essential to generalize and keep the details private. What is most important is that you express how the experience makes you feel while exploring ways to improve your approach to support. 

You can also debrief by keeping a journal of your post-support session reflections. How did the session unfold? How did the other person respond to your questions? What was their emotional constitution like at the end of the session? What went particularly well? What could you improve upon? 

Express and Relax

Decompressing after delivering peer grief support is a vital element of self-care. Engaging in your favorite activities can help you process the experience in nonverbal terms.  

If you enjoy exercise, consider taking a walk, going for a run, lifting weights, playing team sports, fishing, hiking, yoga, or martial arts. If you prefer recreation over physical exertion, you can watch a movie, read a book, play video games, or immerse yourself in your favorite forms of arts and crafts. 

You can achieve deeper states of mental reprieve through practicing mindfulness and meditation.

Regardless of how you decompress, the practice will help maintain perspective so that you are not solely focused on grief. In turn, this can help you attain the peace of mind necessary for the most crucial element of decompression – which is a good night’s sleep.