Breaking The Silence

A Guide to Helping Children With Complicated Grief: Suicide, Homicide, AIDS, Violence, and Abuse.        by Linda Goldman

The focus of Breaking the Silence is to provide a guide for caring adults in helping children with these complicated issues. The scarcity of children's works on the topics of suicide, homicide, AIDS, violence, and abuse only magnifies the need to create a resource that gives adults and children the words to use to break this prison of silence and denial that is so much a part of today's culture. This prison of silence and denial was not created by children. They were born into it. A twelve year old client who refuses to tell her friend that her father died for fear she will have to tell her friend how her father died faces a prison of silence locked shut by society. An eight year old who continually runs away from school, shouting and screaming to teachers and administrators his desire to not want to live any longer, is told by the health care system that there is no hurry for him to be seen because he is just being manipulative. Couldn't be suicide be the ultimate manipulation? And who would ultimately responsable? We would. Let's get these kids help.

We need to open a door and allow the children to breathe freely the fresh air of truth. By bringing these subjects into the light of day without fear and shame, we can create a healing environment for communicating loss and grief.

Hopefully, Breaking The Silence will help accomplish this purpose. First, adults will be given specific ideas, techniques, resources, and materials to work with children in each area of complicated grief. Second, adults will be given specific words to use with children, and ways to initiate discussions of these anxiety-producing topics. Third, caring adults will be given the information and tools to help them separate the child from the circumstances surrounding his/her loss and grief. These complications af grief must be recognized and dealt with before the normal grief can be acknowledged and released.

Photographs of nature, animals, and children are interwoven throughout this book to continually remind us that the cycle of life and death is ever present and ongoing. The death of someone or something we love is a normal and natural process of life that we all experience.

Despite the complicated circumstances of suicide, homicide, AIDS, violence, and abise, the underlying process of grief si universal and timeless. As horrendous as these circumstances are, thay could happen to any one of us at any time.

Hopefully the photos will provide an ongoing reminder that these "unnatural events" exist in daily life and need to be addressed and dealt with openly. The "unnatural" has become a very "normal" part of the world of today's children. By recognizing this, caring adults can break through the silent shame and stigma of complicated grief with children and help them reach the underlying feelings of normal loss and grief that everyone shares.

"..[Goldman] providews a conceptually based and structured procedure, description of a wealth of concrete therapeutic tehcniques, and sources for additional ones. For those who deal with children, especially...children chronically exposed to violence, and wish to help them, this book is an invaluable resource." -Alfred Lucco, Ph.D., University of Maryland at Baltimore, From the Introduction


Designed for mental health professionals, educators, and the layperson (parent.caregiver), this book provides specific ideas and techniques to work with children in various areas of complicated grief. It presents words and methods to help initiate discussions of these delicate topics, as well as tools to help children understand and separate complicated grief into parts. These parts in turn can be grieved for and released one at a time.

Suicide, homicide and violent crime, AIDS, and abuse are each addressed at length, after which the author explains healthy ways to include children in all aspects of death of a loved one - during and after the funeral or memorial service, through private commemoration, etc. The author closes with a list of national support resources and an extensive annotated bibliography with books grouped by category of grief.

 

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Children entering this new millennium are faced with life issues that were unspeakable to us growing up as children. Death related tragedies such as suicide, homicide, and AIDS, and non-death related traumas such as divorce and separation, foster care and abandonment, bullying and terrorism, and abuse and violence have left our children sitting alone in their homes, unfocused and unmotivated in their classrooms, and terrorized in their
communities. They are overwhelmed with their feelings and distracted by their thoughts.

Survivorship of these traumas creates for any child a loss of their assumptive world of safety, protection, and predictability. The role of the media as a surrogate communal parent and extended family further creates
this same traumatic loss of this assumptive world for many if not most of our children.

Children naturally assume their world will be filled with safety, kindness, and meaning as they attempt to answer the universal questions of who am I and why am I here. All too often these qualities seem to disappears into a nightmarish universe of randomness, isolation, and unpredictability. This leaves many of todayıs young people immersed in a new assumption: There is no future. There is no safety. There is no connectedness or meaning to my life. By joining together as a global grief team, caring adults can co-create an assumptive world that again provides a childıs birthright to presume love, generosity, and value will be integral parts of their lives.

We are raising a segment of our youth that are numbed, disconnected from their hearts, their minds, and their consciousnesses, and choosing all to easily, other alternatives such as drugs and alcohol, crime and violence as ways of coping with the loss of their assumptive world. In yesterdayıs world we may have protected ourselves from trauma by having fire drills in our schools. In todayıs world our kids protect themselves from danger in the schools by having gun-fire drills. Too many of todayıs school children are grieving children. So many of our boys and girls are born into a world of grief and loss issues that live inside their homes and lay waiting for them outside their doorsteps, on their streets, schoolyards, and classrooms. Increasingly, children are traumatized by prevailing social and societal loss issues in their families, their schools, their nation, and their world.

Text adapted with permission from Life and Loss: A Guide to Help Grievng Children, Breaking the Silence: A Guide To Help Children With Complicated Grief: Suicide, Homicide, AIDS, Violence, and Abuse and Helping The Grieving Child in the School Healing Magazine (Kidspeace)and Growing Up Fast (NES).
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