New therapy groups to fill the gap in bereavement services

For seven years the charity I founded, The Loss Foundation, has been providing support groups for people who have lost a loved one to cancer. We have learned so many things over the course of those seven years, some that now seem obvious to us, but others that we did not anticipate.

Talking helps. This is one of the obvious ones, but what we did not realise when we started this was just how little opportunity people were getting to talk about their loss. Grief is so much more socially isolating than people realise, and our society provides very few opportunities for people to talk about difficult things, especially if their loss is not so recent.

There’s a significant gap in bereavement services in regards to what people are struggling with and what support they are being offered. In general, if lucky enough to live in an area where bereavement support is offered, people will most often be offered a course of bereavement counselling or they will get signposted to support groups in the community, like the ones we run.

Those services are essential. But they are not enough. Because although they provide a space to talk and process, they are not directly dealing with the plethora of difficulties that people can find themselves going through or experiencing even years down the line when grieving. For example, they don’t always cater to help people understand and manage anxiety, which is rife when people are grieving, nor do they get the chance to directly help people manage troubled sleep, which is again more common than not in grief.

Over the last seven years we have been listening, querying, asking, searching, and we now have a very clear understanding of the difficulties people have when they are grieving that are not getting tended to anywhere. For example, how to deal with unwanted memories of illness and death that pop in to our minds unexpectedly, how to respond to negative thoughts about the future, how to manage anxiety and low mood, how to try living a life that feels valuable and worth living, and so much more.

So we are filling the gap. We are offering a free 10-week program of therapy groups for people bereaved by cancer in London. We piloted the groups in 2016 and found that they reduced peoples’ anxiety, low mood, grief intensity, and trauma symptoms, and increased their self-compassion.

The groups will be run by our team’s psychologists, free of charge. Registration for our new groups has just opened!

We call everybody who registers to talk them through what the groups entail, and on countless occasions we have had people crying with relief on the phone. This is most often from people who have been struggling with grief for years and thought there was nothing left for them in way of support. We think that says it all.

If you know of anybody who could benefit from an active therapeutic approach to help them better understand and manage grief and all that arises from it, please direct them to us. We want to help them. Registration for our first round of groups closes next week!

Dr Erin Hope Thompson, Founder of The Loss Foundation, Clinical Psychologist