Prince William's grief: How we can all help

Our emotions have the role of pushing us towards opportunities and away from threats. They alert us to when our innate human needs are not being met. So it’s not surprising that some of those big emotions can feel painful, the most intense of which can be those connected with loss and grief.

In the BBC programme 'A Royal Team Talk'  shown Sunday 19th May at 10.30pm, Prince William says he experienced ‘pain like no other pain’ after the death of his mother, Princess Diana. 

Prince Harry has also been open about his attempts to deal with the death of Diana by ‘boxing up’ his own emotions for over 20 years.

People often try to deal with life’s losses and traumas by switching off emotion. The ‘box-it-up’ method can work for a while, as it did for Harry, but what tends to happen over time is that the lid of the box begins to lift on its own and all the suppressed pain, despair, guilt and anger start to tumble out.

My article this week looks at delayed grief; how unprocessed loss can take people by surprise many years later and how we can offer support.

I hope it helps…

The simplest way to help someone who is grieving

As James sat in front of me, memory after memory of his father’s death surfaced, released, and ran softly down his face.

‘He died when I was 10’, said James. ‘It was an unexpected heart-attack. He went to work one morning and didn't come home. Mum thought I was too young to go to the funeral so I went to school on that day just like any other day.’

James's mum wasn’t being cruel. She had hoped to protect her young son from the pain of seeing her so desperately upset. She wanted him to escape somehow the turbulent and intense range of emotions that are a part of the journey through the grieving process. So she made life as normal as possible for him. She compensated by taking him on holidays, buying him the latest designer clothes and gadgets and putting on her ‘I'm okay’ face in the daytime.

Crying alone

It was only after she put James to bed at night that she allowed herself to cry.

She put away the pictures of James's father and he was rarely referred to. The mother-who-meant-well stayed strong and kept going. She was doing a good job, she told herself. After a year, James seemed fine, was doing well at school and never mentioned his father.

What she didn't realise was that, in bed at night, James could hear his mother crying and would often cry himself to sleep too. Both mother and son were going through intense emotions they did not want to communicate to each other, for fear of causing upset. Both were isolated in a shared grief for the most well-intentioned of reasons. They were making a mistake that many of us make.

Must keep going

There are plenty of laudable reasons for not dealing with grief. People have to go to work to keep their job. They have to get the kids off to school. They have to mow the lawn, do the shopping, cook and pay the bills. They think if they give way to grief, it will be like a dam bursting, that they won’t be able to cope with the deluge and will drown in a flood of their own tears.

But deferring grief is like living with an undetonated bomb that we tiptoe around so it won’t go off.

An open wound

The grief, however, remains as a concealed, but still-open, wound. Although we may have stuck a plaster over it, it will not begin to heal until the bandaging is removed and we let some light and air onto the trauma.

Death has become a sanitised business. We try to ignore it. We clean it up with phrases like ‘passed over’, or ‘slipped away’ rather than saying someone has died. Or we wrap up the event and leave it on a shelf somewhere in a darkened room that we try not to visit.

We are taught, in the face of adversity to stand strong. We must stay in control. We have to keep a ‘stiff upper lip’.

But grief is not an illness. It’s a fact of life. We will all lose someone we love and we will all feel pain. Being able to ride the waves of the powerful emotions that come with bereavement is an example of mind management and asking for help or talking to someone about how we really feel is a sign of emotional intelligence, not emotional weakness.

As a therapeutic coach, I have a range of skills in my professional toolbox.

But for James, just as I would for Prince William if he were a grieving client, I used the simplest, yet most powerful of them all.

I listened....

Therapeutic Coaching Professionals

If you are a coach who counsels, a counsellor who coaches, a teacher, doctor, nurse, mentor, priest or hypnotherapist; if you work or any of the helping professions or are interested in studying in a helping profession, you can be invited to join the 'Therapeutic Coaching Professionals' private Facebook forum, by clicking 'like' on the Fusion Therapeutic Coaching Face book page).

'Therapeutic Coaching Professionals' is a supportive professional group where we share tips, tools and the kind of interventions that really help our clients move forward quickly.

Fusion training

  Motivation, resolving depression, the Rewind Technique, Mindfulness Based Mind Management (advanced MBSR), worrying well, solution focus, guided visualisation, resolving addiction, epigenetics, mapping the connectome, polyvagal theory, the reticular activating system (RAS), secondary gain, trauma resolution, coaching for kids, treating depression, worrying well, working SMART, therapeutic stories, insight, psycho education, suicide prevention, affirmations, positive mental rehearsal, imagery, dissociation, goal setting, new paradigms, reframes, fast track learning, perception shifting, self actualisation, positive psychology, reframing, metaphor, personal empowerment, motivational thinking, resilience and resourcefulness, human flourishing, anchoring, rewiring your brain, the STOP System, the SAFE SPACE happiness recipe, holistic coaching and working on the continuum of wellbeing plus many other professional theories, tools and techniques underpin the content of the fast paced, fast track, Fusion training programmes.