The four clichés to avoid when consoling a grieving friend

3 hours ago 1

Gay Alcorn

Each week, Good Weekend’s how-to column shares expert advice on how to navigate some of modern life’s big – and small – challenges. This week: How to console someone who’s grieving.

Photo: Illustration by Drew Aitken

If there’s one piece of advice Lauren Breen offers on how to console someone who’s grieving, it’s this: say something. “It’s OK to be a little bit uncomfortable and say, ‘You know, I’m not really sure what to say or do, but I just wanted to let you know that I’m thinking of you today.’ It’s much better to be weird and awkward than to just disappear from that person’s life.”

Breen, known as “the grief lady”, is a professor of psychology at Curtin University in Perth whose PhD, more than 20 years ago, was on the grief experienced after a person dies in a car accident (her own sister-in-law had lost her life in a crash). Grief is, she says, “our response to the loss of anything that we have an attachment to”. It’s not a single feeling: often, it’s a combination of feelings and thoughts in response to the death of someone close to us. But it can also follow the loss of a job or a house destroyed in a bushfire, a divorce or the death of a beloved pet.

When you do say something, says Breen, make sure it’s not about you. Don’t say, “I know how you feel” because you most likely don’t. Don’t, in your discomfort, fill the silence with clichés, such as “At least he/she is no longer suffering” or “It was meant to be”; they really don’t help.

You can’t fix the person’s pain, so don’t try. “You don’t have to have the right words or the right answer, but you can be calm and honest and open,” says Breen. And if you do offer to help, make it specific and ensure you follow through, rather than muttering a vague, “Let me know if I can do anything.” Check up on the person again in a couple of weeks’ or a few months’ time and on the anniversary of the death. Grief is a very individual experience; never, ever suggest someone should be “over it” by now.

Breen wishes the famous five stages of grief popularised by Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969 would just disappear. The supposed stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – have no validity, she says, and have actually done more harm than good: grief is different for everyone.

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