Grief and Healing 
This information was taken from the Child Trauma Academy Website
How Caregivers Can Help Children Exposed to Traumatic Death
The information listed below is from the Child Trauma Academy website. It is intended to inform and provide general principles. It is not intended to be comprehensive or to exclude other observations or approaches to helping grieving children. Below is a guide that addresses some of the key issues related to the child's complex set of reactions that often follow traumatic death. While focused on traumatic death, this information may be helpful to families, caseworkers, teachers and other adults working and living with any grieving children.
What can I do to help?
1. Be honest, open and clear.
Give children the facts regarding the death. While there is no need to describe great lingering detail, the important details should be given. These often are horrifying but it is important to give factual information to the child. The imagination of a child will 'fill in' the details if they are not given. Too often these imagined details are distorted, inaccurate, more horrifying than the actual details and can interfere with the long-term healing process.
2. Do not avoid the topic when the child brings it up.
Similar to other trauma, the adults around the child need to be available when the child wants to talk but avoid probing when the child does not want to talk. This may mean answering one question -- it may mean struggling with a very difficult question. "Does it hurt when you burn to death?" Don't be surprised if in the middle of your struggle for the 'right' answer the child returns to play and acts disinterested. The child has been unable to tolerate the level of emotional intensity and is coping with it by avoiding it at that point.
Children will sense if the topic is emotionally difficult for adults around them. A child will try to please caregivers - either avoiding emotional topics or persisting with topics that she senses the caregivers find more pleasant. Try to gauge your own sense of discomfort and directly address this with the child. It is reassuring to children that they are not alone in some of their emotional upset.
Children look to adults to understand and interpret their own inner states. Younger children will even mirror the nature and intensity of an adult’s emotions. So if you feel you will be unable to control your emotions when you are trying to help the child, you will need to use some coping strategies yourself. Take a few moments, collect yourself and then try to help the child. It is only human to lose control and be very emotional in these moments. That is not bad for the child if, after you feel more composed, you can help the child understand how you were overcome with emotion - "Just like you feel sometimes." Explain that you struggle to understand too - "We need to help each other when we are sad."
3. Be prepared to discuss the same details again and again.
Expect to hear things from the child that seems as if they didn't 'hear' you when you told them the first time. The powerful, pervasive implications of death for the child can be overwhelming -- a traumatic event. The child's responses to death of a parent, sibling or other loved one will be similar to the child's responses to other traumatic events. This will include emotional numbing, avoidance, sadness, regression, episodic manifestations of anger, frustration, fear of the unknown (future), helplessness and confusion.
The child will have recurring, intrusive and emotionally evocative recollections of the loved one and about the death of the loved one. If there is no clear image of the death, the child will 'imagine' various scenarios. These images will return and return. As they do, the child (if she feels safe and supported by the adults around her) will ask about death, the specifics of the death and the loved one. Patiently, repeat clear, honest facts for the child. If you don't know something - if you also have wondered about the nature of death or a detail in this specific loss - tells the child. Help the child explore possible explanations, let the child understand that you and others can and, often, must live with many unknowns. In this process, let the child know, however, that there are things we do know - things we do understand. Bring positive memories, images and recollections of the loved one into the conversation.
4. Be available, nurturing, reassuring and predictable.
Do your best to be available, loving, supportive and predictable. All of these things make the child's work easier. She feels safer and cared for. The loss of parents, siblings and other loved ones is extremely traumatic and will forever change these children's lives. The child has, in some sense, a life long task of working, re-working -- experiencing and re-experiencing the loss of these loved ones. Each holiday -- each 'family' occasion-- will bring the loss, the death and the ghost of the loved one to this child. Available, nurturing and caring caregivers, teachers, therapists and caseworkers will all make this journey easier.
5. Understand that surviving children often feel guilty.
A child surviving when family members die may often feel guilty. This can be a very destructive and pervasive belief. The guilt children feel is related to the false assumptions they make about the event. An important principle in this process is that children do not know how to verbalize or express guilt in the same fashion as adults. Guilt, as expressed in children, may often be best observed in behaviors and emotions that are related to self-hatred and self-destruction. The child will not likely be able to articulate that survivor guilt is intimately related to their sense of worthlessness, self-abusive or destructive behaviors.
The children surviving a parent’s sudden death will have great survivor guilt. Was there something wrong or bad about me. I could have been there -- I should have been there. These thoughts will recur in any variety of permutations. And most of the time the outcome of these thoughts will be guilt. If these children's caregivers, therapists and teachers can minimize these potentially escalating and destructive ideas, the child's recovery will be eased.
6. Take advantage of other resources.
There are many other well-trained professionals willing to help you and the child in your care with these problems. Take advantage of them. If the child is in therapy, talk to the therapist. Always remember that the loss does not go away but the way children experience loss will change with time, hopefully maturing in ways that make it easier to bear. The traumatic loss of a parent, a sibling, a peer will always be with these children. With time, love and understanding, however, children can learn to carry the burdens of traumatic loss in ways that will not interfere with their development.
Resources:
Kids Matter Inc. 2010
URL: KidsMatterInc.org
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