'Get well.' Grief therapist Julia Samuel on 'Grief work'

How should you grieve? Is there any way to grieve, or are you at the mercy of fate? How do you deal with someone in grief? Grief therapist Julia Samuel has been helping people who have lost a loved one for 25 years. She now knows how to and especially how not to.

In March this year, a few days before her book Funeral work was presented, psychotherapist Julia Samuel's mother died. She was sad, but also angry: '"Are you serious, mum?" I thought, "do you have to do this right before my book presentation?" Everything always revolved around her. Now she made sure it was all about her again at an important moment. She may have been ninety, but I was both sad and angry.'

'It is important to recognise that we can have very conflicting feelings at the same time. We would like everything to be neat and orderly, to be purely a loving person. But things are not so orderly. My relationship with my mother was anything but perfect. She drove me to madness at times, and I her. Still, we loved each other. Loving is about really seeing the other person, with all their quirks. My mother, for instance, was the biggest denier of death there was. Even just before she died because her body was full of cancer, she still blithely said she had the flu.'

How did you deal with that as a grief therapist?

'You cannot put a hold on someone and force them to face reality. Someone simply has defence and survival strategies that you have to respect. My mother put death away all her life. By the time she was twenty-five, her mother, father, sister and brother had died. And my father had already lost his father and brother at that age. There were six significant deaths between them, and they never talked about it. Something like that doesn't suddenly change a few weeks before someone's death. So what I did was ask my mother questions: "When the doctor gave you the diagnosis, did you understand what he said? Is there anything you fret about or fear?" "No," she would invariably reply, "I'm fine."'

At Funeral work clearly shows that most people deny death or keep it far from them.

'True - as long as we don't talk about it, it doesn't exist. As a result, people are incredibly ignorant when it comes to grief. No one knows what it means, what it means, what it feels like. Man's natural tendency is to avoid pain and death. Many people in mourning go to work very hard, drink a lot or seek other sedation. And that damages families for generations, because the way we deal with death and grief affects the whole family system. It is important to think about death and grief before it happens, so that you are prepared for it and can deal with it better.'

Why can't we do that now?

'Until the 20th century, death was much more a part of life than it is now. People all died at home, lives lasted much shorter, women died in childbirth, one in six children died, there were hardly any medicines. After the First and Second World Wars, there was no time to mourn, because cities and businesses had to be rebuilt, children had to be born. There was no psychological space for it, and besides, the bigger the trauma, the longer it takes for people to talk about it. People had already suffered enough pain, everyone wanted to get on with life.'

'Then medical science took off. Diseases could be treated, and death went out of sight. Seeing a dead body became less common, people no longer experienced grief up close, no one talked about it. We are getting older, which makes us feel we have a 'right' to life. In today's society, we want to be in control and 'fix' things. So mourning, too, should be over as soon as possible.'

How should it be, good grieving?

As much as we would like to, there is no simple to-do list or five-step plan for grieving that will solve it all. In my book I list eight pillars that help, such as expressing your bond with the deceased and maintaining a daily routine. The most important thing is to fully feel the pain of loss. By nature, we tend to avoid pain and look for ways to feel better. Unpleasant feelings have to go away. But the paradox is that grief only softens or goes away if you allow it to go away completely first.'

'When someone dies, the relationship and love does not end but it takes a different form. Remembering someone regularly and expressing that love gives it space. Grief moves into the body and can feel like intense pain or fear. This unconsciously causes a flight-or-fight response. Exercise helps to get that stress out of the body. A combination of exercise, something soothing like meditation and then a treat for yourself does something positive for your system for the rest of the day.'

'Understanding more about the relationship you have with yourself also helps. Knowing what makes you upset or anxious, what the little voice in your head is saying to you, what calms you down. Then you can be more compassionate to yourself and cope better with your feelings. And of course, support from loved ones is very important. Grief makes a person very lonely. When there are people who sincerely listen to you, it helps enormously.'

That sounds fairly obvious.

'If you've dealt with grief before, yes. But there are whole tribes who really don't know. In the twenty-five years of my practice, I have received countless people who did not know how to deal with their feelings and did not get the support from their surroundings that they needed. Many bereaved people don't know that you can experience a whole complex of feelings like grief, anger, guilt or shame at the same time - and that this is perfectly normal. They don't know that grief can last a very long time, and that it can feel physically like intense pain or fear, and that it affects your memory. They don't know that new loss always raises old grief, no matter how well it has been processed, and that this is quite normal.'

'Such insights can help you get through the grieving process better, be more patient towards yourself or another person. That is why I consider the personal stories to be the core of the book, because in them you read how others experienced it, how they reacted or what they encountered when they went back to work, for example. That offers more understanding and insight than a practical list ever could.'

The environment can mess it up quite nicely because people don't know how to deal with it.

'That's right. When someone is suffering, you literally feel it in your own body and it has a disturbing effect. Human instinct says: get out. If you are not aware of it, you will act accordingly. But if you are aware of it, you can choose to ignore that feeling. Where it usually goes wrong is when people want to fix someone's pain. And then they say stupid things like, "Time heals all wounds" or, "Thank goodness his/her suffering is over now. Which totally ignores what the mourner is feeling.'

'Maybe deep down they know you can't say something like that, and yet many people don't know anything better to say. But you can't take away someone's grief and you don't have to. Acknowledging the grief and just being there is all you have to do. I think we underestimate how much that means for healing. People mainly remember years later the small attentions, like a handkerchief from a stranger on the tram.'

How meaningful are collective expressions of mourning for celebrities, victims of attacks or, as we have just experienced in the Netherlands, when a young woman has been murdered?

'Very meaningful. The fact that people who don't know each other come together and talk to each other, even share their grief with people they don't know, has a powerful and healing effect. With an attack like the one in New York now - and we've had a few in the UK in the past year too - you see that it immediately brings to mind the September 11, 2001 attacks. Two things come into play with such events: people immediately wonder if they and their loved ones are OK, and if so, there is relief and at the same time often a slight sense of guilt.'

'In addition, the strong realisation that we cannot control death is presenting itself. It helps by jointly expressing such feelings, lighting candles like in Paris, or making music together. Among young people, you see them sharing a dying process or saying goodbye via Instagram or Facebook. There are already lots of Facebook pages in memory of someone, sharing memories and featuring someone's favourite music and photos. These are new and very positive ways of sharing grief.'

'In the UK, I am pushing for the introduction of a mourning band, which you can use to show that you have lost a loved one. That makes it clear to the outside world that they need to be a bit more friendly and understanding with you.'

You yourself were a close friend of Princess Diana. Does it make a difference to the grieving process if your loved one was or becomes a public figure?

'When a loved one dies, you actually want time to stand still for a moment, because that's what it feels like. It is very difficult that the world just goes on as if nothing has happened, while your world is completely upside down. The special thing about a famous person is that the clock does indeed stop for a moment, and the outside world reacts to your loss. That is comforting in a way.'

'When Diana crashed, I was in shock like everyone else. At the same time, my relationship with her was very personal, and it was disturbing that this public relationship with her took over so much and she just couldn't be left alone. I live opposite Kensington Palace, so we would often drop in on each other or call each other. Large groups of people were now gathering there. I blocked out the public aspect: I didn't read newspapers, didn't watch TV, I struggled with the mass attention. Because, of course, my greatest grief was ultimately that I had lost a good friend and would never see her again or be able to call her. That I could never hear her laugh again. That's what I miss the most.'

First aid for grief

Funeral work by Julia Samuel was published by Balans, €22.50.