When illness, death and dying enter our lives, almost nothing is the same. An important aspect of the grieving process is contact with people, with social anchors that give us the support we need – especially when the mourners are children and young people. The reality of the Covid-19 pandemic no longer allows us this contact, and so we find ourselves in a situation in which we have to reinvent the principles of human behavior in these times. Digital. Distant. Contactless. And yet: can the “new normal” show us new possibilities in grief counseling and therapeutic collaboration? In a three-way collaboration project between Breitenstein Consulting, the Ludwig Maximilian University and a Munich center for grief counseling, an interdisciplinary team developed an individualized concept for online group grief counseling.
Change management and grief counseling go hand in hand. The various emotional phases that occur during an upcoming change process are often compared to the stages of grief according to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s model: a phase of shock is followed by denial, anger, grief, acceptance, and finally, consent. This process requires time and space. The mourning center lives a philosophy in which contact with others is indispensable. Important here are the protected setting, regularity, personal development and group dynamic support. Since the center specializes in grief counseling for children and adolescents, it is emphasized here that children often grieve differently: they jump in and out of their grief and do not always express their grief with words and tears. It quickly becomes clear that digital grief counseling cannot replace direct human contact. In order to develop a concept for online group grief counseling, our project team began a sensitive and thorough analysis phase to understand the therapeutic group work of the grief center and to explore the possibilities of virtual collaboration.
To give the mourners the opportunity to feel a sense of security in front of the screen and at a distance from the mourning group, while still being able to determine the pace themselves, a clear agenda with basic rules of communication, opportunities for individual reflection, active phases and a clear distribution of roles with moderation is required. The “digital self” is also central to online group work. In order for the mourners to feel that they are participating in a social interaction, the group should participate in the environment of each and every mourner. The respective environment of the mourners should therefore be presented and shared. Objects such as the bed, sofa or carpet are used to unlock the places of mourning. Based on this approach, the mourners are embedded in a real, spatial mourning process. The respective location offers even more opportunities for personal reflection than the mourning center!
For us, the development of this concept represents much more than a simple digitization project. It shows us that the digital world gives us opportunities that are only now, in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, coming into focus. The “new normal” affects everyone. It doesn’t care whether we are sick, have lost people, or are healthy. This makes it all the more important to embrace this development and, in collaboration with experts, to develop ways to transform seemingly non-digitalizable, human issues such as grief.
