Jennifer Levin
Hi everyone and welcome to Untethered: Healing the pain from a sudden death. I am Dr. Jennifer Levin, and I specialize in traumatic death and helping individuals through the struggles, pain, trauma, and chaos of an unexpected death.
In today’s podcast I interview Dr. Robert Niemeyer who is a Professor Emeritus of the Department of Psychology at the University of Memphis. Dr. Niemeyer is a leader in the field of Thanatology which is the science or study of death, dying and bereavement and he has published 33 books, including the New Techniques of Grief Therapy: Bereavement and Beyond, and serves as the Editor of the journal of Death Studies. He is the author of over 500 articles and book chapters and is a frequent workshop presenter. As a clinician and researcher, he is perhaps best known for his work on meaning making in grief and currently working to advance a more adequate theory of grieving as a meaning-making process. In our interview we explore the meaning making process of grief after a sudden or unexpected death and the concept of narrative reconstruction used in meaning making. Dr. Niemeyer also demonstrates three of the techniques that can be used in therapy to facilitate meaning making after a traumatic loss. Finally, Dr. Niemeyer, who is also the Director of the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition shares opportunities available at the institute for clinicians interested in specialized grief training.
Thank you so much for joining us today. And why don't you just start off and tell us a little bit about yourself.
Robert Neimeyer
I'm happy to do so Jennifer, and it's a great pleasure to be here with you. And whenever we have meaningful conversations about things that are often marginalized and our usual social discourse, or usual, just conversations, it's very meaningful to me, so thank you for the opportunity. I am a practicing psychologist and have been, well, gosh, I guess now for 45 years. In addition to being someone who is quite interested in developing our, our understanding, conceptually theoretically, about what it means to confront a crisis of meaning and most especially in the context of severe loss. So that's led me to engage in a fair amount of research on the topic of bereavement, the factors that help people get through that experience, and even grow through the experience, and the factors that also impede them or the places they get stuck. And, in this, I am really finding that what we're learning in terms of our research corresponds to our human experience, our first person experience, and also my clinical experience. So I look forward to the opportunity to share some of those ideas with you and to hear some of your own.
Jennifer Levin
Right and what actually led you to get involved in the field of grief and loss and even research?
Robert Neimeyer
Well, that's, of course, a question that could be answered on lots of levels. Probably the deepest level of which I become more conscious, across the course of living is the the early tragic deaths I experienced in my life. My grandmother, paternal grandmother, lived in our home with us, and died in our home with us when I was just about nine years old. That contributed, I think, to a kind of depressive darkness in my father's life, which accompanied his literal blindness, the darkening of his vision through untreatable glaucoma. And ultimately, other demons that I can't quite name, because I don't have that first person account from him of what was going on. But he died by suicide when I was 11 years old. And that, of course, rocked our world in major ways. My mom in some important way, never really moved through that fully, she remained a prisoner of that loss, I think for the rest of her life. And that took the form of numerous suicide attempts throughout the next 10 years, through my adolescence. So those things no doubt, primed me to take loss and grief very seriously, as a, an often deeply unwelcome part of the human experience and, naturally, then it led me to psychology as a college major, with an interest early on as an undergraduate in death threat, the degree to which we are threatened by the prospect of our own mortality. And, of course, that also dovetailed with clinical considerations and ultimately deepened and broadened into a real interest in what it means to encounter loss of the lives of others and also the non death losses of life, to put those on a scale of almost equivalent seriousness. So all of that contributed, I think, and although I think when I initially began that road, I did so in my own kind of darkness and an awareness of what was really moving me I just happened to be volunteering at a suicide and Crisis Intervention Center in my first year of my undergraduate years, without ever connecting it to my dad's death, this is how ignorant we can be of ourselves if we really work at it. So in any case, across time, somethings had become clear. And my own motivation for the work is among those.
Jennifer Levin
What part of the US did you grow up in?
Robert Neimeyer
I grew up in Ohio until the point of my dad's death, but within a few months, my mother kind of sought a geographic cure and fled to the state of Florida with us, which effectively meant that we lost all other relationships, people, places, projects, possessions, that once anchored our lives and so, of course, functionally it compounded the loss rather than cured it. And so those were the two states, Ohio and Florida, in which I lived as a child and adolescent through university and then around the country since then, and you reach me now in Singapore. So I have a rather international peripatetic existence as an adult.
Jennifer Levin
Yes, I know you do. You travel quite extensively. You have a diverse and extensive career that has explored grief from many different perspectives. And as you know, I'm very interested in sudden and unexpected death and loss, how that impacts people. And I'm very curious about your perceptions and your research findings, that has examined the needs of individuals who are grieving a loved one who's died suddenly and unexpectedly. So specifically, and I was actually reading one of your studies on, how would you characterize the needs of those who are grieving a sudden and unexpected death, compared to those who are grieving natural or anticipated losses?
Robert Neimeyer
This is something that we've been doing even more research on in recent years, with my young colleague, Jason Bottomly, a PhD student of mine, who now is his own autonomous scholar, we've been looking at precisely the question, looking at at sudden and tramatic loss in the form of suicide, overdose, and then comparing it to natural death losses in a large cohort of some hundreds of people. So we, we've been looking at that question very specifically. But for many years, we also have been looking at the factors that predict adaptation to violent death loss, suicide and homicide, fatal accident. And what we come to recognize in all of this is that a feature shared with all of us who are navigating bereavement, but in a much more accentuated way, is our need to somehow wrap our hearts and minds around what has happened to us. What has happened to our loved one, we have the need to make sense of a senseless event, one unanticipated, and by that what we imply is that we didn't have constructs for it, we didn't have a way of understanding it, we didn't see it coming. We were caught with our constructs down, when people die, die in this kind of certain way. And then when we add to it, violent death losses, arising as a function of human intention, or inattention. That is whether by design, in the case of suicide, or homicide, on the part of the deceased, or another, or in the context of inattention, medical accidents, vehicular accidents, natural disasters, we find, of course, that acts of war, most relevantly in terrorism in the current climate, then, of course, peoples need to somehow make sense of what has happened to find a way of squaring this absolutely tragic and traumatic event with a worldview that often was more innocent, that was unprepared for the eruption of such things in our own lives. That seems to be a central process. And it implies a need to workhorse a kind of emotional modulation, if you will, and ability to engage in self soothing and to seek relationships that provide a kind of safe container for our difficult stories and experiences and emotions. And in this way, then to create a safer space, within which we can review and revise all of those assumptions about what life is or should be in order to square it with what it actually has become. And that implies attempting to make sense of ourselves and the world in different terms.
Jennifer Levin
Yeah. That's such a difficult thing to do right now, with everything that's going on in the context of the world in general.
Robert Neimeyer
That's right. And for those who know tragic loss of their own, paradoxically, they may meet that, the pain of the world in one of two ways one is, of course, being so preoccupied with their own loss that they can scarcely register the tragedy happening on a universal scale. But people also may find that they're very activated by these experiences of homicide and torture and instability. And you know, and the bombings that devastate whole families and communities, people lose 47 members of their family system, and how do you ever survive such an experience? So, yes, there is a connection between the macro level of violent death, and the micro level of violent and sudden death that we ourselves confront most commonly in our offices and too often in our lives.
Jennifer Levin
Yeah, I definitely am seeing that right now with the clients that I'm working with as well. To build upon that a significant amount of your work has obviously focused on grief as a process of meaning making. And can you describe that for the listeners who aren't familiar with your work?
Robert Neimeyer
Well, I think of meaning making is having a few different aspects, I suppose. And, and we can think of it in terms of where people get stuck in their bereavement. When they find themselves captured in a form of grief that remains intense, charged, reoccupying, they can scarcely make space in their minds and hearts and actions for anything else in what is sometimes referred to as prolonged grief, because of the, the intensity of it just keeps winding forward, as if time itself scarcely mattered, as indeed it scarcely does. We find that in the face of violent death loss, especially time does little to heal the wounds, it's a question of what we do with the time that matters. And often what keeps us from doing what we need to, and that is, in a sense, reviewing and revising our basic life stories, is that we become stuck in aspects of that story. We can get very preoccupied and mired down in a ruminative kind of preoccupation with the circumstances of the death, our mind keeps going back to it, it fills our dreams, our daydreams as well as our nocturnal ones. And we may find that we will cycle through that event story as you and Ted Rynearson so well, no again and again and again. We know that rumination about the story, and the mere repetition of the story, without deepening and in some sense, freeing the story to move forward differently, is a sign of trouble. It tends to crowd out everything else in life that matters to us. We get preoccupied with the why questions. These are commonly the case and of course in connection with suicide. Why did this happen? Why me? Why my loved one? But we may become quite preoccupied with those in many forms of sudden death loss that don't involve intentionality. And even in just losses through grief, why did my child contract cancer at the age of 12 years old? So that's one dead end that people can find themselves stuck in. Another is, and I think of that as a struggle than an unsuccessful one, in that case, to integrate the meaning of the loss into our lives without it becoming the dominant story of our lives. And then, of course, procedures like restorative retelling this kind of, you know, emotionally modulated, slow, deliberative review, in the presence, often of a non-anxious person or group who can stand with us in doing that work. That would be a cardinal method for dealing with that, among others. We can also get stuck though in the back story of our relationship, not just the event story of how the death happened, but the backstory of who we lost not only how we lost this person, but distinctively this relation, this child, this partner, this sibling, parent, soulmate, upon whom we depended for a sense of having kind of a secure base or providing that secure base to them, in the case of the child, and of course the death typically violates that expectation, it risks sundering a relationship and, and so the meaning that we seek there is the meaning typically of a revised or realigned continuing bond with the person. How now do we not relinquish the relationship to death, but reconstruct it in life, so that we maintain a sense of the accessibility of that person's stories and their presence to us, what Ted Rynearson calls presence within absence. And so to help people find a way of doing that both shores up their sense of security of the bond. And it also may help address unfinished business in the relationship, unresolved relational issues, from the person's life shared with our own, as well as from their death. All of those perhaps regrets the need to give or extend forgiveness and receive it. These are major factors that determine what our grief looks like and how sticky it is. And then the third piece that we focus on within that kind of meaning focused grief therapy is the meaning of our lives now going forward. Who are we, in the wake of this loss? If the loss is profound, especially if it is sudden and shocking, we are not the same people we were before. We often need to look for an attempt to reestablish the strands of consistency with the previous life we had. But we also need to take on board different identities, sometimes different values, perspectives understandings of life's tragedy. And this can set the stage for post traumatic growth, though it does not guarantee it. And so, in this, we really need a trauma informed focus on grief. In terms of dealing with the traumatic story of loss, we need an attachment informed perspective on grief, to deal with the relational bond that has been challenged or shattered. And we need a resilience informed understanding of the nature of self-transformation within family systems, the whole family's identity has changed when we experienced the loss of one of its members. So that's a bit of what I mean by meaning, we're looking to pick up the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, and put them together, sometimes differently, to make a more coherent image.
Jennifer Levin
And you often use narrative reconstruction as one of the techniques for this?
Robert Neimeyer
That's right, as you do, as Ted does, we are part of a community of practice all three of us, that sees human beings, not only as Homo sapiens kind of knowing or conscious beings, but Homo neurons, we are storytelling beings that's even more unique to our species. There are lots of other animals that have consciousness, dolphins and the great apes among them. But as far as we know, they don't tell stories. They do sing songs. But we seem to be the storytelling beings and, and so we need to make sense of the story of the loss, the story of our life. And the story of the relationship and narrative means to those therapeutic ends naturally follow.
Jennifer Levin
Yeah. So, for any listeners who wanted to read more about the things that you're talking about, and your meaning making and your narrative reconstruction, what would you refer them to read of your work?
Robert Neimeyer
It might depend partly on who they are. So I might point professionals in one direction and lay readers in another but recognizing that there's a substantial overlap. First of all, all of us who are professionals also experienced loss. So we are also lay readers. And also, if the writing is accessible, then intelligently readers can certainly read the professional literature without getting bogged down in all the statistics. So one source that I think is potentially of interest is, I have a few chapters within the Handbook of Grief Therapies, published recently by Sage, and one of them is on meeting focused grief therapy. It's called Grief is a Quest for Meaning, or Grief Therapy is a Quest for Meaning. That may be of interest. It's, I think, accessible and multifaceted and is anchored in a case study. There's also a series of books that I've edited, and to which I've contributed many chapters, but so too have many other skillful therapists around the world, and this is a series called Techniques of Grief Therapy. There are three volumes, all of them different Techniques of Grief Therapy, Creative Practices for Counseling the Bereaved, Techniques of Grief Therapy Assessment and Intervention, and New Techniques of Grief Therapy Bereavement and Beyond, all of which are published by Routledge, and all of which provide dozens and dozens and dozens of specific tools and techniques, that many of which even lay readers might use to enhance, for example, their own journaling, or their own active attempts to meet or master the grief that they experience in often creative ways. So if anybody is dissatisfied with any of those, I'm happy to personally refund their money.
Jennifer Levin
Actually, I have those. They're great books. And that was actually my next question is, can you give us an example of specific techniques that you find useful when working with clients?
Robert Neimeyer
I don't know if it would be possible to or useful to talk about restorative retelling, or if you yourself and others you've interviewed have done that so thoroughly that...
Jennifer Levin
Go for it. Yeah, we actually haven't talked about that.
Robert Neimeyer
So maybe I could mention one technique in each of these three domains, the event story of the death, the backstory of relationship, and the personal story itself, just to give a flavor of the diversity of this. Restorative retelling would be a very central technique for dealing with the event story. And of course, this is a practice pioneered by our mutual friend and colleague, Ted Rynearson, still very active as a scholar and contributor to this area, even in his 80s. And, of course, he has attracted a community of fellow travelers, ourselves, among them, you and me, who are also engaged in this work. So some of what I would say would directly derive from Ted and some would be my own twists on the theme. So looking through the narrative lens that I share with him, but for me, it is, it's quite central, I would say that we are looking to help people reengage the story of the loss. And to do it through a mnemonic device that I call bracing, pacing and facing. That is we're looking to provide them the support they need moment to moment in the context of retelling a potentially traumatizing tale without the prospect of retraumatization. And this may mean that as we encourage them to perhaps close their eyes in order to have more visual access to the event of the dying, as they remember, or as they imagine it, we encourage them to speak the story of what has happened, the external story of the loss itself, what happened and when, what was said, and by whom in that phone call, to attend to the internal story of what was happening in them, when they received the death notification or discovered their loved ones body after their hanging. Or were standing alongside the bed of the hospital when the heart monitor flatlined. And so it's an attempt to, to bring forward and give voice to that personal story, the internal story as well as the external, and the third strand that is braided together with the other two in this narrative work is the meaning oriented strand. That is, what sense did they make of what the doctor told them at that point? How did they understand the loved one's intention to die by suicide or so that we're attempting in a way to be alert to the cues that they are wrestling with the issue of comprehending it, or understanding the significance of what happened right along with the active emotions and bodily responses that are part of their internal narrative and the events that play out along the timeline from death notification moving forward or from maybe illness moving forward in the case of terminal illnesses. We're trying to walk with them and to make it possible for them to stand in the presence of horror without being overwhelmed. And so we might say, in this instance, Jennifer if you could take me into that room as you stood beside your mother and that hospital bed and if you were just to look around that room in your mind's eye, with your eyes closed, what would you see in that scene? Walls, they were just kind of gray. The room was empty, except for her. Empty you say. And what was happening in you, as you experienced the emptiness of that room? I just felt kind of hollow myself. Hollow, like, something was missing? Yes. As I think about it, I didn't even have any emotions. I was just kind of blank. Like, as that scene moved forward was there a point where that changed? Yeah. When my sister came. What happened then? She looked up from the bed. Seeing my mother just fighting to breathe I saw the tears just brimming in her eyes. And something in me just broke, like glass. Like glass just shattering? Yeah. And how is it for you now as you say that, and as those tears now also emerge from your eyes? I just couldn't let myself feel it at the time. But I feel it now. What do you need now? And so these would be you know, this is just a kind of spontaneous reconstruction of a possible scenario. Three minutes of it. But that restorative retelling, might, by agreement and design with the client, take 45 minutes of an hour session, saving 15 minutes to step back, step out of the scene, ground the person again in her, his or their body and in the room and in the shared space, open their eyes to reenter relationship reenter now, not then. And then with that clarity, but also that intimate dip into their personal narrative, step back onto this more solid ground of the present, and reflect on, you know, what, what did you observe about that, that seems significant to you? What do you make of that now? What do you need now, having reentered and really walk through the story, taking me with you on that trail, what now would be the next step going forward? And so we spent 15 minutes talking about that. And that might not be the only time we review that story, we may come back to a number of times, we may review a single chapter of the longer story. And then we spend a session kind of working with that and making sense of it and making sure the person is safe and secure and caring for him or herself. And then we do another session where we tackle the next chapter. We got the diagnosis. We got the treatment. We had the death, we maybe had the burial, it may be distributed across several episodes of evocative but restorative retelling. And so what's being restored here, a sense of integrity, a certain sense of control over something that was outside our control before, at least now we are the storyteller, instead of simply the co-victim of the story, the helpless bystander. So that would be an example of one of many techniques that we might use to deal with the event story. Well, it is amazing. I mean, you've done this work, you know how amazing it can be, you know how people can stand into this bravely. And they can move toward greater mastery of an experience that no one would want to have but that sometimes life dishes out. And it's an enormous honor to walk with them intimately each step of that way. If we change the channel to the backstory of the relationship, I could also pick a particular technique or tool that, again, among dozens and dozens, many of them outlined in the Techniques of Grief Therapy books that would have to do with not saying goodbye to the loved one as the goal of the relational work. But in the words of Michael White, saying Hello again. How do we reopen the relationship rather than seek its closure? Right? If the goal is not to say goodbye, but Hello, and restore connection, how can we do it? There are many ways but one is through imaginal conversations. We often hear this talked about in terms of chair work, but chair work is only one of several forms. So we can work with their eyes closed, conjuring a sense of the presence of the deceased, helping the person find words to say to the dead what needed to be said but weren't said at the point of dying because the circumstances or the character of their relation prevented it and for people to speak their emotional truth of the relation, ask the questions they needed to ask, state what had remained a silent story in the relation.
Jennifer Levin
That is amazing. Hmm, that was amazing.
Robert Neimeyer
And then at the right moment and dialogue as the person maybe grows silent after several minutes of prompting them to Could you say more about that, Jennifer? Or what would you want to say to your mother, if she could join us here today, fully healed from a psychological and physical suffering that she experienced in those years, and could really show up for her daughter in a way that life denied you both. What more would you want to tell her now about how it is for you now and what you need now, even from her, we deepen you into that we wait for that pregnant pause where you may look up almost as if in a family therapy setting, you'd be looking at mom. And I might say, could you click the screen now. And just for the moment, step out of being Jennifer, and step into your mom's position, offering your mother your voice? What now, would you say to this daughter who says to you so earnestly, I just hurt so, I miss you so. There's so much I wish we had been able to do together that we couldn't, what would you want to say to her now about that. And we would prompt mom in this way to the same level of honesty and vulnerability that her daughter achieved. And we would go back and forth in that way a few turns moving a relationship to potentially place a much stronger bonding and much firmer resolution. And so that would be a you know, a kind of intervention, once again, we would carefully usher people out of this kind of liminal magical space that the imaginal conversation involves and back into a secure place in their room with us and their body alerted to the air conditioning humming in the background and the rest and then say, so what about that is important? What came through for you there Did anything surprise you, about either of you, and about the nature of the conversation? And so, this is the place where we help people with meaning making. So meaning making is not some kind of a robotic, cognitive intellectual task. It is grounded in first person deeply emotionally evocative experience that we step back from then and try to harvest the lessons learned from that deep immersion. So that would be an example of an intervention in that channel. And then, I guess there's the third channel. I'll mention that briefly. And this is the channel of the personal story of self. Again, there are dozens and dozens of techniques by which we might look to review and revise our sense of who we are. One that I rather like is called composition work. And it was devised originally by a colleague of mine named Agni Konopka. And she and I practice that together and sort of I was able to join her in developing the technique, I now practice it with my wife and partner, Carolyn. And it is a way of using like stones, seashells, feathers, twigs, natural elements of all kinds, very diverse, I'll just call them stones in general, to represent aspects of ourselves, roles that we occupy feeling states, so, you know, myself as, as the, you know, the good boy scout, myself as a therapist, myself, as a father myself as a partner, these kinds of roles, but also sort of emotionally significant roles, you know, myself as a philosopher, myself as a hurting little boy, and, and then to also consider, who would represent parts of my identity through their participation in my life, and I would have my children, I'd have my, my spouse or partner, I'd have some very dear friends, I'd have important mentor figures, there might be symbolic figures, maybe there's a Buddha, or Jesus or Mohammed or something in the mix, or an Abraham or you know, so these could be people, dead or alive, frankly, real or imagined, who also play a part in our composition of self. And on a blank surface, it might be a sand tray, or a tabletop or a large piece of paper, we might configure these stones to represent their closeness and their relation with one another, prior to the death of a loved one, following that death, and then rearranging it at yet another time, in a preferred future world which we would like to work. So it would be a way of visually looking at how this system of self-identifications changes with some things becoming more central, others more peripheral, the alignment of different parts changes, new stones may be introduced to represent new and emerging parts of the self. So this would be one again of dozens of techniques. All of these are things that we provide training in and the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition for those interested in in-depth training and in grief therapy. And it would represent one way in which we try to help people name and claim aspects of who they are to relinquish gently roles that no longer serve them and embrace others that do, with hope and courage. Accepting the relational realignments that are sometimes required for that to happen. Some people we may grow more distant from and others much closer to. So the construction of self ultimately is one goal of grief therapy that doesn't get enough attention, I think.
Jennifer Levin
Absolutely. And I seem to see that so much with people that I work with, in the longer term, you know, after especially come a year, two, three, and I don't like to assign any time. But further out that that's one of the bigger struggles that's in the longer term of the grief.
Robert Neimeyer
That's right. And this is where support groups don't always serve us well, as important as they may be. Because, understandably, they tend to concentrate on the dramatic feelings and needs of those at the earliest point in a devastating loss. And longer term survivors, who are really looking to, you know, essentially rewrite their biographies across time. May be, you know, that just is not the priority. When you're in the face of that raw pain on the part of others. So it often is a bit of work that happens outside the support group setting.
Jennifer Levin
Just having you go through those examples of those interventions. I know I have a lot of clinicians who listen to the podcast and so that was just wonderful. And for me, it was like getting a private lecture. I don't mean lecture, but you know, demonstration. That was just amazing. Thank you.
Robert Neimeyer
You can take take the old professor out of the lecture hall, but you can't take the lecture hall out of the old professor.
Jennifer Levin
Wonderful, let me say in preparing for our interview today, I was listening to some of your previous podcast interviews and I was really struck by a particular quote you mentioned, and you may not even remember saying this so it's okay, if you didn't, if you don't remember, but if you do, I was hoping you would elaborate on something where you said, grief takes the form of an urgent dialogue with ourselves. Do you remember saying that?
Robert Neimeyer
No, not at all. But I like the idea.
Jennifer Levin
You said that in a podcast interview with Healed Grief and you can pass, but...
Robert Neimeyer
No, I'll happily play rather than pass because I, I do have a dialogical conception of self. And that's implied, really, in probably all of those techniques I was describing, certainly, the imaginal dialogue we're having with the deceased, you know, I'm not a spiritualist, I don't have the idea that I'm literally conjuring the dead. But I'm inviting people to meet the internalized image of the other, which is the image with which they're striving to restore a better relation. And so that itself is a deep form of urgent dialogue with an aspect of the self. I think the composition work, obviously, is attempting to symbolize, you know, Jennifer, the little girl, Jennifer, the mature clinician, you know, Jennifer, the podcaster, all of which are present in that composition. And so, I think that dialogical work of a very technically specific kind, is a good companion in the work that we do. But at a more general meta level, I think we can see therapy, grief therapy most especially in our context. And it's a form of dialogue with ourselves, about ourselves, and for ourselves. And in everything that we do, whether it is in terms of journaling, whether it's in terms of externalizing our experience in the presence of a therapist who can receive it with compassion, and generosity, all of these are dialogical acts. And of course, much of what we know since Carl Rogers, a good therapist does, is reflected back to the client, often more poignantly, and clearly what she or he is saying, in a way that it can be more visible, more audible. So I see therapy as the essence of meaningful dialogue. And grief therapy certainly isn't an example of that. Even if people do not see a therapist, that urgent dialogue with themselves. To ask the question of, who am I now? Whose Am I now? Right? Where have I been? And where am I now? And where am I going? These are fundamental questions. And they're not just intellectual preoccupations, they're charged with powerful feeling of fear and anxiety and guilt and dread and, and also hope, and you know gratitude. So the range of emotion that permeates all of it.
Jennifer Levin
As I mentioned on the podcast attracts a diverse audience, including listeners who are grieving and mental health professionals, some of which who may be interested in your institute. So please tell us about the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition.
Robert Neimeyer
Well thank you. The Portland Institute, just PI for short, is the, I think it's fair to say, the world's leading organization for training grief therapists in the sense that we have probably at this point 40 or 53 hour modules recorded on aspects of grief therapy. What we're doing here today might well appear within one of those in some form, but in a form that always emphasizes experiential learning. So we use a lot of clinical video people see me doing therapy with lots of clients, for example, and they'll also see, you know, other clinicians work. We work in a way that is evidence informed. But we're not so much going over the statistics, we're looking at the news you can use as practitioners in doing the work that we share. And so we have modules concerned with specific techniques. We illustrate things like restorative retelling, like imaginal dialogues, like composition work and dozens and dozens of other creative media. We offer certification in grief therapy as meaning reconstruction and family focused grief therapy, in grief therapy for non-death loss in arts assisted grief therapy, and in grief therapy for suicide bereavement, our newest certification track, we feature a mentoring model. So it's not so much just death by PowerPoint, and then multiple choice tests. Even with the recorded sessions, we had dialogue with people by having them complete reflective journals based on their engagement with the recorded material and videos. And then we provide personal feedback to each of them in terms of an email from Bob to Jennifer, and so on. So, it is a different model, I think, a deeper model of training, one that can be paced by the learners themselves. And I don't know what more to say about it. I invite people to take a look. You don't have to sign up for a certification program, you can take a single module that interests you. So just looking at Portlandinstitute.org, they will find us and we'd sure welcome them in joining us whether for a single module or for whole certification program.
Jennifer Levin
Ok great. We'll put information in our show notes about that. So final question for you today. What advice would you share with individuals who are just beginning their grief journey after a sudden or unexpected death?
Robert Neimeyer
I guess I would say go gentle with yourselves. Don't expect more of yourself than you would expect of a child of yours going through this experience or a dear friend. Allow yourself to experience the turbulence but ideally in the context of a caring relationship within your family, within your friendship circle, within a support group structure, or with a trusted therapist who can help you hold what you wish you did not have to. And actively thinking about how you can hold it. How can you become the teller of the story? How can you make ultimately decisions about what this loss will mean to you going forward? The meaning you want your loved one's life to continue to have for you. This, a sudden death of the kind we're talking about here is never chosen. But ironically, it places us in a position that is rich in choice, in which we make a lot of decisions about how we will bear this, with whom we will bear this. And ultimately, who we will become as an individual and a family in light of this. None of that is easy. Most of it is agonizing. Some of it is deeply gratifying and moving in positive ways. Give yourself the time and the companionship on the trail to move forward for life that once again could be meaningful, though it can never be the same.
Jennifer Levin
Oh, absolutely. Words to live by. Bob, I cannot thank you enough for your time and your insight and sharing this depth of knowledge that you have after so many years of experience, research and working with clients with us today.
Robert Neimeyer
Well, thank you for that affirmation. And I only want to return the same to you that I think many of us who do this work do accumulate a kind of wisdom about living and and those who do the work as bereaved people accumulate wisdom about living. They simply need a way to hold the pain long enough to do something with that, that itself can be beautiful, even if the death was very ugly. And I wish every listener well in their personal journey. And if they like us are professionals in the area, in their professional companionship with those who are walking that path. So thank you for allowing me to walk in with all of you for this hour.
Jennifer Levin
I couldn't agree more. Thank you.
I am so honored to have leaders in our field of Thanatology such as Dr. Niemeyer willing to gift their time to this podcast focused on sudden death so that our diverse group of listeners can expand their knowledge or move towards healing. The concept of meaning-making can be difficult to embrace after a loved one dies suddenly or in a traumatic manner.
I have always found Dr. Niemeyer’s ability to speak about difficult and emotionally laden topics of grief and loss to be so eloquent. Upon reviewing transcripts of our interview, I thought his description about the needs of individuals who are grieving a loved one who died in a sudden manner captured the experienced so well and I would like to read what he said again. He said there is…
A need to workhorse a kind of emotional modulation and an ability to engage in self-soothing and seek relationships that provide a safe container for our difficult stories, experiences and emotions. And in this way, then to create a safer space, within which we can review and revise all of those assumptions about what life is or should be in order to square it with what it actually has become. And that implies attempting to make sense of ourselves and the world in different terms.
I found Dr. Niemeyer’s explanation of the three domains of meaning making and his demonstration of the different interventions incredibly beneficial.
The three domains of meaning making he described were 1) the story of the event, 2) the backstory, and 3) creation of the self or meaning of our lives going forward. He used a technique called restorative retelling to help find meaning with the story of the event.
Restorative retelling was developed by Dr. Ted Rynearson who was the first person ever interviewed on this podcast and Dr. Niemeyer demonstrated this technique as appropriate way to work with meaning with someone is struggling with the details of the circumstances that ended their loved one’s life. For the second domain, he showed us a way to restore connection with a deceased loved one to communicate what needs to be said. And finally, for the third domain he demonstrated a technique I was unfamiliar with called composition work. Dr. Niemeyer shared his current practice where he uses stones to represent aspects of himself, roles, feelings, and states along with other objects to represent others who are important and loved in his life. This technique involves rearranging the geographic of relationship of the stones and other objects at different life periods including prior and post death and, in the future, to help connect with different and emerging parts of the self.
I have been fortunate to attend multiple trainings by Dr. Niemeyer over the years in person and online. I have always left these trainings with greater insight about myself, a deeper understanding of grief and new ways to work with clients who are living with grief. In addition to the opportunities Dr. Niemeyer shared at the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition, he has also just released a Grief Therapy Masterclass entitled: Advanced Skills in Working through Loss. This class covers the meaning-based model he briefly addressed today along with a module on trauma-informed approach to loss, realigning relationships with the deceased and reinventing the self after loss. Information about this masterclass will be posted in our Facebook group talking about the podcast with Dr. Levin along with the books he mentioned. If you are living with traumatic grief, you may find it helpful to begin exploring meaning with your therapist or to begin exploring some of the resources Dr. Niemeyer recommended on your own.
In the month of January, we will feature two different podcasts from two different family members. On January 10th, our next podcast, Tami Millard, will share her experiences after her husband suddenly died and overnight found herself a single mother, grieving, working and caring for the needs of her teenage daughter. On January 24th, Tami’s daughter, Anya, invites us into her grief experience after her father’s death and shares her perception of her mother’s grief and reflects back on high school and being a teenager without her father.
Thank you so much for joining today’s episode of Untethered Healing the Pain After a Sudden Death. To learn more about hope and guidance after sudden or unexpected death please visit therapyheals.com and sign up for my monthly newsletter Guidance in Grief at www.therapyheals.com. Bye for now.
