Helping Kids Through Loss with Grief Expert David Kessler

0:00As you know, I love talking about emotions, but there's one I don't talk about a lot. And honestly, it's one that I think I have a lot of struggle around. Grief. Now, we can easily think, no one in my life has died recently. No one's about to die. But here's the thing. We cannot go through life without processing grief. It will happen to all of us. It will happen to our kids. And it's more than just a death in the family. It's shifting stages. It's moving. There's so many ways grief comes up. And what I promise you is my conversation today with David Kessler, one of the world's foremost experts on grief and loss is going to transform you.

0:38It is going to make you feel. It is going to give you visuals that stay with you forever. And I think one of the most powerful things about this conversation is it's going to give you frameworks to understand complicated feelings, maybe before they happen next time. And having those frameworks in you now will change how those experiences end up being processed in your body and how things end up going in your family home. Trust me, this is a conversation you do not want to miss. And you also might want to get a tissue or two ready. I'm Dr. Becky, and this is Good Inside. We'll be back right after this.

1:19Hi, David. Hi, nice to be here. So happy to have you. So let's just jump right in. Okay. We're going to be talking about grief and loss. And I'm a big definitions person. Right. I feel like that gives me a framework. And so let's just start with grief. How do you define grief? What brought you to be interested in it? Let's just start there. Okay. I think what brought me to be, it's what brought me to be interested in this. It's not a career that most people choose. It kind of chose me. I grew up with a lot of loss in my childhood from neglect to sexual abuse, addiction. And then when I was 13, my mother was dying.

2:05And at the same time she was dying, where we were staying at the hotel, there was a fire and a shooting. It turned out to be one of the first mass shootings in the U.S. So it was a lot. And I came away from that feeling really damaged and broken and this life was shot. But luckily, I had a neighbor who really sort of gave me a little attention that I needed. And she said, because I dropped out of school. She said, how old? Probably 13, 14. And she said, you know, after a couple of years, I just walked the streets. And she said, you know, you seem kind of smart. You can challenge your high school diploma.

2:52So I went back and I did that. Went to community college. Started learning about this field, really for my own healing, never thinking it'd be a career. Yeah. So that's what got me into this. It's just finding my own way through it. And how, when you were younger, how did you see the adults around you? How was grief modeled? Here's not well. The only advice I got was from someone in the hallway of the hospital who said, stay strong. which kind of meant take care of everyone and get rid of your feelings. And the other thing that I think is really surprising is as a child, I thought I was the only one that ever had a parent die.

3:38I mean, everyone I knew had parents. Yeah. So it was me. It was me like I must have done something wrong on some level. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think that's key with children is that we personalize it. We think we did something, you know, we all say challenging things to our parents. So you think I just would have been better, nicer, more obedient, whatever it was. Yeah. So that's what got me here. There's so many things I want to double click on one at a time. Let me think if I can hold them in my brain. What you're saying, I think is so important. And just for anyone listening, it's so it's hard to understand because you're like, wait, I never told my kid that it was their fault that I got sick or that.

4:26No one says that. I mean, maybe some parents say that. We hope they don't. Like, you know, it's going to be your fault if I die. That's usually not what people say. And we call that magical thinking. Magical thinking. And I think about it in terms of what's really adaptive. I'm always grounded in evolution. Well, when a kid is overwhelmed by sensation and feeling, right, kids depend on adults for survival. Right. Right. And so if an adult gets sick or, you know, dies, a kid is overwhelmed by the feeling of, oh, my goodness, one of the people I depend on for everything in this world is not here anymore.

5:00They have to try to make sense of that. And if they don't have a safe adult to tell them a story of how to make sense, kids are really left to their own devices. And actually taking in fault, it must be my fault. It sounds like, oh, why would I do that to myself when I was a kid? it's very adaptive because at least it feels like I could be better. There's something in my control. I have some control. A hundred percent. And so it ends up catching up with us later in life. It's usually not adaptive. Absolutely. But for a lot of years. And so I just think that's so powerful that, yes, magical thinking.

5:33But also as a kid, what a crafty thing to try to create a story that actually gives you control back versus the frozenness of, I guess anyone could be taken away from me at any moment without reason. And that's one of the things I always teach. We would rather be guilty than helpless. I just want to let that sit. Yeah. Guilty than helpless. We'd rather have an illusion of control than live in this world where anyone can die any moment. My fault is better than people randomly dying. Think of that as a child. Yeah. There's so many applications of that. But feeling out of control and helpless and like the world is random and anything could happen to you at any moment is kind of like an unlivable scenario.

6:26Correct. Right. And I'm always drawn. I think about it in terms of the power of repair and attachment, but it's really relevant here. this powerful Fairburn quote, I don't know if you know it, where he says, for kids, it's better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the devil. So similar, like I'd rather take fault and badness in than to think I'm kind of a good, relatively helpless kid and the world around me is kind of bad. That's again, kind of unlivable. And I reached out to my father and wanted to talk about grief and he shut it down. Tell me more about that.

7:02He didn't know how. He didn't know how. He said, we're not talking about that. You know, your mother's gone. That's it. So luckily, I took it upon myself to learn, to understand what had happened to me. Well, I want to ask you two questions at once to answer in either order. I'm curious what you remember that feeling like when it was shut down. And I'm curious your understanding of it now. It felt so isolating. Only me again. I am the only one in this pain. Everyone else seems to be doing okay, but me. And also, an important thing with children is I can remember going back to school, and it's probably one of the reasons why I ended up dropping out, is the teacher, in her kindness, was in front of everyone.

8:00Oh, my gosh, everyone, David's mother had died, da-da-da. And the thing is, kids read that stuff as embarrassment. I was embarrassed. I was the kid who had a mother who died. Now, as adults, we would never think death is embarrassing. But as a child, that's how sometimes we read it. So I always I do a lot of education around teachers and really making sure that, you know, they understand how to acknowledge things a little more privately rather than making someone stand out who always already feels like they're standing out. Everyone be nice to David today. Be nice to David. Good intentions. Great intentions.

8:45Great intentions. And I think part of it, I wonder for you, is your feeling state, your sensations were obviously so intense and we know the feelings intensify as we feel alone. And so in a way, the publicness of it is even worse because it calls attention to something. First of all, you weren't ready for it, right? So it's like an assault in the moment. And then in some ways you're starting to feel seen publicly for a set of feelings you've been told in your home shouldn't even be there in the first place. So really not a good match. I'm just trying to survive and behave and figure out this new world I'm in.

9:20And I think that's what death is and loss. You've been thrown onto another planet with no instructions. I think that's true for adults. And it's just as if not more true for children. So getting back to what's my definition of grief, I have two of them. Okay. One is, especially when we're talking about death, grief is love. Grief is love. It's another form of love. And the second definition is grief is a change we didn't want. So that could be the divorce. It could be moving. that could be someone, you know, not being the person we thought they would be, all those things. Love and something you didn't want, which the simplicity of those words, it's so interesting.

10:17One of the things I share with parents a lot in very minor scenarios compared to death, you show up to the ice cream place and it's closed or, you know, you thought you had soccer practice and it started an hour earlier, right? The simple language of you didn't want this to happen. Correct. Hard stop, zip it, nothing else. It is both so simple and so profound and how like you didn't like, yeah, that's exactly, that's like kind of the, the whole essence of my experience is actually that I didn't want that to happen. And that's a really painful experience when we have things in various degrees that we didn't want to happen.

10:52And I think the hardest thing for parents is we, we don't want them to have this pain they're having. So we try to fix and make it okay. And we can't because grief is not being broken. Grief is, you know, this, these feelings that happen to us that there's, it's, it's feelings to be with not to fix. And you know, that throws us all for a loop. And something you shared in your story that's so profound is you were feeling so much grief after the loss of your mom. And I think there's this narrative, not only to kids, but to be strong for your son, be strong for your daughter. Right. But if there's a really massive gap, I don't think anyone thinks for a kid who's grieving, you want a parent who is completely melting and can't function, right?

11:48There's extremes, But if there's such a big gap, my kid is devastated. He lost his mom and I seemingly can just go on and back to work like nothing happened. That that's actually really disturbing and almost shaming to a kid who's feeling so intensely. Well, and getting back to the simplicity of it, I tell parents. And by the way, when people say, would you rather talk to the child or the parent? I'm always like the parent. Let me work with the parent. So, you know, that feeling, right? So I always tell parents two things. You have to teach them how to grieve and how to live. Grieving, feel those feelings and life continues.

12:29We're still going to do things. So it informs one of the reasons why I think a parent might have an especially hard time with that. But going back to your dad, do you have an understanding now, doesn't make it okay, but why your dad reacted like that? why he didn't want to talk about anything? He was completely overwhelmed. He was completely overwhelmed. It's interesting. One of the things that I did in my own healing was, this is as an adult, I went back and rewrote my story as everyone else. So for instance, when I was a kid, the nurses didn't let me see my mother. I had to be 13. I had to be 14.

13:14I was only 13. My father didn't want to talk about it. And I felt like my mother abandoned me. So think about this years later when I began to do this work. And I really looked and went, wait a minute, what was it like for those nurses? I realized, oh, it's very nuanced. I bet some of them like those rules. Some of them might have felt bad enforcing them. Some of them might have thought they were doing the right thing. It became really interesting to look at that. And then I got to my father who I judged, who wasn't there for me. Wait, his wife's dying? He's going to be a parent? And he's never really been a parent.

14:00He doesn't know how to do this. He can't pay for his wife's burial. So all of a sudden, the man I had so much judgment for, as an adult, I could find compassion. And my mother, who I thought abandoned me, I was able to realize that's what a child's mind does. Abandonment. My mother didn't abandon me. She died. Wow. I'm just sitting with what you said. It's just so powerful and makes me think about whether it's grief or something else, the power of rewriting the story of the people around you. And I think there's another two things are true. When we gain understanding in a different way than we used to have, that doesn't take away from the pain.

14:42And so I just, and I know you know that. Both stories exist. That's right. That's right. My childhood story exists and my adult story exists. That's right. And they're just, they could both be on the shelf. There's no need to. There's no canceling of one another, any of that. No ranking. Right, right. Yes. I think that's so beautiful. You know, I don't want to distill it down to this, but as you've, you know, thought and lived around grief for so long. Are there one, two things that you feel like people really misunderstand about grief? Like they really have one framework and a different framework is more helpful.

15:14I think one thing is for children, they're puddle jumpers. They jump into the pain and they jump out. For adults, when we're in grief, if someone came up to us in grief and said in our first few weeks. Do you want to go to a party? We'd be like, are you kidding? I'm in grief. I can't get to a party. Why would you even ask me? I'd be insulted. A child can be in enormous pain. Grandpa died in this moment and five minutes later want to go out to play. So I think adults don't realize children, puddle jumpers in and out of the grief and they need that distraction. I think the other thing is, as I mentioned, we're fixers.

16:07We want to fix. We don't want our kids to be in pain. And it's really, I often try to say to myself, to others, we have to give even our children the dignity of their own experience. Wow, so beautiful. And it's so hard when they're in pain. Like we don't want to get, we want to give them the dignity of winning the award. We don't want to give them the dignity of their pain. Yeah. And that's hard. It is. I'm a visual person. And sometimes I think logically order of operations. Like one of the things I find it's helpful to level with parents about is the pain is there, like come and gone. Like that's there.

16:48That's like a fact. So the only real choice we have is what we do next, because I think we get into, I don't want my kid to feel this way. And there's somebody like, they do feel this way. Oh, I wish they didn't feel, okay, it's already happening, right? It's kind of like the ice cream store is closed. What are we going to do next? We can't make it open. So I think this idea and your experience really speaks to it. Like we, for our kids, no matter what it is, we can't change the hard, but we can change the alone. And I think we focus too much on fixing the hard. The thing we can fix is the alone.

17:17Right. And that's what we want to know. Just like I felt no one was in this with me. for our parents and to just like, they're in this with us. I think the other thing is, um, you know, our kids pain is so hard. We want to throw a million shiny objects. We want it. Well, let's go to your favorite place. Let's do this. Let's get you out of it. And grief must be witnessed. We need our grief witnessed. Yeah. We need to know someone else sees our pain. Yes, absolutely.

18:08So, so much grief and loss in your early years. You became very interested in grief and loss. And then I know you experienced the loss of your own son. Yes, I have two sons and I I adopted my two sons from the L.A. County adoption foster care system. They'd been in five foster homes. I had the illusion they were four and five years old when I got them. I had the illusion that love would conquer all. And I forgot how important those first few years were. So I tried my best to overcome that and give them great childhoods. But still, those demons came up from their past when they were in their teenage years.

19:00And my younger son, David, died at 21 after really a tough, tough fight with addiction. And he was actually born drug exposed. so that was really brutal to watch brutal for me brutal for his brother it's tough I'm very I'm so sorry for your loss thank you did being on that side of grief not your own parent but your son did anything was it a different experience of grief did it was I was shocked and um paralyzed to be in that kind of pain. You know, it's hard for me to, people will go, well, was it different than as your child, you know, childhood and all that? And it's like, it's just pain. So I don't, I could never figure out which would be worse or all those things.

19:57I mean, I certainly, I always feel like the pain we're in is the worst pain. And that was pretty brutal, pretty brutal. Yeah. And it's been nine years now. I have found, you know, joy and happiness. And again, and I try to live in his honor. And partly, I really had to do that for his brother. I had to really teach him life goes on no matter what we've been through. And I think the hardest things sometimes for me and for parents is to realize our kids are going to go through loss. If we're going to teach them about staying safe in the road and everything else, we have to teach them about loss.

20:45When? How do we do it? When it occurs. When the neighbor dies. When the dog dies. That's our moment to teach. I think that's exactly right. Just when do we teach when it occurs? Like parents hear all the time, grandma's dying of cancer, but my son is three, so young. and again there's like this um like we can't ignore reality like again is he young at three sure three is young grandma is dying he sees grandma every week now grandma's in the hospital he hears the word cancer like grandma's not going to come around soon so we don't really have a choice like in my mind like it's here so either he's going to live it alone and confused or we have to figure out the best way to talk to and you know a three-year-old about that oh we do have a choice.

21:35And sometimes we make choices that are not good ones. I have heard grandma's gone to live somewhere else. Grandpa's gone on a long trip. Yeah. All of those things. And then you've got this young child that just hears grandpa went on a long trip. Wait, wait. And then five years later, we're going to Disney World. Wait, wait, who's going to die? Someone's dying on this trip. That's exactly right. Grandma went to sleep. And then six months later, my kids had a lot of sleep issues. I'm like, I'm going to help connect the dots. Yes. Yes. Oh, there's a reason they've got a little insomnia there. Who wants to go to sleep and die?

22:14So I'm reminded of, you know, one of my favorite, you know, things from my kids childhood where there was I think it was my oldest was probably in this three or four year old preschool class. And they had it was a gerbil pet gerbil. And truly like a week into school was pretty early. We get an email from the teacher saying, you know, I think it was Patty, the gerbil. Patty died. And Patty was very, very old. Parents were like, well, you probably didn't have to start the year with Patty dying, you know, but here we are. And they did this thing where during the rug discussions, one of the teachers would transcribe the conversation and send it to the parents.

22:48And so we kind of had a sense of what's going on in the classroom. And they transcribed the conversation about Patty dying. And it was so interesting. There was a girl in the class who was one of my son's friends. who had recently gone to her grandparents' burial, the whole graveside, everything, okay? And you heard other kids in the class saying, I think we should write Patty a letter to read. And this girl was like, Patty's in a box in the ground. So I was like, I feel like Patty went on a long trip. And you could hear what the kids had been told about death. And this one girl, and I love this girl, It was just kind of like going with reality.

23:29Like Patty is not going to be able to take our call because Patty's dead and she's a gerbil. Right. And you just saw it play out in this transcription. And I do think that kids are expert perceivers of their environments more than us because their life depends on noticing danger. And so they smell inconsistency. They know things don't add up. And that actually can give them so much anxiety. right and so much panic because then it's like well what else can I trust in the world what else can happen correct and I'll tell you something parents do a big big one on is when someone has died by suicide when someone has died by suicide we're as parents not going to tell them the truth and my only response to the parents and I say this gently I wonder who will someone is going to and then they're not going to trust you that's a hard one it's the big secret we keep a lot of times which only adds to the stigma of illnesses of our mind yes I you know I often think that hard truths told by a loving, trusted adult.

24:45Right. Is is actually one of the safest, most connecting experiences we have. And yeah, there are. And I think this is so intergenerational, like the things nobody was ever honest or put words to for us. We don't really like your dad didn't have language, my guess is. And so some generation at some point kind of puts their hand up and they're like, I guess it's going to be me. And it's awkward and it's painful and you don't get it right. But You kind of pivot every generation, I think, after that. All right. I want to ask you a question here. Oh, my goodness. I wasn't prepared for this, David.

25:19So here's where there's some disagreement in the field. Okay. And I'm all for it. Yeah. There's no one right way to do anything. A lot of people believe we should ask our young children if they want to go to the funeral. Here's my take. and this is where I differ with some. My take is, and parents when they hear this, they go, I can't force my child. And I go, wait, but you force them to eat. You force them to go to school. We force our kids to do things all the time. I say, listen, this is one, a teaching moment. I would say to the children, do you remember how we went to grandpa's birthday party and we sang happy birthday?

26:08Happy birthday is another way we say, I love you. And we're all going to gather one more time for grandpa. And we call that a funeral. And in that goodbye, it's another way we say, I love you. And then I prepare the child for what they were going to see at a funeral and what it's going to be like. And it's interesting. Parents sometimes want to go to their five-year-old. do you want to go to grandpa's funeral? And the problem with that, I love the idea of giving children choices, but what happens is the child says, no, I don't want to go to the funeral, which is their way of saying, I don't want grandpa to be dead.

26:54And so we go, okay, mommy, daddy's not going to force you. Poor child at six, seven years old goes, when's his next funeral? I want to go after all. Oh, I didn't inform you. It was a once in a lifetime event. You didn't understand that at five. So what are your thoughts on that? So I think there's probably something in between. So I'm not a big fan of asking kids questions that are adult decisions. That's number one. I'm also not a fan of forcing basically anything except for on the seatbelt in the car. And part of that is I just think there's a better way to be effective. So here's what's in the middle.

27:31because this actually recently came up with my friend where the couple was a little bit in disagreement about if the kid should go to, you know, the grandparents funeral. And I said to this friend, I was like, look, if you ask your kids, all they're actually feeling is, do I want to make mom happy or dad happy? Like, or I think what happens when you ask a kid, first of all, they're like, I have no idea how to answer this question. I don't have enough information. I don't really know what a funeral is. I don't really know the impact going or not going is going to have on me. And so I'm actually just going to try to read what you think.

27:59And so I don't actually think they're able to answer the question. It's like a five-year-old saying what school they want to go to. Like that's the school that gave them the best candy. Like they're not equipped to make that decision. Now I think where I really align with you is I think number one, we tend to think kids can't handle things when they can handle things. Number two, kids are actually really interested in taking things that are not palpable and making them palpable. Like they, funerals are like, oh, Grandpa died and here it is like die. Like, what does that mean? Kids find that very confusing.

28:37And while as adults, we make something concrete. Yes, it brings up this flood of feelings of the reality for kids, especially it's part of an arc. Like they want to have that moment of making it real. And the friend I was talking about ended up taking the kid to the funeral and graveside Like this kid wanted to put dirt on over and over. Right. Because I think it was the kid's way of saying, this is my way of understanding what's happening. So the way I would approach it is, first of all, if there's two parents or one, try to get on the same page. You don't want this conversation to be a marital dispute hidden as a conversation with your kids.