Throwing a lifeline when young hearts are breaking
Grief counsellor’s mission to help kids
The tragedy of losing not just one but both her parents when she was a little girl inspired Audrey Holligan to become a grief counsellor for children.
Audrey, from Cairneyhill,
Fife, draws on her own tragic life experiences to advise BBC kids’ channel CBeebies on how to tackle trauma and grief in their programmes.
Her mother died of a brain haemorrhage when she was just 18 months old and her father of the same illness when she was seven.
Her cousin, who became her “second mother”, was killed in a car crash, aged 21, the week before her wedding when Audrey was just four.
Speaking today on national Grief Awareness Day, the 54-year-old, who is a children and young person bereavement support worker with Cruse, emphasises the importance of talking to young people about death.
This is changing but there is still a long way to go. With Covid-19, people are talking more about death. They are thinking more about their own mortality and that can only be a good thing.
Adults tend to grieve once and they revisit that grief, while children will grieve many different times throughout their life at different ages and stages.
My hope is that if I can help one child help themselves to get through what is usually the worst thing that will ever happen to them, that is invaluable for that child.
I would have given anything to have had a support worker when I was a child to help me rationalise the grief and to normalise what was going on around me.
That’s why I think it’s brilliant CBeebies asked me to liaise with them. I help them with script work in children’s programmes they do if they’re dealing with subjects involving trauma and grief.
I help to give pointers of the type of language they should use and situations which can help children watching understand grief on a child level. It’s a different journey for the child who loses a parent.
Sadly, most of my family had died by the time I turned 12. Most of my early memories are of grief. Grief isn’t a stranger to me and death isn’t a stranger to me – it’s something I’ve walked with my whole life.
Death wasn’t something people spoke about as much back when my parents died but I think today people are more aware of how to deal with death and grief.
My tool was sport – that was my therapy, if you like, back then. The grief didn’t really come out in me until I had my own daughter at 41. That was when the trigger was pushed. What we are trying to do is normalise the situation for a grieving child through music, activities, play, sport – anything the child will connect to.
The signs to look out for when a child is struggling with grief include a child isolating, their concentration being affected, sudden phobias, changes in play patterns, a preoccupation with death, self-harm, becoming clingy or “pleasing” and other mental health issues.
My career, whether deliberate or subconsciously, took me to working with traumatised children whom society had rejected. It was only then I saw my own inner child and how broken it was. This led me to counselling for myself and I never looked back.
You can never fix grief but if you can help a child to make a difference in their own lives, then that’s huge. Grief remains with you for the rest of your life and becomes more severe at certain ages and stages. It is so important for adults to know how to speak to a child who has lost a loved one as those words will stay with the child for a lifetime. You need to let the child share their feelings and tell their own story.
■ Heather Greenaway Death and grief are often treated as taboo subjects, especially around children.
You can never fix grief but if you can help a child to make a difference in their life, then that’s huge