Companioning - Curiosity Overrules Expertise [Part 11]
Companioning is the gift of empathy and support you give those who grieve. It includes sitting with a person who is grieving and opening up your heart to travel with them through their grief.
This final article in this series is based on Alan Wolfelt’s 11 tenets of companioning. To review the first ten tenets, check out my blog here.
Curiosity Must Overrule Expertise
The eleventh tenet of companioning says: Companioning is about curiosity; is it not about expertise.
At the heart of companioning is a willingness to enter into the mystery of a person’s grief with an awareness that you cannot fully understand the experience of another.
Your attitude is not one of ignorance but rather a choice to lay aside any assumptions or guesses about the person’s reality.
It involves a clearing away of thoughts, beliefs, and ideas that might cloud your ability to see things as they are in pristine form. -- Alan Wolfelt
You Actually Don’t Know
It’s humbling for those with vast experience, knowledge and wisdom, to admit, “I don’t know what another person is experiencing.” But we don’t and to be helpful we must embrace helplessness.
You have to to disconnect from believing you have superior expertise of another human being’s emotional-spiritual journey of grief. — Alan Wolfelt
This lesson hits home for me because of my experience, training and expertise in the area of grief and loss. Knowing can get in the way of holding space for a person in the thick of their grief. Those who are deep in grief, do not need assessment, diagnose, and treatment — they need someone to observe, witness, listen and learn.
Compassionate Curiosity
To care for those who mourn, compassionate curiosity is a must. Compassionate curiosity is the practice of, “actively encouraging the mourner to teach you about their grief while you remain patient, humble and caring.”
If we make judgments or assumptions about the grieving person and are wrong, it separates us. If we act with curiosity and a “teach me” attitude, it brings us together. Nurturing the uncomfortable place of uncertainty is when inner healing can happen.
The Challenge for the Expert
Those trained to care for grieving people can become hindered by the curse of knowledge. That’s where knowing too much gets in the way of compassionate curiosity and the “unknowing” required to companion.
The great danger of the increasing professionalization of the different forms of healing is that they become ways of exercising power instead of offering service. - Henri Nouwen
As I reflect on what helped me to grieve, I think of those who sat with me with compassion and curiosity — not those who had answers or their own experience of how grief worked for them. I felt like a child who had so much to learn and appreciated those who walked with me and let me be the teacher.
Final Thought
As we come to the close of these 11 tenets of grief companioning, I encourage you to consider your own ideas of what has worked to help you care for those who mourn in your life. Alan Wolfelt’s list is a start to may more ideas on what it takes to support those on a grief journey.
For more insights on how to grieve well, check out our online course:
Discover How to Live Again After Loss
