Companioning - Let the Person Who Grieves Be the Teacher [Part 10]
Companioning the gift of empathy and support you give those who grieve. It includes sitting with someone and opening up your heart to travel with them through their grief.
This series is based on Alan Wolfelt’s 11 tenets of companioning. Today’s article looks at the tenth tenet. To review the first nine, check out my blog here.
Let Grieving People Teach You Not Be Taught By You
The tenth tenet of companioning says: Companioning is about learning from others; it is not about teaching them.
Walking alongside a person in grief as a companion rejects the model of grief support that sets you up as the expert. You don’t know exactly what a mourning person needs to do or not do to move through their grief.
As a companion, I believe that grief is organic. Grief is as natural as the setting of the sun and as elemental as gravity. Grief is a complex but perfectly natural — and necessary — mixture of human emotions. Companions do not cure mourners; instead we create conditions that allow them to teach us. — Alan Wolfelt
The Telling of Stories
When I fresh in my grief, I experienced the impact of people who created a safe space for me to tell my story. A story I needed to tell over and over again.
When I facilitated a grief group, I saw the power and impact of story telling. In that safe place there was courage to express raw emotion and speak the truth. In the telling of stories, hope sprang up and healing happened.
Healers are hosts who patiently and carefully listen to the story of the suffering strangers. — Henri Nouwen
Story telling happens where empathetic witnesses exist and have the patience to not force but let grief find it’s own path.
The Role of the Shapeshifter
Shapeshifter is a term that refers to the role we play to help people reshape their life story. It doesn’t happen in one telling of the story but over time as new meaning and purpose begins to emerge.
As the companion, you have the privilege of being a witness to the shift that starts to happen as awareness grows and new insights emerge.
Stories, carefully chosen and shaped by both the teller and the listener, can open gateways into our interior landscape, can reveal the meaning in our lives enfolded in the details and unfolded in their telling and conscious contemplations. — Oriah Mountain Dreamer
The Benefits of Honoring the Stories of Others
Here are just a few of the benefits of listening to and honoring the stories of each another:
We are given the chance to search and discovery wholeness amid fractured pieces
We come to know who we are in new and unexpected ways
We see the deeper meaning of our lives
We come to embrace forgiveness and the freedom it brings
We see how adversity and suffering have enriched our lives
We see afresh how the path of healing includes the emotional and spiritual realms
We learn to appreciate who or what we lost in deeper ways
We come to understand how precious each day really is
We learn to live fully in the present — not stuck in the past or full of fear for the future
Final Thought
Companions realize that it is in having places to re-story their lives that they can embrace what needs to be embraced and come to understand that the human spirit prevails. We heal ourselves as we tell the tale. This is the awesome power of the story. — Alan Wolfelt
For more insights on how to grieve well, check out our online course:
Discover How to Live Again After Loss
