Stop Talking, Get Out the Crayons

Grief is tricky. It comes and goes. It surges and disappears. It is one of the mysteries in psychology because it doesn’t move in the same way for everyone. 1969, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross shared the 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance and suggested these stages are linear. Essentially, if you go through the stages, at some point (if you’re lucky) you arrive at the acceptance stage. When I studied psychology in graduate school, I learned these stages and was taught how to take children through them. In 2000, when I became a clinician, I noticed that children have their own process of grief. Instead of linear, children experience grief as a roller coaster.

Children do not go through the stages in order. They jump in and out of the stages or pass them up all together. Kids are concrete thinkers and instead of thinking their way through grief, grief arises from concrete objects such as pictures, a book, a movie or seeing an image of something that reminds them of the loss. One of the common examples of this is when parents tell a child they are getting divorced. Kids will often make conclusions about the divorce based on concrete facts such as “my parent’s got divorced when the cat ran away.” The cat had nothing to do with the divorce but to a child, the cat is the concrete way to process an abstract concept such as divorce.

Over the years, I have learned the way to help a child process grief is to ask them to draw their experience. The prompt for their drawing could be: what do you remember? how do you feel? how does it seem to you now? I have learned far more from this approach than from asking a child to verbally explain their experience. When kids are allowed to process their experience without having to put words to it, they can move through their grief at their developmental level. As a child moves through grief, you can ask them to draw what they are hopeful for in the future. You can also draw your own picture to allow a child to see how you are processing the loss.

I think many of us would benefit from some crayons to process the grief in our lives. Words are helpful. They communicate to others what we are experiencing but sometimes we need to process it on our terms, without explanation. Give it a try with a child who has suffered a loss and maybe even for yourself.

Love and peace,

Allison