Editor's note: This text-based course is an edited transcript of the Continued Learning Podcast episode entitled, Recognizing and Treating Traumatic Grief, presented by Lisa Zoll, MSW LCSW, and Benjamin T. Bencomo, DSW LISW, LCSW.
Learning Outcomes
After this course, participants will be able to:
- Explain what traumatic grief is, why it occurs, and the long-term effects of traumatic grief.
- Determine high risk elements for traumatic grief.
- Identify evidence-based interventions for treating traumatic grief.
I am Dr. Ben Bencomo, and I am very excited to be talking with our guest today, Lisa Zoll. Lisa will share a bit about the work she does in her social work practice. Her area of expertise is traumatic grief. I can't think of a more timely topic. Trauma is all around us, and as social workers, we are called to respond to trauma and to support people as they are experiencing it. We see people in the days, weeks, months, and years afterward to help support them as they recover from some of the traumatic experiences that they have lived through.
Lisa Zoll is a licensed clinical social worker. She graduated with her master in social work degree from Temple University. Lisa's professional social work practice experience includes 12 years as a clinical psychiatric specialist at the Penn State University Medical Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania. During that time, she worked primarily in the adult partial hospitalization program and the psychiatric outpatient clinic. In 2008, Lisa began teaching loss and grief as an adjunct instructor in the master of social work program at Temple University in Harrisburg. In 2014, she was appointed as a full-time faculty instructor where she taught courses across the curriculum. Lisa founded Grief Relief, LLC, in 2019 and specializes in helping clients challenged by loss, grief, and trauma. She's published several articles and has spoken on these topics at the local, state, and national levels. She specifically addresses loss and grief and how they impact individuals, families, communities, and organizations.
Recently, Lisa is certified and completed the training in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) in January 2022. She has added this to her tools for supporting people who have experienced grief and trauma. Lisa, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm very happy to meet you and to be able to learn from you today.
Lisa Zoll: Thank you, Ben, and I am excited to be here as well.
Dr. Ben Bencomo: To start, let me ask you what brought you to social work, and what are some of the educational and professional experiences that have influenced your work today?
Lisa Zoll: Social work was actually my second journey into higher education. I initially graduated with a bachelor's in business management as I thought I would be a nursing home administrator. I worked as an activity director at one point and went back and got my master's in therapeutic recreation. I had a desire to do more, so I went back and got my master's in social work in 2003. I worked at e Penn State Hershey Medical Center for 22 years, and then higher education came knocking at my door.
I began teaching in the program I graduated from. On graduation day, I remember mentioning to someone that I wanted to come back and teach the loss and grief class someday. The class I had taken wasn't great. I thought there could be more. There was more to know about loss and grief than what we were able to cover in class. I started just teaching a one-credit course over the summer and that eventually turned into a three-credit course. I started teaching another class, and then another, and they asked me to become a full-time instructor. I never imagined myself being a full-time instructor at the college level. I did take the position and a year or two later they closed the Harrisburg program where I was teaching.
That left me wondering what I would do next. I thought I wanted to stay in higher education as I had experience with students and I had clinical experience. I started looking at jobs in college counseling centers but they were looking for people with college counseling experience. I applied for a job as a bereavement counselor and they told me they thought I would get bored with the position. I heard a lot of "no" and I finally got tired of people telling me "no".
I had an interest in grief from both a professional and personal perspective. I knew it was a niche that I thought I could fill. Ben, I think a lot of people really focus on children and grief, as they should. There absolutely needs to be a lot of focus on children and grief. I don't work with children, and I am not a child therapist by any stretch of the imagination. Where I live we have the Highmark Caring Place, for children who have experienced significant loss (such as siblings, parents). I wanted to start a similar place for adults.
I wasn't familiar with anything that was being done to specifically target adults and grief. I know there are a lot of generalist social workers and therapists who probably do good work with grief, but I wanted to focus my practice on grief. I had to open my own door, and that's how it started.
Dr. Ben Bencomo: Interesting. You mentioned that it was both a mix of professional and personal experience that led you to be interested in this specialization area. Can you tell me more about that? I know that many of my students may pick a population or specialization area like behavioral health or addiction, but it's not often I hear of someone who wants to specialize in grief or trauma. What specifically did you find appealing about that specialization area?
Lisa Zoll: On a personal level, I was sheltered growing up when it came to loss. My parents, sister and I didn't go to any funerals until my grandmother died when I was an adult. We didn't go to any funerals. We didn't talk about death and we didn't have any grief rituals. I think my parents did not know what to say or do, and I think they were trying to protect my sister and me from pain. And I understand that.
Then I had some other losses of people that were closer to my age, and I went to their funerals. I realized how hard it is to lose people you love. You may talk about it when it first happens, and there is some collective grief in the beginning. I was a volunteer firefighter and EMT and I'd been to a couple of funerals for the firefighters that had died. The funerals were very ritualistic, but we didn't talk about it and we still don't. As an outpatient therapist, I was working with a couple of people that were experiencing losses, and I wasn't as familiar with how people get through grief as an adult. I was drawn to that part of social work and therapy.
Also, I had a close friend that died. A week or two after the funeral I was having a hard time functioning. I got to work one day and I thought, "I can't move, I can't do anything." There was a chaplain program at my workplace, and I explained how I was feeling to one of the chaplains. She said, "You have unresolved grief." I said, "Oh, it has a name." Naming it was so helpful. And then I said, "Well, what do I do?" I worked with her for a few sessions. I ended up writing a letter to the person that had died, and it was helpful. I wanted to be able to help other people in that way. I wanted to help others understand what's going on with grief and loss, and to offer things they can do to help process it.
Dr. Ben Bencomo: Naming the feeling and being able to process the feeling I think is very important. Traumatic grief encompasses a couple of areas that I think social workers have focused on for some time, but the term traumatic grief may be new to some social workers. I want to define traumatic grief but first, let's start by defining trauma. How would you define trauma, Lisa?
Lisa Zoll: Many of us have worked with people who have experienced trauma. I think there's variability in people's responses to stressors and traumatic events. The impact of a potentially traumatic event is determined by the objective nature of the event and the person's subjective response to it. If a person experiences something as traumatic, then it is traumatic. Tara Brach writes, "Trauma is when we have encountered an out-of-control, frightening experience that has disconnected us from the perceived world order, our perceived world order, a sense of resourcefulness and coping." We're left in that state of shock, and often numbness and disbelief.
Dr. Ben Bencomo: I remember one of my professors, Dr. Gorman, who described it similarly to you. Dr. Gorman described that trauma happens when the person's coping is exceeded by that event. We are client-centered and it is up to the client to determine when they experience trauma. We don't get to define what is a traumatic event. Rather, how that person reacts to that event is what's most important.
How would you define grief?
Lisa Zoll: I was fortunate to work with a woman named Lynn Shiner. Twenty-seven years ago both of her children were murdered by her ex-husband who then took his life on Christmas day. She wrote a book called "Stabbed in the Heart" that I came across and I was so inspired by her. I invited her to speak to our classes, and she was always willing to do that. We formed a wonderful friendship while working together. We defined loss as something that people experience - it can be death or non-death related - when they have an emotional connection to something that is no longer there.
That's a very basic definition. Therese Rando writes about experiencing the psychological, behavioral, social, physical, and I will add spiritual, reactions to our perceptions of loss.
William Worden wrote a textbook on grief and he says, "Each person's grief is like all other people's grief; each person's grief is like some other people's grief, and each person's grief is like no other person's grief."
We have some universal characteristics of grief that we know that people experience. These might be things such as sadness, yearning for the person that's been lost, crying, and socially withdrawing. There are some common reactions to grief. All cultures have some reaction to grief, and we even think that animals respond to losses and death. But then as we drill down into that, every person's experience can be very individual.
Dr. Ben Bencomo: This is interesting - the idea that we can empathize with loss and grief because we've all felt it to some level, but we can't fully understand what that person is going through.
How would you define traumatic grief?
Lisa Zoll: Traumatic grief, in short, is the death of a loved one or a person that we are very close to, with a distressing preoccupation of that person, a yearning to be with them. I've heard so many people say that, while they're not suicidal, they would love to be with the person who is gone. They say, I just want to be with them again. There is a clinically significant impact on them and their ability to function sometimes. I've done some research on this and there's clinical debate about whether trauma and grief are individual events or entities that should be treated as such, or if there is an intersection or connection between trauma and grief, and thus they're mutually exclusive.
In my experience, I was thinking of grief in one silo and trauma in one silo, and they meet in the barn. I can't separate the two because of what I see in my office. So many of the people that I see in my office are impacted and challenged by a significant loss. A significant loss may be the death of a child as well as sudden deaths, accidental deaths, and accidental overdoses, to name a few examples. These people are struggling to make any kind of sense of their new reality. They want to know what this means, and how they can move forward without this person that they weren't supposed to have to bury. Certainly, there can be grief without trauma and there can be trauma without grief, but I think traumatic grief occurs when the loss is sudden, tragic, and/or unexpected.
Dr. Ben Bencomo: Ah, I see. For social workers that are working to support adults in this area, what are some signs that they can look for in someone that might be experiencing this interconnection of trauma and grief?
Lisa Zoll: There is some variability but also some commonality in the experience of traumatic grief. There is an intense fear and a feeling of helplessness. People feel unempowered rather than empowered, and it tends to really engulf the individual's immediate ability to cope; it overwhelms their system of coping. They feel that they have never experienced anything like this and have no frame of reference for this. And in the aftermath, those who are affected are left to identify ways to reorder their lives.
Typically, we may feel we have some semblance of order in our lives - we have a routine, we have a job, we have a home, we have family, etc. Then, one of these events happens, and it seems that everything comes crashing in. It creates a massive amount of disorder. That disorder is a result of the event that happened, and then we are left to reorder our lives. There is an order-disorder-reorder concept.
Earlier I mentioned the distressing preoccupation about the death itself. This can be a preoccupation with the manner of death, such as how the death occurred and if it were preventable. Maybe there is a perpetrator also that needs to be held accountable. There may be a sense of disbelief that it actually happened and how it happened. It is hard for the individual to wrap their head around the death because of the often tragic circumstances that surround it.
Dr. Ben Bencomo: Yes absolutely. Does this look different for different populations such as children, adolescents, adults, and older adults? And how do we account for the differences in how someone might exhibit those outward signs of that traumatic event?
Lisa Zoll: I am not an expert in children and grief, but my understanding is that children tend to have more somatic symptoms or regression. As adults, we don't always have words for what we're experiencing. Teenagers and adolescents may act out more. Children and older adults are the two populations that are often disenfranchised from the grieving process. This is because we may think children are too young to understand what's going on, and we may think older adults have been through it and experienced it before.
Dr. Ben Bencomo: So then people assume they should already know how to cope, right?
Lisa Zoll: Exactly. People may think "They've got this" or that they could have expected it since they are older. That is a disenfranchised response to loss in general.
We know that when an older adult loses a spouse that they've been with for 50-plus years, that is a huge disorder; how do they reorder?
Dr. Ben Bencomo: Yes, that makes complete sense. I think that a lot of times we make those assumptions, and those assumptions can be even more harmful than starting from the idea that a loss is a loss, regardless. And maybe the significance of that relationship building over time even compounds the feelings of trauma and grief that that person is experiencing.
Are there any differences that you've observed in your professional practice among people of diverse backgrounds in terms of how they present, or how that traumatic grief might look different in different communities?
Lisa Zoll: The main thing I could tell you about is the difference between how some men and some women come into my office. I have worked with men who have lost wives or significant people in their life. There were two of them that I specifically remember who came in with a list of questions that they wanted to be answered, and topics they wanted to discuss. They told me what they wanted to talk about. Women can be more emotional. I know I'm being very stereotypical, but there is definitely a difference between the way men and women process grief.
I've heard the analogy that men have brains that are more like waffles, where sometimes they tend to compartmentalize things better than women, whose brains are more analogous to spaghetti, where their emotions are kind of everywhere. And again, that is stereotypical, but there is something to it, at least in some cases. Certainly, there are men that process emotions and women that can compartmentalize.
Dr. Ben Bencomo: I have heard you speak about the three D's in regard to a person's response to a traumatic event. What do you mean by the three D's?
Lisa Zoll: The three D's are disorientation, distress, and devastation.
The event can cause disorientation, we could use the word disorder as well. It may leave the individual in shock, feeling confused, lost, or in some sort of altered mental state where they are not able to think clearly or process things in their usual manner. Distress is a psychological reaction associated with emotional suffering. It can include a wide range of emotions, such as sadness and despair, uncertainty, anxiety, and fears that can be difficult to cope with and are often out of the ordinary demands of life. With a traumatic event, we have to join this world of the living, but also, we're in this world where we are struggling to maintain some sort of order. Devastation is simply defined as severe and overwhelming shock or grief.
Dr. Ben Bencomo: How might these responses change or evolve in the weeks, months, or even years following a traumatic event?
Lisa Zoll: I will go to my scholarly advice from the DSM and look at the intensity, frequency, and duration of the responses. I taught the DSM class for many years, and when we look at clinically significant distress we ask, what are the intensity, frequency, and duration of the symptoms? In the initial weeks, we think about a high level of intensity of those feelings such as sadness, despair, and anxiety. In terms of frequency and duration, it is happening all the time as we are living it.
As we move out in months and years, I use the analogy of a stereo or your car radio. At first, the volume is turned way up and almost every thought is about the loss. Over time, the volume gets turned down, sometimes more slowly than others, and sometimes more quickly than others. For the people I see, the volume is still there. Some people self-identify that they need help because they experience a tragic event and even a year out they are having a complicated reaction to the loss. For some people, others in their life tell them, "I think you need to talk with someone".
Dr. Ben Bencomo: So there isn't a timetable if you will, and these aren't mutually exclusive. You don't move from disorientation to distress to devastation in the same way. Have you seen people who cycle through the three D's over time? Or are they all compounding at one time?
Lisa Zoll: That's a great question. I think it's a lot of compounding all at one time, and it varies. I think that they are experienced in a variety of ways, at a variety of times. Therese Rando talks about STUGs, sudden temporary upsurges of grief. This can happen when there is a reminder such as a holiday or an anniversary and the volume gets turned up again and then goes back down. I often use a snow globe analogy. You shake a snow globe, then all the snow eventually settles on the bottom, then something happens and it all gets shaken up again.
Dr. Ben Bencomo: What a great metaphor to think about. We all have these triggers, whether it's a certain song, a smell, an event like an anniversary, or a certain time of year, and it shakes everything up again. I'm a visual person so that metaphor really works for me.
Lisa Zoll: I have a little collection of snow globes in my office, and I show them to people when I explain that.
That's one thing I wish I would've known about early on. As a clinician, you look back and feel sorry for the people you've treated first because you didn't know as much as you know now, and I'm still learning. Early on, I didn't know about these sudden temporary upsurges of grief, and I wish I could have told people that this is a very common reaction. Now I can tell them if they have an anniversary or something coming up.
I just went through EMDR training, and I think about people I had seen in the past that could have used it. There is so much to learn about loss and grief. It is an ongoing process for us as clinicians, I think.
Dr. Ben Bencomo: Absolutely. We evolve, our skillset evolves and we continue to grow and learn throughout our careers. I've often told my students the day that you know everything as a social worker is probably the day that you should retire because we always continue to learn. And now I will be using your snow globe metaphor when I talk about STUGs.
When a social worker is responding to someone in crisis, what are ways that they can begin to support that person or those people that are experiencing that traumatic event? What should they be looking to do first?
Lisa Zoll: I'm thinking of the crisis in two ways. Crisis is the initial response to an event where we go in and do crisis intervention. The other way we can look at it is that they're in crisis because they're coming to our office.
We are always looking at the safety and security of people. My office is very non-clinical if you can imagine. I have snow globes everywhere. We have an emotional support dog in our office, a little cockapoo who is laying on the couch as we speak. The thing that makes for the best therapeutic relationship is building rapport. How we present ourselves to people is part of that, and we all have our own brand of doing that.
That includes having a space that's welcoming and comfortable. We also bring ourselves to the table. We hold space for somebody to vent. We hold space for them to talk about their experiences and things that they can't talk to other people about or that they believe other people are tired of hearing about.
I have a woman that I work with who's an Episcopal priest. We had a very long discussion one day about holding space for people and their grief and the person that is no longer with us. I think that is sort of a sacred space for people.
We invite people to bring in pictures of their loved ones and we display them on a wall in our office. I've had people that like to come in and see that. We do a lot of different things which are really about validating their experience. One thing I've learned is important, especially in the first session, is to ask the name of the person they lost and to ask them to tell me about the person. I ask them to tell me whatever they want me to know about the person. I say, "I'm a blank slate about Bob. Tell me everything you want me to know about Bob."
Then, I get to experience Bob through their eyes and what they're seeing. It is very important; Lynn taught me this about asking and saying their names. I don't even know if it is a clinical skill as much as a very human connection to people.
Dr. Ben Bencomo: I like that. I think telling the story of the person and adding in the ritual of having that person's image on the wall can be very helpful for creating and holding that space you described.
After we have established rapport and created that space you describe, where do we go from there? I'm thinking in terms of the intensity of emotion and the idea of "functioning" and what that actually means. We do want to help people be successful in their environment and think about how they were being successful prior to the trauma (you see I'm avoiding the word functioning). How can they return to that pre-crisis level in terms of flourishing in their environment? How do we start to move from that initial stage to the second stage of supporting a client?
Lisa Zoll: One of the things that we're looking to do is to help to reduce the acute stress of the event that happened. Lynn and I came up with this: the event, the work, the forever.
The work is what we do to try to make meaning out of the loss. The first thing that we often do is have a funeral. That may be the first ritual that we have to try to make sense of the loss and bring meaning.
Then there are other things that people do. Some people get tattoos, and some people have races or start foundations. There are also a lot of little things that we do to try to figure out how to integrate that whole narrative of trauma and grief. As social workers, we're trying to restore and enhance their coping skills or adaptive capacities. From a social work perspective, that may mean using that strength-based perspective that we talk about so often. You may ask, "How have you dealt with something like this before?" and they may reply "I've never dealt with something like this before, and I don't want to deal with this now."
Part of what we do is talk and try to figure out if there is any meaning to be made out of it. I don't know that we can ever make sense out of a traumatic event, but are there things that we want to do that we might not have done because of this loss?
Connecting people with support systems is very important. There are many studies that show that the stronger and better the support system, the better the outcome. Some of the people that I work with say that neighbors are still looking out for them or that their families are still supporting them months and years after the event.
Then we talk about timeframes, the forever. Lynn says that we loved them forever, why wouldn't we grieve them forever? We want to take off the pressure on people to find "closure". We talk about not finding closure; there are no timeframes of when you should be feeling better. People I have worked with have struggled with having a nice evening out or going out to dinner with friends, and feeling guilty because they weren't home thinking about their son or daughter.
The thing that I've come up with is that you're not betraying your loved one, you're betraying your grief. You know, your grief is always going to be there. It doesn't matter what you do. If you leave your grief for an hour, it's not going to miss you. It'll be right there waiting for you at the door when you walk in. You have permission to leave your grief. When you can offer different angles or perspectives, it is helpful.
I also like to use the word "and". You can grieve and go out and have dinner with your friends. It is like anxiety; we say you can be anxious and you can still go to that interview. They aren't mutually exclusive. You don't have to leave one to be part of the other.
Dr. Ben Bencomo: I think that's quite profound, that idea of you're not betraying the loved one, but rather you're leaving the grief for a little while. It will still be waiting for you, but it's okay to allow yourself those moments of healing and joy.
You talk about post-trauma counseling and how important it is to build those support systems for clients in the aftermath of grief and in the years to come. One of the ways that you have done this for people who are experiencing traumatic grief is through Grief Relief. Can you tell us about Grief Relief - what is its mission, and what services are provided?
Lisa Zoll: The tagline is, "Looking back, living forward." It's that "and". We want to be able to look back but we also want to be able to live forward so we have to make space for both of them. Our mission is to join with members of our community in a space that allows them to navigate stressful life events they've experienced at their own pace.
Part of the goal is to facilitate the healing journey by identifying ways to process past experiences and embrace the possibilities of the future. Sometimes that's hard to find for people. Our vision is to provide expert and customized services to meet the unique needs of the individuals, families, groups, communities, and organizations that we serve.
I'm trying to be a footprint in our community to the extent that is possible. One of the ways that we're doing that is by getting involved with a first responders' assistance program in our county. As a former firefighter and EMT, I am really excited about this.
We have partnered with On the Job and Off, which looks at mental health for first responders. They send their first responders that are in need of counseling to us. We work with first responders, police and corrections officers, paramedics, EMTs, firefighters, dispatchers, etc. It's ever-evolving, what we're doing.
We have a couple of different platforms. Grief Relief is the individual platform for individual counseling, Living Forward is our training and presentation platform, and GRIT (Grief Relief Intervention Team) is our crisis intervention platform. Most recently, we added GROW, Grief Relief on Wheels. We purchased a teardrop camper that is our mobile office. I haven't used it yet but I can take this teardrop camper, hook it up to my car, and we can be on-scene and on-site as needed. I am excited about how this is evolving.
One of the impetus to do the EMDR training was to help first responders get back on the job as soon as possible. I've also seen some amazing things happen with EMDR. I was a skeptic at first. I had an intern that did EMDR training and after I watched it I didn't think it was right for me. When the first responders started to come, I started to identify that we are really working with trauma on so many levels. Then I knew it was time, so I started the EMDR training last fall and finished this past January. Even if I don't use the full process, there are different parts of it that are really helpful. They help people identify first, worst, and other events in their lives that connect to these events. Two therapists in the practice as well as I recently completed the EMDR training, and now I have added this to my wheelhouse.
Dr. Ben Bencomo: Can you say a little bit more about what EMDR is, in case there's anyone listening who isn't familiar with that type of treatment?
Lisa Zoll: EMDR is the eye movement desensitization reprocessing, founded by Francine Shapiro back in the late '80s in Canada. She took a walk one day, she came back, and she felt better. She wondered why she felt better after the walk. As a researcher of sorts and a clinician, she realized she was scanning the environment back and forth with her eyes. She started researching that. She found bilateral stimulation was the thing that helped.
The idea is to create some sort of bilateral stimulation, such as following my finger as I move it back in forth. Or, you can use light bars, pulsers, or a headset where the sound goes back and forth between both sides.
When I took the training they compared the fact that while they do not know exactly how it works, we are really not sure exactly how talk therapy works, either. We just know that it does. There's a specific protocol for EMDR and you develop this calm, safe place first, and then you go into treatment planning. People come up with a target incident, the image that it represents, negative cognition about themself, how true they believe that is, the validity of the cognition, and a subjective unit of distress (SUDS). Then, you get into processing in order to take the charge out of the traumatic event and the memory that people are sitting in. To use the volume control analogy mentioned earlier, we are trying to turn the volume down.
Bilateral stimulation is having one foot in the present when you're not processing, and you say, "Stop, open your eyes, or tell me what you're noticing." The other part is in the past when you are in the processing and your brain does the work. It's really fascinating to watch, and I don't know that I'm doing it justice in terms of defining it. They talk about how you get on a train, you make frequent stops, you tell me what you noticed, and then you go with that. The famous line from EMDR is, "Go with that."
Dr. Ben Bencomo: We discussed some things in your toolbox like EMDR and animal-assisted support work. Are there any specific modalities that you have found either more helpful or less helpful in your practice experience, in terms of supporting people who are living with traumatic grief and its effects?
Lisa Zoll: I think it's often a combination of things that we pull from our toolboxes and our experience, both professional and personal. I think that narrative therapy and storytelling can be very helpful. We may have people write, journal, or write unsent letters sometimes. I think there's also a place for cognitive behavioral therapy. We work on cognitive distortions that people have, such as "I could've done more, I should've done something differently." Sometimes there is not a lot of basis for those beliefs. I have a therapist that is a certified drama therapist, and he uses different modalities. We may find many effective approaches, and sometimes our clients lead us to where they need to go, too. I like the solution-focused aspect of trying to find what may have helped in the past, and apply it to the present and into the future.
Dr. Ben Bencomo: I often have the conversation with my students that there will be some theories and practice modalities that seem to jive with the way that you see the world. And there will be others that some clients do not find helpful at all. Some will help connect with how they are seeing their lived experience with their own perspective. I think having a variety of treatment options and a variety of different modalities available to support people absolutely can be very helpful.
We know that the scale and the frequency of traumatic events, unfortunately, in our world seem to be growing ever more quickly. We have a lot of people who are experiencing traumatic grief today, whether that is a result of losing someone during the COVID pandemic, or due to natural disasters, suicide, addiction, violence, mass shootings, or other reasons. Regardless of whether a social worker is working in one area of specialized practice or not, I think that we all should have a good understanding of where to start when it comes to supporting people. People will be experiencing traumatic grief in all of the different settings where social workers find themselves, right?
If a social worker is interested in learning more about how to support survivors of traumatic grief, what would you recommend?
Lisa Zoll: Two social work publications that I know of that often have information about traumatic grief are Social Work Today and The New Social Worker. They often have articles there that are pretty relevant to things that are going on now. In the fall, I wrote an article that's going to be published in Social Work Today about traumatic grief. I think that they're trying to keep on top of what's going on, by letting clinicians and practitioners know what we're seeing and what we're doing.
I think, more so than ever, we are experiencing parallel processes with our clients today. We also experienced COVID in many of the same ways that our clients have experienced COVID. We have had the losses and the uncertainty and lived in that limbo during the pandemic. We watch the news and can't help but be impacted by seeing the school shootings and the acts of violence. We talk so much about self-care and it seems we're so bad at it.
Dr. Ben Bencomo: Thank you for that. You mentioned not taking care of ourselves as often as we should. What do you do for your own self-care, Lisa? And how do you keep having that positive attitude and creating that safe space for the clients that you're working with?
Lisa Zoll: I spend time with Riley, our dog who is on our website. I listen to a podcast called "True Crime Obsessed" which may sound odd but it's well done. The podcasters talk about crimes, and they use humor, which I think is so important. It's never at the expense of the victims, but at the people that didn't do what they should've done and made more of a mess of things. I saw Top Gun as soon as it came out. I do a lot of reading that is not necessarily professional reading. Those are a few of the things I do.
Dr. Ben Bencomo: I think we all could use a Riley on the couch to be able to reach out to for support.
Lisa, our time is up for today. I think that this topic is one that a lot of our listeners will readily relate to, either because of their own personal experience or their professional experience. I think it's important for all of us as social workers to have an understanding of traumatic grief. We need a good level of understanding to know how to support people, and what to look for as others experience trauma and feel the aftereffects of traumatic grief. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and your expertise with us.
Lisa Zoll: I appreciate the opportunity to have this discussion with you. Thank you.
