Show Notes:
We are continuing our series on suicide prevention and today we are talking about how we cope when we haven’t been able to prevent a suicide – what we do when our workplace is impacted by the loss of a co-worker who has died by suicide. As we’ve identified in this series so far, those working in first response and front line work are at a higher risk of suicide than the average population, and as such it also means that we’re at higher risk of grieving the loss of a co-worker to suicide. I know that for many of you, it’s hard to not be stumbling on yet another anniversary of the death of someone you’ve worked with – that it can become numbing to cope with the sheer volume of compound losses. For others, the frequency may not be so high, and when co-worker suicides happen you may feel shocked and uncertain how to hold it. We’re also left with this expectation to keep going. To show up and put in your shift set. To carry on carrying on and act as if it’s “business as usual”… in part because to some extent, it is. You are an essential service who is at a higher risk for suicide, and there is expectation that you figure out how to manage the risks of the job, including the loss of people you have been connected to.
WARNING: While you may be able to avoid, ignore, numb or stuff our grief-related feelings around a given loss, or maybe even a series of losses – this will eventually sink you in it’s own right. Avoiding it isn’t actually avoiding it – it’s not steering you away from the iceberg right ahead – it’s more like covering your eyes while careening directly toward it. If you don’t deal with grief and emotions, it will eventually deal with you. That’s a promise, and I have a ton of clients who would echo that this is 100% true.
Common emotions that emerge when someone in our sphere dies by suicide include:
- Guilt. We can feel like we should have seen it coming, should have known somehow, should have done more, connected more. We can carry a sense of guilt for not knowing the person was struggling, or for not taking indications of risk more seriously, or for taking actions to help but these not being successful in preventing suicide.
- Anger. Often being a witness to the aftermath of a suicide leaves us feeling angry with the person who committed suicide. Anger for the impact this leaves behind for those left to continue living and working out how to carry forward with this significant event now a part of their story. We can also experience anger toward situations, people and systems that we perceive as being participants in the factors leading to suicide.
- Sadness. When a person matters to us and we lose them, sadness is an appropriate emotional symbol of the mattering they held within you. Sadness can feel uncomfortable for many, we’re still working to dispel long-held cultural myths about sadness equating with weakness. Sadness is really about missing and grieving something or someone that mattered to us. It is an echo of their mattering, and we shouldn’t want to trade that – because ultimately we are creatures of connection and having people matter to us and mattering to others is the most fundamental aspect of human living.
- A jumble of emotion. There’s an episode of a cartoon called “Daniel Tiger’s Neighbourhood” – it’s a spin off of Mr. Rogers Neighbourhood and I highly recommend it. In one of the episodes he sings a little song about how “you can feel two feelings at the same time.” Most of my clients have heard this little jingle because it’s valuable for us to know and understand. Humans rarely feel a single emotion. More often than not we feel not only one or two emotions, but rather a host of emotions simultaneously – sometimes even competing or mutually exclusive seeming emotions. We’re complex, and our emotions reflect our innate complexity. Sometimes we can be feeling guilt, anger and sadness all at once. We can remember good times and feel gratitude for those moments and memories while also feeling angry that we’ve been robbed of more time with a person we care about. The jumble of emotions can lead into expressions of our emotions that can feel hard to name or make sense of – frustration, irritability, mood swings, difficulty making sense of things, confusion, difficulty sleeping, and so on. We can struggle to know how to make sense of this thing that has happened – often feeling like we’re left with so many questions unanswered.
- Numbness or Action. For those who have worked within first response or front line work where crisis response is part of your moment-to-moment work every single day of your career, you may also find that you jump over emotions and move directly into numbness – the tuning out of feelings to continue on functioning; or into action mode – where you try to do and solve and fix and manage rather than be and feel.
- Disenfranchised grief. One of the strange emotions that can emerge as a co-worker to someone who has died by suicide, is feeling not entitled to having an emotional response. After all, you aren’t their spouse or child or family member or close friend. You worked together. That’s it, right? We can feel like our feelings need to not matter, or that the feelings we feel are silly or disproportionate. Meanwhile, in first response and front line work, co-workers often work very closely with one another. Shifts are often 8-12+ hours, spending more time together during waking hours of the day than that person likely will with their spouse, children or other close people in their personal lives. Many first response and front line work organizations are built on concepts like brotherhood or family. There is mutual respect, protection, and looking out for one another. These are professions where we rely on one another to stay safe and solve problems that can be life and death. You are riding out the highs and low’s of that together, and it builds an allegiance and bond that runs deep and has impact much like it might for those in the persons personal sphere.
These plentiful and big feelings tend to be why we try to hard to avoid and steer clear of really feeling them. It seems too big, too much, and we have to keep functioning somehow. The thing about grief is that it’s often compared to skidding on ice – when you slam on the breaks and steer to fight the skid it tends to get a whole lot worse, but when you let go of the gas and steer into the skid you tend to course correct a heck of a lot quicker with less likelihood for total catastrophe. When we try to do all we can to avoid grief, we make it worse and it becomes a bigger problem to get ourselves out of on the other side. Meanwhile, if we can try to let go on controlling it a bit and allow ourselves to move with the direction it’s steering us, we tend to be able to come out of it less damaged.
Grief can feel nebulous because it doesn’t really have a strong sense of timeline. It’s hard to say when we’re done grieving – some, myself included, would say that likely we never really are “done”. Grief ebbs and flows – days will feel easier and then harder again, triggers will happen that prompt us back to remembering and grieving a new piece connected to the loss of someone who has mattered to us. The thing about grief is that it is an emotional symbol of our living. If we’re really living, we’re really doing this life thing where we are connecting, feeling meaning in connection with others, and...
