Melissa Lundquist, Bachelor of Social Work program director at the University of St. Thomas, spoke with KSTP’s “Minnesota Live” about how to support friends and family members experiencing grief. Lundquist discussed the importance of approaching conversations about loss with empathy and offered guidance on how to provide meaningful support to those who are grieving.
From the conversation:
Chris Egert: Aside from being well-intended, are there mistakes that you could make, or can we do the wrong thing in a situation like this?
Melissa Lundquist: I think, what keeps us from engaging is because we’re afraid of hurting someone that we care about by saying or doing the wrong thing. But the biggest thing to do is not minimize the loss by saying, it’ll be all right. You’ll move forward. You can get married again. You’ll find a path forward. But to be able to stay in that hard spot of listening to the pain.
So we don’t want to minimize the loss, and we don’t want to set our own timeline for how long someone should be grieving or our own expectations for how someone should grieve. And often we do that, and we do it to each other in our own families. Sometimes even the same loss we respond to differently, and people can have judgments about that, and we want to refrain from that.
Egert: That all just kind of makes it so complicated, and I’m just thinking it makes me want to pull back because you don’t want to do the wrong thing.
