Healing Grief at Work : 100 Practical Ideas After Your Workplace Is Touched by Loss (eBook)

INTRODUCTION Why the workplace is a grieving place If there's been a death in your life, you get three days off work- and it had better be a biological, nuclear family member. Then it's chin up, carry on, back to work... Imagine that living your life is like driving a car. Inside this car are seated all the various parts of your self-your family self, your physical self, your spiritual self, etc. Depending on where the car is going at any particular moment in your life, a different self needs to be in the driver's seat. If you are reading a book with your child, your parental self is in the driver's seat. If you are grocery shopping, your task-oriented self is in the driver's seat. If you are playing a sport, your physical self is in the driver's seat. And so on. At work, your work self is in the driver's seat. In a culture like ours where work is so highly valued and so much of our self-worth is tied up in our jobs, we tend to think of our work selves as one of the most important drivers in the car-sometimes the most important driver in the car. So when your work self has to concentrate on driving, all the backseat selves typically understand that it's time to hush up and maybe even take a nap. But now-a death. When someone you care about dies, a new and very high maintenance driver climbs into the car. Its name is grief. It may be sad and it may be angry and it is, without a doubt, relentless. And it wants to be in the driver's seat all the time, especially in the early weeks and months after the death. Grief is not only taking over the car, it's affecting all the other selves in the car. It's causing your emotional self lots of distress. It's giving your physical self various aches and pains. It's rendering your cognitive selfunable to concentrate. It's making your spiritual self question whether you ever want to go to work again and the very meaning of life. And it even has the nerve to wrestle for the steering wheel with that work self of yours. During the workday, your work self is trying to drive and concentrate on the road, but it's having a hard time because that grief self is always either grabbing the wheel or squirming in the passenger seat, protesting and demanding your undivided attention. So, whether you want the workplace to be a grieving place or not, reality suggests that it is. The misconception about grief at work There's a misconception about our feelings and work and it goes like this: When you're at work, you should be able to corral all your strong emotions, stop paying attention to them for eight or so hours, and concentrate on whatever it is you do to earn a living. The workplace is a sacred space-sacred not in the spiritual sense but in the capitalistic sense. Check your emotional baggage at the door and put on your work hat. Especially in for-profit work environments, the workplace is for concentrating on tasks that grow the bottom line-and little else. Even in seemingly compassionate, human service-oriented businesses (I think of hospitals, daycare centers, nursing homes), the day-today processes and procedures allow little time for complex emotional and spiritual issues. If you're in love, that's fine-but don't be using the workday to yearn for your soulmate. If you're upset about a financial problem at home, that's fine-but don't dwell on it from 8-5. And if you're sad...