Grief Counselors
Whenever some traumatic incident happens at a school, the authorities bring in "grief counselors". These very self-important people-- social workers, therapists, and psychologists-- swarm the school to help the children deal with the horrible emotional consequences of witnessing or hearing about or thinking about something awful.
In at least some cases, students are actually required to see a grief counselor, whether they want to or not.
In fact, the the more they don't want to see a grief counselor, the more likely it is, in the grief counselor's view, that the child is horribly repressing his feelings! We must get those feelings out, out, out! We must make a suitable display of vicarious emotionalism in order to gratify the sensibilities of the authorities. Have no fear parents: we are training your children in grief!
Grief Counselors!
You know, in the old days, in Rome or Greece or somewhere, whenever a rich person died, his or her family would hire mourners to come into the house and wail their heads off for a few days so everyone would know just how badly they felt about the death of their poor loved one. The more you loved the dear departed, the more mourners you hired.
In fact, of course, the more you wanted your neighbors to think you were grieving, the more mourners you hired.
The grief counselors that come into the schools to teach children how to grieve whenever some disaster befalls a classmate, are more of a reflection of how our society feels we ought to respond to tragedy than they are of a genuine need on the part of the students. The very idea of "counseling" a person on how to grieve is absolutely repugnant to every principle of honesty and authenticity that I know of. The resulting behaviors exhibited by the children have as much to do with real grief as an orgasm with a prostitute has to do with real love.
What kind of society thinks that grief can be packaged and distributed like some kind of commodity? Do we even know what grief is? Do we have the slightest idea of what real emotions are?
The grief counselor doesn't put anybody "in touch" with their real feelings. He puts people in touch with "appropriate" external gestures and statements that perpetuate our society's self-gratifying ego-centric belief that we are somehow honorable, caring, compassionate individuals who really value each other as human beings and place a high priority on each others' well being.
What does a student really feel when a classmate dies? Well, the truth is, their real feelings are probably quite mixed. We overlook the fact that "boredom" is a feeling, and that the drama of a disaster is a kind of relief for some of us. We overlook the fact that not everybody likes everyone else. We assume that children will mourn the death of a classmate, but some children will envy the sense of importance belonging to those directly affected.
The grief counselor operates on the assumption that it is better to express your feelings openly and to share them than it is to keep them inside. We imagine that everyone is a bottle that can only hold so many feelings. If there are too many feelings, the bottle will explode. We must get them out, out, out! before that happens.
So children who are not filled to bursting with feelings will be encouraged to carbonate their consciousness of adult and peer expectations. Go ahead and cry, if you want to. Have you cried yet? If you don't want to, that's all right too. Have you cried yet? Your friends are crying. But if you do cry, we'll reward you. If you don't cry, we'll wait.
The absurdity of this entire process is that we pretend we are waiting for genuine emotions to spill forth, when, in fact, we're only waiting for one emotion, the one we consider appropriate. We have to pretend that we are waiting for genuine emotions because otherwise it becomes transparent that what we really want is validation of our own sense of importance and honor and compassion, and that we are manipulating these children in order to get it.
But what if we are not bottles? What if we are star fields or tornados? What if a child doesn't fit into our neat little package of prefabricated emotions and ideas?
Then we'll harass the little buggers until they get it right.
Copyright © 2001 Bill Van Dyk All rights reserved.
