How to Navigate and Assist Our Clients with Grief
Grief affects us all differently and can manifest in many ways beyond the loss itself. In this episode, I’m sharing valuable insights on how to better communicate with and support clients experiencing grief, how grief shows up mentally and physically for clients, and some practical tips for avoiding common communication pitfalls.
As lawyers, we can better support our clients by learning to communicate with empathy and understanding. By listening without judgment, we can help clients identify and name their losses, and provide education and resources. With these simple strategies, we can make a real difference for our clients navigating grief and loss.
In this episode, you will hear:
- Grief as a normal reaction to any loss or change, like loss of job, health, or freedom
- How grief manifests mentally with reduced focus, isolation, emotional rollercoaster, and numbness.
- How grief manifests physically with disturbed sleep, eating changes, body aches, and fatigue
- “I can’t imagine how you feel” vs. “I know how you feel”
- Helping clients identify and name their losses – tangible or intangible
- Asking clients to tell you their story and listening without judgment
- Avoid common myths like “stay busy” or “be strong.”
- Provide clients with education on grief and resources.
Follow and Review:
We’d love for you to follow us if you haven’t yet. Click that purple ‘+’ in the top right corner of your Apple Podcasts app. We’d love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast.
Supporting Resources:
To learn more about Grief and The Grief Recovery Method visit: www.griefrecovery.com
To download the free e-book on grief, visit: https://larricklawfirm.com/grief-recovery/
Episode Credits:
If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.
Episode Transcript:
Elizabeth Larrick: Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I’m your host, Elizabeth Larrick, and this is Trial Lawyer Prep.
For the past two episodes, we have been working through grief, what it is, how we’ve been taught to look at grief, understand it as little [00:01:00] kids and as adults, and ultimately, this episode, we’ll be looking at ways grief manifests for our clients and for ourselves. and ways we can help navigate that with our clients and communicate better.
Why are we talking about this as trial lawyers? First and foremost, as a personal injury lawyer, we have wrongful death cases, but as we’ve learned, grief can manifest itself, can pop up as a normal and natural reaction to any change or loss in a familiar pattern or behavior. Loss of a job, loss of your health, All these are ways lawyers help people divorce, business, personal injury, criminal cases.
All these involve this emotional component of grief. And so that’s why I wanted to talk about it here today. Also, everything that we talk about as far as grief and [00:02:00] what we’ll talk about next episode as well, which is the grief recovery method is based on the certification that I achieved or did in March to become certified as a grief recovery specialist.
And my journey to that certification came through me actually having some really deep seeded grief. That was getting in the way of my focus, my concentration and for months was clouding what I was doing in my personal life and in business life. And so it wasn’t until I had a very good friend, a very good mentor that said, Hey, You’re carrying around some really heavy grief here.
Do you want to do something about it? And I said, absolutely. Thank you and help. So we went through the grief recovery method and came out on the other side and I just said, oh my gosh, this is so powerful and what so many people are struggling with and may not even know if they’re like me or maybe they know they don’t know how to process it.
That’s why I want to [00:03:00] do a series on it here on the podcast to spread that education And if you have clients that are struggling, you will be able to have better tools in your tool belt. As far as helping them and communicating with them, let’s talk about ways grief can manifest. And from my personal experience, this is really where I feel like can help more for talking about the work itself.
And so we’re going to talk about mentally how it can manifest and physically how it can manifest and also recap and bring back in that short term energy relieving behavior, those action items that People can take to relieve some of that emotional pressure from that grief. But let’s talk first about mentally what we may be seeing our clients experience, which would be reduced concentration or focus, maybe emotional isolation, they could have a roller coaster of emotional energy.
[00:04:00] Yeah. Sometimes it’s a sense of numbness. And again, there’s no universal response or mental response to it. But from my personal experience, reduced concentration and focus was definitely something that I was having a really difficult time with and just could not figure out. My self discipline was not kicking me into gear and just seemed like there was a very heavy fog that just couldn’t seem to break through.
And I think what happens a lot for our clients is we have to get things done, right? We have to move the case forward. So we need discovery responses. We need photographs. We need these emails. Hey, we need stuff that’s, we got to do our job. We need stuff from them and we just can’t get them to focus long enough to Right.
We’ll get on the phone. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And then nothing. And it’s okay. This person used to run a multimillion dollar company, but they can’t get me some photographs here. [00:05:00] What’s the issue? And so just keeping that in mind, that those are definitely ways that people can experience grief and also physically, right?
So on the physical aspect, we got disturbed. sleep patterns, changed eating patterns. Sometimes we eat more, sometimes we don’t eat at all, right? Body aches. Nausea, headaches, fatigue, increased inflammation in the body, lowered immunity. These are all things that can manifest physically. And what research has shown on the physical aspects is those body aches, those headaches, that emotional pain activates the same region of the brain as physical pain.
So, those are the same receptors, even though we haven’t had anything physically happen to us, right? Those body aches, those are real, our brain, it is real to us, and so, it is real to your clients. So, just keep that in mind. [00:06:00] That what happens with over time is that’s where you’re gonna see some increased inflammation in the body.
You’re gonna see lowered immunity. You’re gonna get sick more often. They’re gonna be struggling with staying healthy, even increased blood pressure. Now also under this category, I have depression with an asterisk. Okay, because most folks research out there, researchers, psychologists, don’t want to go into Group grief and depression together, right?
Depression is a separate situation. If you had depression before, grief can obviously trigger that, but it’s not that grief causes depression, okay? So definitely want to make sure that we clarify that because when we go to talk to people who are experiencing grief, to talk to our clients, a lot of times that’s how it gets treated, is with anti depression medication when that’s not necessarily going to solve that emotional problem, get [00:07:00] rid of that emotional pain or body aches that we’re dealing with, right?
So there’s an asterisk there because obviously if you had depression before it can, and grief can cause an episode, but all in all, those are not things that go together, right? Grief doesn’t cause depression. And what we talked about as well, other ways that grief can manifest for our clients and relieve that pressure is some of those short term energy relieving behaviors that we talked about.
And what you’ll start to see is someone who has had a major grief event in their life, they’re working with you, whatever reason that brings them to a lawyer to deal with it, wrap it up, hold somebody accountable, or dissolve the business, whatever it may be. What you’ll find is that many people begin to alter their life choices after a series of unresolved losses.
And so they’re just protecting themselves from any further heartbreak. But what happens is that quality of their life goes down significantly. [00:08:00] Because they want to live a guarded life so that they don’t have any more of these losses, right? Any more of this grief. And so we want to be able to help people navigate this.
we communicate with them, avoiding comparison, helping with education, because we’re not, let me just put it out there. This is not, I’m not saying, hey, lawyers, you now need to go get the certification. You need to relieve and help process people. Absolutely not. There are lots of specialists out there that can do that, but what we do As helping people with lawsuits, helping navigate the legal system to resolve a problem for them legally that they have to have a lawyer for.
We can do a better job of communicating, of giving some space to talk about feelings, give a little bit of education between us, with our staff, with clients. But also that helps [00:09:00] us when we’re frustrated, when we can’t get answers out of people, when we don’t understand what the issue is. We’ve got a gambit of people or cases, and they’re all reacting differently to the loss.
And we don’t understand that, and it’s frustrating for us. And sometimes, like I said, it can be looked at negatively. And don’t you bet, that’s exactly what the jury is going to do too. Because they’re in the same boat that we are. They don’t know that grief can be normal, natural reaction to any loss or change in familiar pattern of behavior.
So yeah, they’re totally going to be judging the different people based on how they’re reacting and what they’re portraying to the jury as their grief. But more specifically, let’s talk about how to communicate because I think some of these things are really small. But they make a huge difference when it comes to clients and navigating their grief.
The first thing is, and again, I’ve had this conversation [00:10:00] with many people, done the CLE for organizations, and if you have an organization that you’d like to have this put together for you all, just let me know. But we have a tendency to say when someone communicates with us how they’re feeling or their loss, I know how you feel.
You don’t. No one does. Okay. And so a better, because again, I know how you feel means that your loss was the same as their loss, but you don’t even know that yet. And it could be a completely different type of grief event that they’re experiencing versus what you had. And instead of having a comparison, I know how you feel.
I lost my dog last year. I know how you feel. I had a divorce as well. That’s just means, Oh, let’s not talk about it. Okay. I know how you feel, don’t talk about it. Instead, a very easy thing to say, which validates and [00:11:00] acknowledges what someone is saying, is I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine how you feel. I can’t imagine that type of loss.
You’re just validating, you’re just acknowledging. It’s there. And you’re not going to say, I know how you feel. The other thing that’s a great way to communicate is to help people identify and name that loss. Whether it be tangible or intangible, this happens with me really frequently when I sit down to help people get ready for testimony.
And we start to talk about, and we start to list, and we put pen to paper, and we put it up on the wall, can’t play with my grandkids. Can’t exercise the way that I want to. No longer drive on the highway. My husband has to drive me everywhere. Yeah, once we start to put that step up there, then it’s hey, this is real losses.
What have you lost [00:12:00] here? Lost all my financial security. You lost trust. Absolutely. People don’t do that for themselves. They don’t. Again, we’ve talked about a last episode. We weren’t really taught how to process. Grief. Process. Some feelings, not all our feelings, but we’re talking about grief here. If you can help people just by saying, gosh, this is a huge loss, you’re having some loss of trust, right?
Ask it in a question. Wow, that’s a, it’s a huge relationship that you’ve lost, right? Yeah. How are you feeling? Are you feeling sad? Are you feeling conflicting feelings? Help them name those feelings. The best thing we can do is just ask them to tell you the story. Because they want you to know, they want you to hear it.
They want you to hear how it feels. Now, people always tell you, I don’t have time for that. We’re in a hurry. We can’t always be talking about feelings. Listen, you’re going to know [00:13:00] when the opportunity arises and when it’s appropriate, when it’s not. Also, most of the time, people just want to get it out once because nobody else in their life they can talk to about this.
You are helping them process. The loss, the change, legally, they’re trying to process it emotionally, right? So having them tell you that story, you being able to hear how it feels, you’re doing a significant service to them because they don’t have anybody else in their life that’s going to do that. Now you’re going to think, well, I had to watch it every time.
You’re overthinking it. You’re getting way in the weeds here. Ultimately, listen, we, at some point we have to be. A big heart with ears and just listen. And when we do that, we really restore some of that loss of trust and listen, they will appreciate it. That trust that you build [00:14:00] by listening, by just taking a moment and it’s okay to switch gears and say, thank you so much for telling me.
I can’t imagine how you feel. Can I ask if we can talk about this other thing? Or, I’m here if you want to talk a little bit more. Okay, look, that was a polite way of doing that. We can be polite. Sometimes I think we forget, we need to be polite. Yes, we have a job to do, right? But again, we signed up for the intellectual side.
We’re going to get the emotional side too. And this is part of the reason why I want to do this series all together. And ultimately, the other thing, how we communicate is we really have to avoid those myth statements. That, go out and replace it, go get you another one, go, hey, go stay busy, join a gym, get a new hobby, you got more time on your hands, you just, you need to be strong for others right now.
Hold on, what’s our other ones we got here? Be strong for [00:15:00] others. Can you go do that at home? Do I need to call you back, right? Go grieve alone. Stay busy. Be strong for others. Just give it time. Right? Avoid all those statements. Right? Because again, what are you saying? Which is, I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear your feelings.
They’re not important. Take that somewhere else when they’re very important to our cases and they should not be ignored because if you start to ignore that at some point, you’re going to erode the trust that you’ve got with your client and they’re either going to go on somewhere else or you’re going to have a very difficult client to deal with.
And lastly, a way to help. Folks with their navigating grief. It’s education. Five minutes on what is grief. Helping them see that, hey, listen, you may have heard somebody say you just need to stay busy. Somebody may say you just need to suck it up. Move on. And you can’t. And you’re really struggling with it.
You’re gonna be having some grief here, right? What is it? Helping people with just a little bit of education can just blow the doors off of it. That’s what [00:16:00] it did for me. I had no idea that’s what it was that I was struggling with. I just thought that I was in a funk, that I needed to do something. Change what I was doing and I was trying all kinds of intellectual ways to deal with the problem But never once did I try to sit down in a process that emotional feeling that I was having And it was gonna stick with me until somebody outside of myself Said hey, here’s your problem And that’s the beauty of having folks around you that can do that and sometimes we got to hire people To be able to say, Hey, you’re struggling with this, or this is what it looks like.
This is what I’ve seen before. Does this fit for you? Having that extra person on the outside, well worth it. Otherwise we sit and continue to struggle. So we’ve talked a little bit about how this mentally can show up for [00:17:00] people, physically, how it can show up, those energy relieving behaviors. And then how can we navigate with our clients their grief, right?
How we communicate with them. And this also goes to not asking people, have you had a breakdown yet? Or have you fallen apart yet? Or do you fall to pieces? All that language, all those things, that’s all from, that’s negative stuff. That’s social media stuff. Okay, then you’re, then that means, okay, good, you’re done.
I don’t want to hear about it then. If you already fell apart, you’re fine now. You’re on your, you’re on the up and up now. That word choice is so important when we communicate with clients, avoiding comparison, I know how you feel, change that around, I just can’t imagine. And then ultimately education, helping people have just a little bit more awareness, sending them to the resources.
We’ve got in our show notes, we’ve got a website, Grief Recovery Method has wonderful resources. My website has some resources, an e book, [00:18:00] I know that Grief Recovery Method has several e books that address different losses. It could be pet loss, could be spouse loss, may have the grief recovery method and a few other books available as well.
I hope that this podcast was helpful as we learned a little bit more about navigating grief and dealing with our clients who may be struggling with that. If you follow the podcast, the episodes will automatically download into your app so that it’ll be ready there for you when they come out on Wednesday.
All right, until next time, thank you.