Gavin

Gavin shares how Cruse Scotland's group counselling sessions helped him after his son died in 2024 and how the group sessions helped him to open up and share how his feelings.

My son passed away in September 2024, unexpectedly, although he had had a few problems with his health.

I found myself not communicating with anyone, keeping everything to myself. Those around me encouraged me to talk, so I decided to reach out for support.

I reached out to Cruse Scotland and had some correspondence with Lesley. I had asked for consideration for one-on-one counselling, but she came back at one point and said, "You know, would you be interested in doing a sort of group counselling session?"

Initially, when I thought about it, I was not quite sure, and then I thought, do you know what, it might be beneficial to do it in a wider setting, and I thought, yes, I am going to go for that. I need to do something.

I think I had discussed it with my wife and said, Look, as it stands at the minute, I’m not talking to anybody.

I’ve still got all these things going on in my head, and I need to reach out and get some help and start talking about things, so that was basically the bottom line. I was struggling mentally to come to terms with what had happened.

How did the group counselling support sessions help you?

What it has done was it let me see that I was not alone. A lot of things that were going through my head are the same things that other people were experiencing.

So, anxiety, lack of sleep, and not talking to people. Odd thoughts at odd times, waves of grief, all that sort of stuff.

It was good to see that it was common. So, what I was experiencing was not something that only happened to me.

It happened to everybody. And then just as we were going through the sessions, little bits of prompts from Andy and Daryl about looking at things from different perspectives just helped to open that up. And I did start talking to people. I started talking to my wife about it, started talking to my kids about it.

And while I would not say that all my inner thoughts are out now, there is certainly more of them out there for discussion. And I feel much more comfortable now saying to my wife that I am having a challenging day, shall we say, than I would in the past.

I would just go away, and I would hide and not talk to anybody until the feeling passed, so that is the difference it has made.

Do you feel that being part of the group has helped you come to terms with your grief at all?

I think it did. I do not ever think I am going to feel that I will completely accept it.

However, what I came to understand is that all my feelings were quite natural and quite common.

Some of the folk in the group, the bereavement had been quite some time ago, and so the fact that they were still experiencing these feelings, it tells me that it is not something that is going to go away.

However, that whole concept of being able to chat to people in a similar situation was good.

It has not stopped me wanting to do one-to-one sessions. I think if I had done it the other way around, I might have found that harder.

When you are in a group session, and I think everybody in the group experienced this at some point during the process, there is a period when you do not want to say anything. 

And so, not that you were able to hide, but you were able to take a quiet period, and the sort of facilitators were obviously recognising you didn't want to talk about it at this point, so they would move on to something else or somebody else.

So, you had that chance to go in and out as you needed to. So, there was not that pressure as it would be on a one-on-one, where you know you have a lot of silences to fill. They were getting naturally filled by other members of the group, which was good.

What would you say to someone who may be nervous about joining a group bereavement session?

Every single person who went to the group session was anxious beforehand.

I would say that if you're struggling to talk about it, even if you go to that first session and just listen to what's happening, what's going on, and the kind of tips and so on that people give you, it starts to bring it out of you.

And I saw that in our group, where there were some people that were ready to talk, some people that had to be, you know, sort of teased out a little bit, but there wasn't any finger pointing to say, now it's your turn.

It was very much a come, listen, when you are ready, speak and say the things you want to say, even if it is just, I am having a terrible day and I am struggling with it.

You know, some people would say, take the dog for a walk, get a bit of fresh air. Or just do something different or something mundane just to get you out of the frame of mind. So, there is lots of that in the group. I would recommend it to anybody. I really would.