Deb Hill, now a middle school counselor, once met with a 4-year old who came to her grief counseling sessions after experiencing a fire that burned his house down.
“He didn’t say a word for seven sessions,” Hill said.
During each session he would silently select a toy fire truck from the toys she had available, expand the truck’s ladder, retract it and put the toy away. He repeated the same sequence each time. Then, after the seventh session, he began to talk.
“This was play therapy in action,” Hill said. Creative interventions, like play therapy, bibliotherapy, writing and artmaking can be used to support grieving students of all ages.
Grief, Hill explained, is “internal anguish for when people feel any reaction to a loss that they have experienced.”
While grief is not limited to the death of a loved one, it’s a natural reaction to loss. Approximately 8% of children will experience the death of a primary caregiver before reaching adulthood. For school counselors, supporting grieving students can be a regular part of the job.
Creative interventions can be adapted to meet kids’ needs at a variety of developmental levels. They can give students a way to create something visual and tangible while exploring conflicting and complicated feelings. Additionally, creative interventions allow for expression when vocabulary isn’t available. “Especially with traumatic grief. They are not always going to have access to their language centers. Even if developmentally, they have access to the vocabulary,” said Hill.
At the American School Counselor’s Association Conference, Hill and her colleague Dr. Anita Pool, an associate professor and School Counseling Coordinator at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, shared creative interventions that school counselors can use to support grieving students.
Bibliotherapy
Books about grief or books that include characters that are grieving can give students an opportunity to explore their own emotions through someone else’s story. They can help kids relate with characters and normalize their emotions and experiences. “I cannot tell you how many times I’ve read a book on a difficult topic and almost always they’ll say, ‘That’s just like me,’” said Dr. Pool. That recognition can be particularly meaningful for younger children. Because of their developmental stage, Pool said, little kids can be especially egocentric and think they are the only one experiencing something difficult.
One of her favorite books to use as a counselor is “The Art of Holding on and Letting Go,” by Kristen Bartley Lenz, about a competitive climber who experiences a tragedy on an Ecuadorian mountaintop. Books can also address forms of loss that aren’t related to death but can still trigger grief for children, including military deployment or parental incarceration.
Pool cautions counselors to be thoughtful about the books they choose. Stories with magical resolutions or explanations can be confusing for younger children, particularly when they are trying to understand the reality of what has happened.
“We want to be sure that we’re giving them accurate, real information, but can provide hope for the future,” she said.
Pool suggests reading young adult fiction before making recommendations. “It may include education and information about other topics within that book that might be too much for that particular child,” she said.
How counselors use books can also change depending on a student’s age. “With our teens, we wouldn’t necessarily sit side by side and read the book during the session like we would with young kids,” Pool said. “I would assign a section or a chapter and have them read it outside of the session or outside of school and come back to discuss it.”
Crafting and writing
Sometimes, the adults in a student’s life may have difficulty hearing them talk about the person or experience they’ve lost. Counselors can provide a dedicated space where students can talk about their memories or explore them without having to talk at all.
Pool recommends activities such as creating a memory book, box or collage using photographs, magazine images and mementos to provide a tangible way to remember someone who has died or to acknowledge feelings of missing someone who is absent. Counselors can also purchase premade vision-board kits from craft stores if they don’t have the time or resources to cut out materials themselves. Around the holidays, which are times when grief can feel intense, Pool invites students to make paper chains with memories written on them, also called memory chains.
Simple art supplies can be just as useful. “Don’t ever underestimate the power of markers and crayons and paper,” Pool said. She keeps those materials readily available in her office. She advises counselors to consider whether paint is appropriate for their students. “Paint is harder to control,” Pool said, adding that the lack of control can be triggering for students.
Writing can also give students a private way to process grief. Students might create an acrostic poem using the name of a loved one, write an epitaph or compose a letter to someone they have lost. Letter writing can be especially useful for expressing things a student wasn’t able to say while the person was alive.
Journaling with or without a prompt is another option. Providing a journal for a student can be a small but meaningful intervention, particularly when cost is a barrier to obtaining one. Hill keeps a storage file of adolescents’ journals at school so students could write without worrying that someone at home might read them.
Toys and play therapy
Hill described play-based interventions as a “slam dunk” for younger students. “Kids don’t always have access to the vocabulary or the language they need to be able to express themselves in a way that we understand,” she said.
Play allows children to communicate symbolically instead. Rather than having to explain what happened, a child can act it out, recreate elements of an experience or use toys to represent feelings and relationships. The process can also give children a sense of control and agency at a time when their lives may feel out of their control.
That can be especially important when a child is confused about a loss or believes they somehow caused it. Through play, counselors can help children explore those beliefs and begin to make sense of what happened.
Different toys can support play therapy and counselors do not have to have a huge collection. Pool uses Kimochis , small character toys in which each character has a distinct personality, as well as diverse dolls, emergency vehicles, medical toys and dollhouses.
“It’s not about the amount of toys that you have, it’s about the quality of the toys,” Hill said. “Not just the build quality, but the intent behind it.”
The goal is to provide enough variety for students to find objects that resonate with their experiences, while making sure the materials reflect different families, identities and circumstances.
Sand trays
Sand trays offer a nonverbal and tactile way for students to communicate and process information. The trays are typically blue, creating an environment that is both expansive and contained. Students can use sand and small figurines or objects to construct scenes inside the tray. The physical sensation of working with sand can also be grounding for some children.
As with play therapy, counselors can provide a range of miniatures, including diverse people, families, animals and emergency vehicles, and allow students to decide what belongs in their scene.
For a grieving child, the tray can create psychological distance from an experience that feels overwhelming. Instead of having to say, “This is happening to me,” a student can create a scene and talk about what is happening to the figures. That distance can make it easier for students to explore difficult experiences. Sand trays can also engage multiple forms of expression at once, combining sensory, visual and verbal processing.
There are different types of sand that counselors can use, each offering a different sensory experience. And for schools that don’t have the space or resources for a physical sand tray, free digital versions allow students to construct scenes using images from the internet. Some students may not want to destroy their sand tray scene and counselors can take photos to capture the scenes before they are cleaned up. These also can be helpful for the counselor to track changes over time.
The flexibility of creative interventions is part of their appeal. “It’s multi-culturally appropriate because [they don’t] require a specific language or a specific cultural context” Hill said. For counselors supporting bereaved students, creating a space where there isn’t a single right way to experience or talk about their feelings, can help students be the drivers of their grieving process.
Deb Hill, now a middle school counselor, once met with a 4-year old who came to her grief counseling sessions after experiencing a fire that burned his house down. “He didn’t say a word for seven sessions,” Hill said. During each session he would silently select a toy fire truck from the toys she had … Continue reading When Words Aren’t Enough, Creative Tools Can Help Grieving Students of All Ages {}