How I Broke Every Rule When Counseling Janell-And How You Can Do Better

In an earlier Joe and Janell video (Growing Together When Loss Tries to Pull You Apart) , we talked about how marriage is affected in the face of catastrophic loss—in their case, the loss of their only child. During that video, we mentioned a pastoral counseling session that took place with Janell and me (and two of Janell’s friends) shortly after Garrett died. When we revisited that conversation ten years later, Joe and Janell shared what went right (they were gracious in that regard, coming up with something) but also what went wrong.

After I moved to Colorado, the pastoral care team asked me to address a group of people offering pastoral care at Cherry Hills Community Church. Instead of coming up with a list of things I thought they should do, I played the video you can see here talking about what I had done wrong. As part of that evening, Brian (who does pastoral counseling at CHCC) handed out a list of the “Tenets of Companioning the Bereaved” put together by Dr. Alan Wolfelt (www.centerforloss.com).

When I saw the tenets, I would have laughed if it hadn’t been so sad, because I had broken virtually every one of them in my conversation with Janell. For those who want to do better when you’re comforting or talking to someone who is facing traumatic grief, I’m listing Dr. Wolfelt’s tenets here, and explaining why I was tempted to do the exact opposite. The intent is that you will learn from my failure. If you haven’t seen last week’s video yet, I recommend you watch that (How I Failed as a Pastor) before reading this. I asked Janell to provide her own commentary after every one of my “confessions,” so her words are in italics.