He has found worryingly high levels of PGD among the COVID bereaved. Using the Pandemic Grief Scale, which he developed and validated with his colleague Sherman Lee, he found that more than two-thirds of a sample of some 850 people in the US who were bereaved by COVID were experiencing what he calls ‘the shadow pandemic of dysfunctional grief’ and would benefit from specialist interventions to help them make meaning of their loss, both of the death itself and the surrounding circumstances, including the mourning and funeral rituals. This is a very welcome vote of confidence in the magazine – thank you all for taking time to give us your thoughts. This month’s contents will, I think, match your expectations. Highlights are Gareth Cowlin’s graphic take on his experience of counselling, and Jimmy Edmonds’ and Jane Harris’ challenge to western societies to allow people to grieve in their own way and time. One of the key problems for LGBT people, especially those living outside big cities, is the difficulty of being able to easily connect with people with the same experience. Sometimes when they do, because that community is made up of many traumatised people, often drinking and partying, it can sometimes not be the most welcoming place. The need for authentic connection is vitally important. For some of the men who have attended A Change of Scene, a monthly discussion group for gay and bi men facilitated by Simon Marks, it’s their first experience of sitting with a group of other gay men and discussing their lives, even though they have been out for 20 or 30 years. Marks also runs group therapy for his clients, which he believes can particularly help gay and bi men connect. He believes one upside of the pandemic may be that more support has become available online. ‘A Change of Scene, as well as many 12-step LGBT meetings, are now being held on Zoom,’ he says, ‘which means people from across the country can access them who might not have been able to before. I hope this continues when the pandemic is over.’

Allegranti B, Wyatt J. Witnessing loss: a feminist material-discursive account. Qualitative Inquiry 2014; 20(4): 533–543.

References

Another highlight of this issue for me is our ‘Experience’ piece, in which Max Marnau, a BACP senior accredited counsellor, shares the dilemma of whether to ‘come out’ to clients about her late diagnosis of autism. She also questions why therapy for autists still focuses on helping them conform to a neurotypical world.

Often, the focus on understanding dementia, providing treatment and engaging in communication can emphasise verbal interaction, and the value of non-verbal communication can be ignored. As Julia states, continued connection is important, and, as such, attention to kinaesthetic engagement is key – not only when people’s cognitive faculties are impaired but more so within/in dementia relationships where meaning making through language as we ‘know it’ is changed and challenged. What is it to step into the other’s world when they have lost their moorings? How can we be with this in our own bodies as counsellors and psychotherapists? Confronted by loss, carers and therapists can experience strong embodied counter/transferential feelings for the person with dementia. Butler is aware of this incorporation too: ‘I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well.’ 17 How does the body of the other summon us to engage? It is the embodied relational engagement that sustains us in the living of everyday life. And, as Jonathan’s words vividly attest, relationships are made up of gesture, voices, spoken, soft, harsh, touch, skin, breath, embrace.My mum was suffering from dementia. She was diagnosed in 2017 and we had to move her into residential care in December 2019. Then COVID came and I couldn’t visit daily, as I’d been doing. Then I got a call saying they’d got COVID in the home, and I knew it was a matter of when not if Mum got it. They called me on Friday 10 April to say she’d got a cough and they’d called 111 and been advised to treat it as COVID.