Jean Simons, our support and education manager, describes feelings encountered at a befriender training session in relation to Martin Toy’s experience.

The befriender training can produce some unexpected feelings in the trainee, and raise issues for the whole family, as Martin experienced.

Although probably not a day goes by when the bereaved parents doesn’t think privately of their child; as months and years pass it is increasingly likely that the parent doesn’t speak about the child outside the immediate family. If the family members have become more distant from one another over the years, whether by children growing up and moving away or even divorce or further bereavement, it may be that the potential befriender has not spoken their child’s name aloud for many years.

The first exercise of the befriender training day is to speak about your child to a partner and listen to their story in turn. Participants usually feel or become tearful and inevitably say “I haven’t said that to anyone before” or “I didn’t think I’d still react like that but when he / she said [whatever] I remembered feeling that too”.

The exercise dispels any illusions that being a bereaved parent befriender ‘just’ involves listening sympathetically but passively to someone else’s story. It means acknowledging and understanding your own feelings and responses and feeling confident that you can help the bereaved parent you are befriending, to share their own experiences; being able to listen carefully to whatever they want to say.

The training encourages the befriender to ask the caller about their experiences and feelings. This sounds very simple, but it is actually rare for bereaved parents to be encouraged to speak honestly about their feelings. Most bereaved parents will recognise that friends and colleagues, no matter how sympathetic, will often try to prevent them speaking about them speaking about their grief, perhaps thinking it isn’t good for them to become upset and tearful. They may change the subject or not mention the child’s name in conversation. It is hoped, though it isn’t easy to do, that another bereaved parent, can encourage and cope with an honest discussion about another’s feelings and experiences without trying to “make it better”; an impossibility anyway.

Usually the discussion in the session turns to support for other children in the family. Many like Martin recognise that it was too hard for them at the time of their bereavement to understand and meet the needs of their other or subsequent children.
Many new befrienders resolve to re-open discussions with their, now grown up or grown older children, and thus is usually a gratifying but sometimes surprising experience.

Many parents are very moved to discover that their very young children had had questions and fantasies which they hadn’t mentioned at the time for fear of upsetting their parent. Parents report a new warmth or closeness with their adult children.