Innovate Issue 2 November 2020 | Page 36

WELLBEING
He described anticipatory grief , and this is what I could see our students were facing .
‘ Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we ’ re uncertain . Usually it centres on death . We feel it when someone gets a dire diagnosis or when we have the normal thought that we ’ ll lose a parent someday . Anticipatory grief is also more broadly imagined futures . There is a storm coming . There ’ s something bad out there . With a virus , this kind of grief is so confusing for people . Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening , but you can ’ t see it . This breaks our sense of safety . We ’ re feeling that loss of safety . I don ’ t think we ’ ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this .’
Our young people are going through this period of rapidly changing emotions and a real sense of uncertainty in a situation where the adults do not have all the answers .
Even though we cannot take away their worries or their uncertainty about the future , we can help them understand what they were feeling , why they were going through all these emotional stages and how to rationalise these thoughts . All of this seems logical to an adult , but teenagers have a strong sense of injustice and I recognised that our students would need to listen to an external voice to be able to hear the message .
To help support our students through this I approached Dr Jennifer Mahon ( 2020 ). Dr Mahon has been speaking to our students for several years now and as both a psychotherapist specialising in emotional intelligence and a parent with children at the school . Dr Mahon then developed a series of talks to make available to our students online . It was imperative to address the students in examination years but also those in Years 10 and 12 who worried about the knock-on effect of losing school-based teaching and a meaningful period of their shared school experience .
Dr Mahon crafted separate talks which became , ‘ What to expect to feel and how to feel ok when the world changes ’ and ‘ Missing Exams - Rites of Passage ’ and ‘ Plan your Transition ’. Dr Mahon felt the focus on grief , famously modelled by Kubler-Ross ( Figure 1 , 1969 ) might be too niche a message since many young people didn ’ t seem to be suffering from grief , especially if they felt safe within their environment . BUT all young people were definitely dealing with sudden change . The talks were therefore informed by change models , Kubler- Ross ’ s Stages of Grief , and Prochaska and di Clemente ’ s Transtheoretical model of change ( 1983 ), which focuses on how individuals can change their own behaviour .
Figure 1
Denial
Avoidance Confusion Elation Shock Fear
Anger
Frustration Irritation Anxiety

Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle

Bargaining
Struggling to find meaning Reaching out to others Telling one ’ s story
Acceptance
Exploring options New plan in place Moving on
Depression
Overwhelmed Helplessness Hostility Flight
Information and Communication
Emotional Support
Guidance and Direction
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