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Life is a series of changes and transitions. Some expected, welcomed and joyful. Others, wholly unexpected, unwelcomed and painful. To be grief-informed is to recognize that there are losses or endings inherent in any life transition, regardless of the type or form of transition.
Career services are often positioned in the context of assisting individuals in beginnings. But what if there are no beginnings without endings? To truly be of service, we need to honour and acknowledge the endings as much as we might want to focus on and encourage the beginnings. To do otherwise is to risk disenfranchising our service participants from valuable insights and career possibilities that might emerge in working with those endings.
Endings are a form of loss
Consider, for example, someone who is a newcomer to Canada. Imagine the plethora of changes that an individual (and their family) experience as they transition to life in Canada. Often, these individuals arrive with great hopes and expectations for creating a life and career in Canada. Indeed, Canada can offer great possibilities, but migration comes with endings as well. These can exact a toll on well-being and affect job search. Possible losses include (but are not limited to):
- Loss of easeful connection with friends, family, language, food and culture
- Loss of a sense of identity, purpose and competence
- Loss of credentials, investment in years of education and value of years of experience
- Loss of work connections and networks
Our career conversations with this individual are, in part, about creating these anew in the Canadian context. However, if we disregard the hurt that may be present in their transition, we may step into toxic positivity territory. So, how can we hold both pain and possibility in our career conversations?
Want to learn more? Don’t miss Dr. Catherine Hajnal’s upcoming webinar series with CERIC on “Working with Grief, Shame and Regret: Uncovering Career Transition Potential,” starting April 29.
Grief-informed practice
Trauma-informed and grief-informed approaches can be seen as complementary. Not all loss is traumatic, but all trauma has loss. Accordingly, if trauma is part of the service participant’s story, then so are loss and grief. For career services organizations, the approach is not about distinguishing between who has experienced trauma and who hasn’t, and who has experienced loss and who hasn’t; it is about embracing a set of guiding principles that incorporate knowledge about trauma and about loss, acknowledging our humanity first.
| Here are some guidelines for providing trauma- and grief-informed services: |
4 principles of trauma-informed practice
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10 tenets of grief-informed practice
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The invitation for us is to appreciate that grief is a natural response to loss. We can tap into the meaning and sense-making aspects of the process of grieving. Continuing with the example of supporting a newcomer jobseeker, we can offer empathy and walk with our service participant as their story evolves through conversation, such that we:
- Acknowledge the knowledge, skills and abilities that emerge in the process of coming to Canada
- Invite the service participant to reflect on how networking happens in their country of origin and how they might apply that in their new local context
- Encourage them to identify how a job might be done differently in their country of origin versus in Canada
- Acknowledge that some loss is rooted in systemic bias (e.g. not having Canadian experience or credentials), validating their frustration and sense of loss
We do not need to fix the grief. Rather we offer validation, reorientation and growth by supporting a natural process of adaptation.
