According to one study in human medicine, the leading reason for seeking medical care is relief of distress. The effort to minimize distress is often described in the medical literature as the act of providing comfort. Comfort means “to strengthen” and is most often described as a physical, mental, and/or emotional state of ease or well-being. Offering comfort is the most important part of supporting your clients’ grief after pet loss.
In a 1998 commentary in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, Dr. Franklin McMillan suggested that comfort, not health, is the “primary and central objective of medical practice.” Dr. McMillan proposed that the purpose of fighting disease is to provide and maintain comfort and that health professionals should view the elimination of distress and discomfort as the single most important part of eliminating disease.
Supporting Your Clients’ Grief Effectively
If you think like Dr. McMillan, you know that, even when your patients die, you can still make a difference in your clients’ experience. Supporting your clients’ grief can be accomplished by simply comforting them during those first painful moments following their loss. You provide emotional comfort when you listen to your clients’ nonmedical concerns without taking action to solve their problems. This means:
- acknowledging your clients’ losses
- creating opportunities for their thoughts and emotions to be openly expressed
- listening to their pain as well as to their happier memories (if and when they are ready to share those with you)
Your clients possess the knowledge and skills they need to heal their own grief. When supporting your clients’ grief, it’s more helpful to simply empathize and listen than to offer advice about what you think your clients should do.
Listening is an overlooked support skill in veterinary medicine. As a professional, you might feel that you aren’t being helpful unless you know the “right thing to say” to “solve” or “fix” your clients’ dilemmas. Yet, the truth is, you can’t “fix” grief. You can’t cheer up your clients or make their feelings go away. Nor should you. Grievers need to feel their feelings in order to heal. Therefore, comfort is most helpful when it is offered as small gestures of support or by simply being a silent presence and witness to their sorrow.
Empathy, Not Sympathy
Skilled emotional support is based on empathy and a genuine understanding of what your clients are going through. Empathy means having an intellectual and emotional comprehension of another person’s condition without actually experiencing the other person’s feelings. The classic concept of “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes” is an example of empathy. You convey empathy when you say, “I can imagine how sad you must feel, knowing that Samson might die.”
Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is feeling sorry for someone. You are conveying sympathy when you say, “Poor Susan! I feel so bad for you.” Expressing sympathy or pitying someone is not helpful when dealing with grief. Feeling pitied by others often offends people and can be counterproductive to feeling supported.
To learn more about supporting your clients’ grief, visit our Veterinary Wisdom® Resource Center.
Keep up the good work,
Laurel Lagoni
Co-Founder
World by the Tail, Inc.