Legislation Pushes Grief Counseling in Public Schools

(Newswire.net — March 31, 2016) South Pasadena,, CA — Senate legislature will require education departments to train public school counselors in “grief and stress counseling” pending bill approval on Friday, making it a law. This legislature has been sponsored by Sens. Marvin Blyden, Justin Harrigan, Neville James and Kurt Vialet, but does not have a funding source. Blyden, when introducing the bill, has said that “grief counseling will offer support in challenging times; therefore, it is important the people provide grief counseling through school counselors, it is a form of therapy that seeks to help bereaved students to explore and process their stressing and confusing feelings. It is a support system that is invaluable. Trained grief and stress counselors will help our students to cope with denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, which are all familiar symptoms of grief.”

According to St. Thomas Source, several senators spoke about the unbelievable stresses that many public school students face, many who have to face death in some form by the time they are in high school. According to Vialet, “It is now common among our students that they had actually seen somebody dead on the floor.  School is often the refuge from what is happening at home. If you read the obituaries of those individuals being killed, they have six, seven, eight, nine children who are all affected and in the school system.” The senators hope to relieve the stresses of death, and help the affected children move forward with their lives, becoming happier and healthier.

The ability to learn how to handle the stress of grief and loss is essential, no matter if you are a child or an adult.

“Losses and life transitions create change and with change always comes with discomfort. Sometimes its small discomfort, kind of like little waves playing around your knee, but sometimes it’s like a damn tsunami crashing down on you and tearing your world apart,” explains Paula Shaw, the author of Grief… When Will This Pain Ever End?: A Guide to Finding Your Way Out of the Depths of Despair After Suffering Profound Loss, a book dedicated to providing you with the tools and processes to helping you through your journey through grief and loss. “That’s how it was for me the summer that I lost my former husband and my dog of fourteen years within a month of each other. It was a really difficult, devastating time for me and my two children. But because I had children and clients who were depending on me, I had to heal and try to get my life back together as quickly as possible. So I started doing a lot of research and I started thinking about the tools I used over the years that’d been really effective with my clients. So, every single day I did something— I used some tool or I did some process to try to help myself feel and it worked.”

“Measurable change quickly occurs and concrete results manifest in far less time than with traditional therapies which only focus on the conscious mind. Working with a wide variety of healing modalities, I provide my clients with the most effective processes for their specific needs. Because every person has unique challenges, this customized approach is critical to their success,” Shaw says.

 

Being able to handle grief is difficult at any age. The new legislation that is being offered that will impart grief counseling in public schools is just one way that can make grief easier. Paula Shaw makes it even easier with her book, http://www.amazon.com/dp/0996317414/, and will help guide anyone of any age through any loss. “I decided I wanted to compile a truly helpful arsenal of tools to help others work through their grief journeys. In this book I’ve done just that giving you tools and processes and information to help you on your healing journey to move through your pain but at your own pace because no two people will go through this healing journey in exactly the same way or the same amount of time. But you’re not going to have to do it alone. I’m going to be with you every step of the way,” states Shaw.

Shaw guides anyone through the process of grief and helps navigate them to a new life on the other side of mourning.

 

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