Grief in the Room
Come with us on a deep dive into everything griefy, from theory to practice. This podcast is designed to give therapists, trainee counsellors and volunteers the knowledge and skills they need to work with grief and loss with confidence and insight.
Grief in the Room
Episode 7 - Neurodivergence & Grief, Part 1
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In the first of this two part series on neurodivergence and grief, we explore the experience of being neurodivergent, how it can impact on people, and how it might affect someone's expression and experience of grief.
This has now been expanded into a rich self-learning course, which you can sign up for here:
https://griefguides.co.uk/course/nd-grief
You can access the resources for each episode by clicking here.
Before we go into this episode of the podcast, I just wanted to say a few words about what you can expect because this episode might sound a little bit different to usual, and that is on purpose. So we are recording the first of a three-part series about neurodivergence and grief. And in this episode, we're gonna be looking at what the experience of neurodivergence is like, how it affects people, how it impacts people, and especially how it might impact the experience of grief.
Now, I am neurodivergent, I am autistic. Martin is neurotypical. And as well as talking about the topic, one of the things we wanted to capture in this episode is what that experience is like for somebody neurodivergent, perhaps struggling to communicate about something quite difficult, and how that is received by somebody neurotypical. So normally when we are editing these episodes, we will edit out the pauses and the filler words and the bits where we lose our train of thought, and we try to let them have a good flow for you. We haven't really done that with this episode, and that is deliberate because we wanted you to hear in real time what it is like for somebody neurodivergent to maybe be struggling to communicate their thoughts, to find the right words for how they're feeling or what's on their mind. And so you are going to hear me hesitating, pausing for quite a long time, losing my train of thought. And you are going to hear Martin giving me the space to do that and checking out carefully with me that he is understanding what I'm saying.
I found this episode quite difficult to record because it is so close to home, and so I did struggle and we wanted that to come through in the recording, so that you're getting a really kind of raw, authentic bird's eye view of what it can be like for somebody neurodivergent, who at other times might not struggle to communicate, might sound very eloquent and not struggle for words, but when it's something that is close to home and that maybe they feel uncomfortable or find it difficult to talk about then their communication could start to be impacted. So keep that in mind as you listen. As I said, this is the first of a three-part series that we're doing and we hope that you enjoy it.