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Nathalie Himmelrich

Inspiring Hope | Finding healthy ways of Grieving | Writer

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trauma

Nathalie with Katja Faber on Homicide Loss – Effect on the Victim’s Family | Episode 2 Part 1

July 4, 2022 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

‘I wish to be ok with it if for no other reason than I owed it to myself and I owed to my still-living children and those that care about me. Because they have a right to have a full and beautiful life, and having a mother that’s traumatised and overwhelmed by something that she has no control over is not doing anybody any favours.’

Katja’s story is extraordinary and has made waves in the media worldwide. Since the recording of this episode a few weeks ago the court case has taken place at the high court in Zurich, and the killer was convicted. We are planning to do Part 2 of this interview in a few weeks so stay tuned.

About this week’s guest: 

Katja Faber is the mother of three children. Following her 23-year-old son’s murder in Switzerland, she used her legal training to work closely with lawyers and the State Prosecutor to secure justice for her dead son. Through her writing at Still Standing Magazine and other grief-related publications, she hopes to break the taboo of homicide loss and child loss. She runs her own fruit farm and is an advocate of ecotherapy as a means of finding healing following a traumatic loss. Katja is a certified Compassionate Bereavement Care® counselor through the Center for Loss and Trauma in partnership with the MISS Foundation and the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Family Trust.

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Topics discussed in this episode:

  • Homicide loss – how a parent deals with the loss, the grief, the trauma, and the legal system
  • Self-care, writing, nature, family support, support groups 
  • Siblings’ grief, mothering living children who grieve their brother
  • Dealing with the media and the added pain caused by media coverage
  • Judgment or misunderstanding of the surroundings
  • Re-traumatizing the victim’s family through ongoing trials
  • The aspect of grief being to some degree public due to trials
  • How to continue living with the fact that the killer is still out there alive
  • The importance of accountability  

Resources and links mentioned in this episode:

  • Nathalie’s book Surviving My First Year of Child Loss: Personal Stories From Grieving Parents
  • The Compassionate Friends Facebook Groups

Links

–> For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website. 

–> Subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

–> Join the podcast’s Instagram page.

Thanks for listening to HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA. If you’d like to be updated on future episodes, please subscribe to my newsletter on Nathalie Himmelrich.com

If you need grief support, please contact me for a FREE 30 min discovery session.

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich. 

To support this podcast, please rate, review, subscribe to, or follow the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

 Remember to keep breathing, I promise, it will get easier.

Filed Under: podcast, child loss, emotions/feelings, grief support, grief/loss, grieving parents, mental health, trauma Tagged With: child loss, court cases and loss, grief support, grieving a child, grieving parents, homicide loss, katja, media and loss, murder, retraumatization, sibling loss

The Right Kind of Grief and Trauma Support

June 20, 2022 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

What is the right kind of grief support and how can I find it? This is the question that each and every one of you reading this will have asked yourself.

hands and coffee on table

Where to find support?

I did too when I was freshly bereaved. Luckily I had a wonderful General Practitioner who referred me to a therapist who I, being a therapist, didn’t have to coach on how to be with me, talk to me, and treat me.

Looking back, she was very supportive and, as I later found out, was also pregnant at the time. I don’t know where I would have been without seeing her and being able to have a sounding board checking on my mental health. She made me feel normal in a situation where I felt as if I was going crazy. She helped me gain perspective and start my journey of dealing with grief before my subsequent and traumatic loss of my mother through suicide.

Am I doing grief ‘right’?

My request for my therapist was to help me gain an understanding of grief and loss. I need to know if I was doing it ‘right’. Even though I understood it from a therapist’s point of view and worked with clients facing grief, I was well aware that going through the experience myself was a completely different pair of shoes.

As a couple, we also went to a grief support group led by the hospital at which I had given birth. This was very helpful for both of us. We got to meet other mothers and fathers, who had also lost a child. We could benefit from listening to their situations and their way of dealing with it.

So how can you find suitable support for yourself?

First of all, you need to decide and find out what it is that you need. The following question can help you:

  1. Do I need or prefer one on one support or group support or anything else that might support me?
  2. If therapy, do I prefer face-to-face, or am I okay with online therapy?
  3. If therapy, would I be better at seeing a male or a female therapist?
  4. If group support, do I prefer face-to-face or an online group?
  5. If group support, do I want to participate or prefer to be in the background?
  6. If neither therapy nor group supports me, what else supports me? Reading, writing, gardening…?
  7. What would you need to be able to incorporate the support that would be best?

Grief and trauma-informed therapy

If you are looking for a therapist and have experienced loss and or trauma, make absolutely sure that your therapist is grief and trauma-informed. What does that mean? Find out whether they have specific training in grief and trauma. You can either check their website on the about us page or ask them when you talk to them. There are multiple different forms of training for trauma some of the ones that I would recommend are Somatic Experience (SE) developed by Peter Levine and the Neuro Affective Relational Model (NARM) developed by Lawrence Heller. you can find practitioners around the world on their practitioners’ websites.

Finding the right therapist

Like any relationship, the therapist-client relationship needs to feel suitable to you personally. You might like to ask a friend for some recommendations. You could also ask for a referral from your doctor, midwife, nurse, or other healthcare providers.

In both of those situations, you still need to try them out to find out whether the two of you are a good fit.

Find out what the therapist offers a free introductory session or give them a call and ask for 10 minutes of their time to get to know them. (Book a FREE 30 min introductory session with me here.)

Then make an appointment. When you are there sense how this therapist fits you:

  • Does the therapist’s room make me feel at ease?
  • Do I get a feeling of being supported when I speak to them?
  • Do they listen to me, and do I feel validated and understood?
  • Do I feel at ease being there?
  • Do I feel like making another appointment?
  • Does the therapist ask me about my wishes, aspirations, reasons for therapy, and what I would like to achieve through being here?

These questions should be giving her enough information on whether you want to continue therapy with a specific person or try another one.

Grief group support

There are many different grief support groups out there and through the years of COVID people have become used to meeting online if in-person isn’t possible. On the support page, you can find different suggested groups or you can simply search them yourself based on the specific topic that you need support with, for example, pregnancy loss, child loss, loss through suicide, homicide loss, loss of a grandparent, loss of partner loss of a mother, loss of a father, etc.

Finding the right group

In the same way, as therapists need to fit your needs so does a group. If you like to participate in a group, it is good to choose a group that meets regularly either in person or online. If you prefer to stay in the background, there are grief groups, for example on Facebook, where you can read and comment if you like to.

Make sure that the general theme of the group is a fit for you. I personally have noticed that there are some groups who did not fit with me early on because they were too focused on religion. I needed a group that was filled with hope and showed me the potential for healing and integration.

Filed Under: grief support, child loss, coaching, counselling, emotions/feelings, from personal experience, grief/loss, grieving parents, health, trauma Tagged With: child loss, finding support, finding the right therapist, grief, the right group, the right therapist, trauma, trauma support, which therapist

How To Deal With Grief and Trauma

June 20, 2022 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

A new podcast is coming your way: How To Deal With Grief and Trauma

Podcast How to Deal with Grief and Trauma

You can’t go through life without experiencing loss and trauma the question is how do we deal and live with the grief and pain? Join Nathalie Himmelrich, grief expert and author, talking to people who have experienced grief and trauma first-hand. If you want to be inspired by others who traveled through their grief and trauma, found that healing is possible, and came out the other end knowing they can survive and thrive in life after loss.

The path to hope, healing & wholeness is different and unique for each and every person.
YOUR loss and YOUR trauma require YOUR grieving and YOUR healing.

This is s a podcast about YOU and YOUR Grief & Trauma.

Podcast Episodes – click here!

Hear it from those who know

How to Deal with Grief and Trauma is a podcast series interviewing YOU. It is about creating a voice for people to share their own personal experiences and start an open and honest conversation on the topic of grieving, dealing with grief and trauma, and healing.

Hosted by Nathalie Himmelrich – grief and trauma therapist – this podcast hopes to shed a huge spotlight on the magnitude of different losses and traumas and how each individual dealt with them.

What we will cover

How to Deal with Grief and Trauma is a conversation. Together, we will get to know a real person, their loss and trauma, and hear how they dealt with it, how they survived it, and how they integrated healing into their life.

I will ask the interviewee…:

  • to share their trauma and loss
  • about the resources and insights that have helped
  • and what their journey has taught them

Subscribe to How to Deal with Grief and Trauma:

…simply by signing up here or in the usual places where you listen to your podcast, such as:

  • Apple Podcast
  • Spotify
  • Stitcher
  • Google Podcast
  • TuneIn

Ask a question or want to be my guest?

To ask a question or if you want to be my guest on the podcast, email info@nathaliehimmelrich.com

And always – It’s ALL YOURS – TRULY – so stay true to your grieving and healing.

Yours truly, Nathalie

🚀  The podcast is being launched on June 21st, 2022 🚀 

Podcast Episodes – click here!

Filed Under: podcast, grief support, grief/loss, trauma Tagged With: dealing with grief, dealing with trauma, grief and trauma podcast, grief support, healing after loss, trauma support

Animal Phobias – What can be done?

June 9, 2022 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

Spiders, rats, mice, and snakes are just some of the common animals people are afraid of. But what if the fear gets in the way of life?

Phobia versus fear

Phobia is a response to something that is not a threat. This is why phobias are sometimes called irrational fears. The response is so intense it may interfere with your ability to function or perform daily tasks.

Many fears had been reasonable or useful in the past or are even useful nowadays. For example, certain snakes or spiders can be poisonous and therefore dangerous, while other animals might carry illnesses. The fear of certain animals might be genetic which is what professionals call ‘preparedness’. Even a few months old toddlers react with enlarged pupils when shown pictures of spiders whereas pictures of flowers in the same color do not have the same effect.

How do phobias develop?

Often, traumatic past experiences play a role. Many people with phobias describe a specific experience that has elicited the phobia. In addition, phobias can be transmitted through stories, films, and the behaviour of parents.

How many people do have phobias?

More than 10% suffer from phobias, according to studies significantly more women than men. Among the animal phobias, the fear of spiders is the most frequent, occurring in about 5.6% of women and 1.2% of men.

How do phobias affect everyday life?

People with phobias do their best to avoid the animal (or situation) they are phobic about. This can be quite significant and influence people’s lives to the point of, for example, not being able to go swimming for fear of water snakes lurking in the water. These behaviours of avoidance actually increase the intensity of the phobia.

Do phobias disappear with time?

No, they don’t. Even if the animal is avoided, the phobia often remains for a lifetime and determines the person’s experience of living.

What can be done about phobias?

There are different kinds of treatments that people suggest: from exposition therapy to psychotherapy using neurolinguistic programming.

What are the chances of a phobia getting healed?

It is important to differentiate between a natural fear and a phobic response. We want to remain responsible and prepared for the potential danger a poisonous snake might offer but the aim is to resolve the unrealistic fear or phobia that impedes the experience of life.

If you’d like to treat your phobia make an appointment today.

Image Credit: Photo by Flash Dantz on Unsplash

Filed Under: trauma, emotions/feelings, nervous system, stress Tagged With: fear, phobia, stress, trauma

We Must Learn to Look at Grief, Even When We Want to Run Away by Dr Puri

February 24, 2022 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

Must read article

It just seemed that the writer speaks grief and healing language with the absolute same tonality as I do. Here is what she wrote:

Can we instead move forward with grief? Can we find a way to integrate loss into life, to carry it with us? Can we feel tragedy together, without an artificial line between those who are ready to move on and those who can’t see a way out?

Dr. Sunita Puri

If you have read my article on our collective grief, The Pandemic of Grief and Loss, stating that we all have more in common than we might like to think.

Grief has been moved into the center

To some degree, I’m grateful to the pandemic for having moved ‘dealing with grief’ into the front, right, and center of people’s lives, a necessary human experience that has been and is so overlooked until we are forced to deal with it sooner or later in every human being’s life.

Many of my client’s challenges are how people are dealing with them, some of which you might be very familiar with: avoiding them by crossing the street, avoiding talking to them, giving them time alone to grieve (usually far too much), or simply by not mentioning the loved one’s name.

Has this changed since grief has moved into the center stage? I do hope so.

Article link:

We Must Learn to Look at Grief, Even When We Want to Run Away, by Dr. Sunita Puri.

Photo by Mulyadi on Unsplash

Filed Under: grief/loss, pandemie, trauma Tagged With: covid, grief, pandemic grief, sunita puri

The Pandemic of Grief and Loss

February 14, 2022 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

You and I are not as different as it might seem…

I will never forget my father’s first words on January 19th, 2012 as I finally reached him: ‘You have got to be strong now.’

I knew what he was going to say next and I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want it to become the reality we had been dreading: My mother was dead.

It was only 4,5 months after my daughters were born and the younger twin had died 3 days after birth.

By now, you might be wondering why I started this post with the statement above. Hear me out…

Have you been touched by loss?

In the past 2 years as we all dealt with the worldwide effects of a pandemic, a situation no one would have or could have imagined, we have all been touched by loss in one way or another.

From letting go of personal freedom to move to no longer being able to meet and be close with people, from losing loved ones, through separation of space, different views, ideas, or all the way to loved ones who died from Covid.

Loss upon loss

The losses that we all had to deal with or face, in one way or another, have made grief an experience closer than we might even fully realize.

  • loss of people through death
  • loss of personal freedom
  • loss of health
  • loss of income, job, career
  • loss of closeness and intimacy
  • loss of friendships
  • loss of freedom of choice
  • loss of ease with which we decided to go about our lives
  • loss of relationships
  • loss of humanity
  • loss of unity
  • loss of individuality
  • loss of trust in self, in others, in society, in …
  • loss of potential
  • loss of safety
  • loss of belonging
  • loss of connection through isolation
  • loss of clarity
  • loss of individual rights

… just to name a few.

Changes and letting go

The increase of fear and worry goes side by side with the changes we all had to go through. Changes inevitably bring emotions: some changes bring relief, others fear, uncertainty, and many if not all mean letting go of what we are or have been used to.

Letting go involves grieving what no longer is. Maybe the grief is subtle, and going under the radar of your awareness. Sometimes it shows up through physical, emotional, or cognitive symptoms such as, for example, a lack of motivation.

Are there any other kinds of losses you have experienced? I’d love to add them to the list. Share them in the comments below.

Photo Credit: Photo by Amin Moshrefi on Unsplash

Filed Under: emotions/feelings, from personal experience, grief support, grief/loss, health, mental health, separation/divorce, trauma Tagged With: covid loss, loss from covid, pandemic, pandemie

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