When grieving adults support grieving children: tensions in a peer support bereavement group programme

This paper analyses the training and supervision offered to volunteers at a bereavement centre for children in the Northeast United States. Drawing on interviews with 15 former volunteers, five current volunteers, and two staff members, the analysis illustrates how the feeling rules of the organisation shape interactional dynamics during group supervision meetings, and how these organisational processes reflect broader themes in contemporary talk therapeutic culture. Volunteers at the centre were socialised to believe that their ability to support others in their grief was produced through expressing their feelings during weekly supervision meetings, although some volunteers were not interested in talking about their feelings and others wished to speak about matters that could not be held so easily within the peer support model practiced at the centre. A tension emerged in the bereavement groups as well, as the focus on talk led some volunteers to privilege verbal expressions despite the understanding that children grieve most naturally through play. This paper questions whether training and supervision of volunteers who support grieving children should best take the form of a self-help group and proposes alternative approaches to supervision that would be consistent with the goal of offering non-clinical bereavement support.