“One way or another, they are going to have feelings about what has happened.”
Dr. Mayhew said that “there is no prescription about how to grieve, how to react, or how long the feelings should last. What is important for students is to support each other.”
She believes a single meeting with a group, for sixty to ninety minutes, should be satisfactory, with the caveat that she is available for any student who calls on her.
For her first assignment yesterday morning, while the rest of the Westside was waking up, Dr. Mayhew arrived at her seventh-floor office on San Vicente Boulevard to assess the difficulties likely to affect Turning Point’s student body.
“Everyone’s reaction will be different,” she said. “Their responses will depend on their history, their relationship with the incident, whether they were there or they weren’t there, whether they were close to the teacher or not close to her, and, in the case of students, their ages.”
Twenty-four-year-old physical education teacher Carrie Phillips of Santa Monica was killed Wednesday afternoon when a car piloted by a feuding couple jumped a sidewalk on National Boulevard, struck and crushed her. Eight of the fifteen students she was escorting back to campus from Syd Kronenthal Park also were injured.
The couple whom police said were in the death car, the driver Laura Samayoa, twenty, and her boyfriend, Renaldo Cruz, are being held in County Jail on $400,000 bail apiece. Formal charges are expected to be filed on Monday by the County District Attorney.
One pending determination is the weight of alleged guilt by each party.
The Rise of Grief Counseling
In the last twenty-five years, grief counseling steadily has risen in stature in American society.
Invariably throughout the 1990s and down to today, when schools have been confronted by particularly horrific tragedies, it has become axiomatic for administrators to summon grief counselors as the opening step toward recovery.
They may not be contacted before parents, but it is a close call.
In school settings, therapists say, if subtle and nuanced differences are misread, they can lead to unintended circumstances.
“When you are talking about grief counseling and trauma counseling,” Dr. Mayhew said, “you need to ask whether they are necessary or whether you are talking about just insuring sufficient support.
“There is a soft boundary between good support and supportive counseling. It’s often helpful to do a debriefing. Counselors usually do that so students are able to talk about it initially in some kind of arranged way.
“Hopefully that will give them an opportunity to begin to open up and permit themselves to have a grieving process.”
When Dr. Mayhew addressed the value of group therapy, contrasted with individual treatment, she stressed the fragility and perils of narrow distinctions.
“”You need to remember,” she said, “that this therapy can either facilitate or hinder. It is a very individual matter.
“It can facilitate in the sense that hearing other people talk about their experiences often is stimulating. For teenagers, this is an especially good venue.
“On the other hand, for some people, hearing about something too traumatic can be overwhelming. They would walk away from the group carrying secondary trauma because they had heard too much for their circumstances. That is more the exception, though, than the rule.”
The success of group therapy, ironically, seems to hinge on individual results.
How Boys and Girls Grieve
Dr. Mayhew, who has counseled groups, said that when she looks into a sea of faces, she wants to convince every person that he or she can and should participate.
“In leading a group,” she said, “since the focus is on everybody and not just one person, you try to get people to interact. You want to create an atmosphere where everyone feels safe joining in.
“By comparison, an individual treatment allows a therapist to go into more depth, really opening up a whole range of potential reactions with much more detail.”
Is there a difference between the way boys grieve/respond and how girls handle it?
“They might respond differently, but not necessarily,” Dr. Mayhew said. “There would not be any difference in my message. I kind of hold the field open. I have seen girls who keep a stiff upper lip and boys who are very much in touch with their feelings.”
In the case of Turning Point, a kindergarten through eighth grade school, the Brentwood therapist would divide them into three age groups: kindergarten-second grade, third through the fifth grade, and sixth through the eighth.
“The nature of death is a little complex for the young ones,” Dr. Mayhew said. “Most important for them would be for their parents to know how to provide support and help them.
“For all children, rituals can be helpful, like writing memorial pages and drawing pictures. It can be helpful to draw pictures of the trauma.
“They could draw pictures of what happened or perhaps a picture of a good memory of the teacher.”
Students should not be embarrassed about their reactions, Dr. Mayhew said. The length and breadth of their feelings transcend time. This is one of the rare areas of life where right and wrong scarcely are in evidence.