Natascha, psychologist at Promir centre, (please look also here)

»At the very moment of the trauma, a dissociation happens inside the child. The child pushes the incident away from himself and refuses to talk about it - it's a kind of psychological help that saves the child in this situation.
If a child understands, it will talk about it without prompting; we don't have to push it there with intent. We just have to wait and create the conditions that the child accepts the incident.
It is most important to always bring the children back to reality, for example the mother is not here and it's better to go to the place where she is buried. After the trauma the child lives in a fantasy world and imagines the mother to be somewhere else or to be not far away. Our task is to help the parents and children to accept reality.
Mourning processes take a long time, at least one year, often longer. This work is a very solitary and detailed work.
I had the case of a client in the clinical practice who told me that he could not cry because a priest advised him not to. The priest had told him that the crying was bad for the deceased and would bind them to the earth and prevent them from going to heaven. As a psychologist, however, I know that the mourning process can't take place if people are not allowed to cry. Crying is a normal reaction and if someone has the need to cry, you should let him. Otherwise, people close themselves, they become like a stone, feel uncomfortable and react insensibly. The effort not to express the pain, but to suppress it, makes everything worse. If a person cries it usually accepts the situation and what has happened. Crying is as if the person moves through the incident once again. At some point, the client accepted my position and not that of the priest and was able to cry.
I don't want to compete with the church concerning my work, but I try to suggest to the client only things that help him. The people have to make choices finally by themselves.
When a child loses a person, each child finds itself in a situation of fear, loneliness and a lack of understanding. Our task is to create a safe environment for the child at least once a week. In all the stages, where we accompany children in a one-year therapy, it's important to have such safe rooms. And it is necessary to always work with the child's relatives, because there are other persons in the kinship and neighbourhood that can take care of the child. Other persons present a different sense of security to the child than the own mother or father.
The child can show unprepared reactions to other people, for example aggression, stubbornness, passivity or crying. The child tries to test the other person with reactions like that to check whether the person supports or helps the child in the respective situation.
Our task is to explain, to support and to help the children to prepare them to go their own way.
Mourning is a kind of acceptance of the incident, that means if we recognize that the child is mourning, then we know that the child succeeded in leaving the most difficult phase behind.
Furthermore, it's decisive that a child can not find self-confidence if it is surrounded by adults without any self-confidence, because these persons will just pass on their uncertainty to the children.«

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