NASW Social Work Talks - EP69: Superheroes and Grief

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

We speak with Dr. Jill Harrington, DSW, LCSW, creator and co-editor of "Superhero Grief: The Transformative Power of Loss," which provides practical ideas for promoting healing through modern superhero stories.

From the National Association of Social Workers, I'm Aaliyah Wright, and this is Social Work Talks. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode, which focuses on superhero grief, the transformative power of loss, which is also the title of a book created and edited by NASW member Dr. Jill Harrington. Dr. Harrington is a social worker and adjunct professor who has a clinical practice in the Washington, D.C. area. She is a thanatologist, clinician, researcher, and educator who specializes in traumatic bereavement. Dr. Harrington and Robert Niemeyer enlisted a league of authors to enlarge our view of bereavement through the prison of contemporary superheroes. welcome dr. Harrington hello welcome thanks for having me tell us first about why you became a

social worker what you do and how you came to create this book so I've been a social worker with my MSW for over 20 years but I think it's a little bit in the genes and also has a lot to do with my superhero parents and you know how they model the life of service I had a father who is a first responder, my mother, who was often very rooted in charity and social services, particularly for underserved women. She was not just a giver, she was a doer. So I grew up in a home that really valued service. When it came time for me to kind of get into a profession, my mother was a hospital administrator. And so I got to hang out sometimes with her colleagues. And she had a great colleague who's become a lifelong friend of mine and senior mentor,

Dr. Bob Sabaka. He was a social worker. I was one of the coolest people. When I go visit my mom at the hospital where she worked, he was one of the coolest people I ever met. I can like talk to him about anything, you know? So I think I was sort of raised with these qualities of service and justice and advocacy. And then when it came time for me to really go into a profession after I graduated college, because I, I, my undergraduate degree was in psychology. My boyfriend at the time. His mother, who is very beloved to me, she was like a second mother to me, unfortunately got diagnosed with pretty advanced stage breast cancer. And I started volunteering and working for some cancer organizations right out of college. And then it became more than just

volunteering. It became then employment. And I started working for a couple of cancer organizations, one of them being the American Cancer Society. And it was there that I met these folks who are oncology social workers. And I was like, wow, there's actually, you can work helping folks with cancer in social work. And really it was through oncology social work that opened that gateway to social work for me. I went back, I got my MSW. I did a lot of advocacy work. I finished my MSW at Adelphi University. And I think for 14 years, about 14 years, I did a lot of oncology related work. So I did a lot of internships in family violence and trauma and bereavement. And then after 9-11, I was living in New York at the time. I was working for an

agency there doing a lot of the intersection of grief and trauma work. Anyone that had any bereavement related experience, kind of a call to action. So there was a lot of on the job training there in terms of violent death loss. So my career kind of took a shift and I decided to pursue my doctorate in social work for myself to elevate my scholarship and training in the field and also to make an impact on the next generation of social workers. I've been able to work in non-profit organizations. I've been able to do therapy with people. I've worked in hospitals. I've done research. I just think that social work itself, the general MSW, gives you such a tremendous background and capability. It opens up, I think, a lot of windows and opportunities.

I'm a big superhero fan. Growing up in New York in the 70s, my dad actually went to DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. This is where Stan Lee and people like Bob Kane, Stan Lee, who was part of Marvel Comics or the creator of Marvel Comics and Bob Kane who was the co-creator of Batman where they went to high school so I also grew up in that era where you had about three channels on the television not like today where you can watch TV 24-7 and you know after after school you had about an hour between the last soap opera and the the well maybe one or two hours between three to five o'clock in the evening news. So you had your choices of Wonder Woman or Batman or Underdog. And certainly on a Saturday morning, at least in my household, you worked really hard to be

able to watch Saturday morning cartoons. I love superheroes, but a superhero came into my life when my sister, my only sister, my older sister, we were about the ages of 12 and 14. We're about two years apart. My sister had been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness that almost took her life and she had been hospitalized and she was very, very, very ill. And I wasn't able to see her because at the time you had to be 16 or older to visit. And we were both in just these really terrible and distressing and sad times. And my mom, who I just told you had worked in a medical practice, had a woman that she worked with who was one of her co-workers, Doris. And Doris came to my mom one day and said, you know, my brother was in town and I was telling

him about what your girls are going through right now. He's a cartoon artist and he wanted to draw something for them to kind of give them a little bit of hope and just say, you know, hang in there and show a little compassion and kindness. And she hands my mom these pictures. They're hand-drawn pictures of Batman and Robin and Catwoman from Bob Kane. And Bob Kane, who was the co-creator and artist of Batman. Growing up, again, in New York, I was born in Queens. I love Spider-Man.

Captain America is from Brooklyn. And Batman, of course, is the superhero of New York, Gotham, which is a metaphor for new york city i just at that time that really that act of just pure kindness first of all her kind of coming out of the shadows from her secret identity to tell my mom like hey i have this brother who you would never know this about this very lovely and humble woman and then for him just to do that on his own accord um for me really just emboldened the the kind, the superpower of kindness, kindness. Oh, so let's talk about how you came to create this book. The book idea came about around in 2009 when I was at the Association for Death

Education and Counseling, which I'm also a member of, which is a home for thanatologists and those of us in the field of death, dying and bereavement. I had used superheroes being coming from the oncology world, superheroes were quite often used in illness and with life-threatening diseases, as well as in bereavement, oftentimes in bereavement camps. You can see the superhero theme sometimes in therapy, using examples, those archetypes of strength, those archetypes of hope. So how I came to create the book was in 2009, I was sitting with Dr. Kathy Shear at the Association for Deaf Education and Counseling. And throughout my career in social work, working with those with life-threatening illnesses and the dying and the bereaved, I often use the interwoven. And a lot of my colleagues of mine, the use of superhero psychology is not something that's really new.

it's been being used for many many many years in the psychology field and often we see it in the field of death dying and bereavement but there's the no real systematic approach by those who are esteemed authors or i would say experts in the field that came to really look at superheroes through the lens of particularly i'm not going to say grief and loss because grief is a reaction to loss. Bereavement is the process a person goes through after a death loss of someone they love or they care about. And so there's never really been a systematic way in which these authors who are amazing superheroes in their field in death, dying, and bereavement, have used the superheroes and the narratives to illuminate some of the

practices and principles and also possibly creative interventions to really look at the narratives, to use them as the lens to either teach that ontology principles or theories or practices. Whenever I watch these movies, because most of them, most of the backstories are rooted in, and a lot of people like to throw around the word trauma, there's all sorts of trauma. And the trauma that's central to most superhero origins is the traumatic death loss of a family member. I mean, Deadpool 2 kind of says this in the movie Deadpool 2, that every great family movie begins with a vicious murder. Most superheroes, their process is really that

rooted in bereavement. Well, let's talk about that for a minute, because you mentioned Deadpool. Let's talk about Batman, Deadpool, the Avengers, and the hosts of other iconic superheroes. Most of the stories we read as children, from Bambi and the Jungle Book, and Batman to Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, the Black Panther, and beyond, superheroes are all dealing with the loss of a parent or a parental figure. And what we're actually witnessing in these tales is how they each grapple with grief even as they're rescuing others can you talk a little bit about that part of this book is about better understanding increasing our competency our skills and our knowledge about what is grief and they're not necessarily grappling with grief what they're

grappling with is bereavement which is grief related to death loss most of them are significantly bereaved while still doing their jobs. The mythology that surrounds grief and death has existed in various forms recorded throughout human history. And in almost every ancient civilization, death has been represented by a deity or a form. And our current superheroes are that current day archetypal figure that represent the human struggle. All of them struggle with death, loss, and vulnerability. And in each one of their backstories, death presents itself as both as a tragedy and an opportunity for transformation. So most of our superheroes that are grappling with bereavement, the real superpower is that many of these superheroes

show us the vulnerability that, in fact, there's vulnerability and grief. We could be both fragile and strong that even with all the most the physical strength and their special powers they can't be erased from pain and suffering and that there are these decisional moments in which their backstories are so set up for them to be the villain and oftentimes they walk that path and like us their stories are about those huge real human struggles that they grapple with pain and profound loss this is the hero's journey I mean they're stripped down to their base they're complex and thawed and they're full of pain but how do they rise I mean it's not easy it doesn't it never gets fixed grief isn't like bereavement it's not like a cold where you just kind of

move through it and it's done and gone it's chronic pain the pain of loss which is really love and how we manage that pain and integrate that pain and transform it so as the world handles so much loss. Tell us how the bereaved and social workers can use this book. For those who are bereaved, I think that this is an approachable and relatable way to get in touch with their grief. I mean, it also has cross-generational appeal and cross-cultural appeal. Film provides us a real powerful medium, an artistic medium to see some of ourselves, examples of ourselves. So when we see that the superhero struggles with the pain of loss and the complexities that go with it we can see part of ourselves so the and those who are bereaved also they give us the book i think

gives us opportunity to um learn about themselves and what they're experiencing through the stories of the superheroes and even in the clinical chapters i recently had a client who had read the book and said, you know, I wasn't, I couldn't put a word to what I was feeling. And I read the chapter on secondary losses. And these chapters are very short. And she goes, you know, I'm a newly bereaved widow. And I really didn't realize how many other losses, what we call secondary losses, I couldn't put a name around it. And the book really helped me put a name around it. I think that they can also learn about post-traumatic growth and transformative grief through the personal stories of the bereaved that are in the book,

many of them who were suddenly and violently bereaved. I think the stories provide thoughtful insights on each of the five factors of post-traumatic growth and their own sense-making and hero's journey with profound pain and loss and giving those personal examples to people of people who have been there, who have really journeyed in that boat. um i think it's really important especially because the book addresses the intersection of death and trauma so what is thanatology okay thanatology is the study of what is inevitable which death is a part of life and holding true to thor's observation in avengers endgame that

nothing lasts forever the only thing that is permanent in life is impermanence so the field of thanatology really dates back to greek times we kind of always as great in civilization since ancient time have wanted to try to understand death and we've often emboldened it with a deity or some form that's readily recognizable and understood and the word thanatos is greek for the the god of death thanatos who was the son of nyx knights in chronos time and back in I say the turn of the century, the early turn of the 20th century, a Russian zoologist named Mikhanov, who really was known for his work in immunology, proposed two new areas of scientific investigation. And the two were thanatology and gerontology. Gerontology took off, but like Thanos,

who's not a much like God in the universe, the Marvel universe, thanatology really didn't take off because in we were living now in this death denying society in pre-modern times um death was really viewed as a part of life and with uh the industrial level revolution and people kind of relocating death and dying um from the home into hospitals and other places um we became more of a death denying society and especially with medical advances which are great um but at the same time And death was not really, it was pushed away and not really viewed as part of life. So the field of thanatology really didn't gain broad acceptance until around the 1950s or 60s. And basically, thanatology includes researchers and educators and practitioners who investigate all aspects of death, all aspects of death.

So that could be clinicians, that could be those who work in hospice, those could be researchers. So really, their focus is how death, the investigation of death, and the impact it has on the living. Listeners, we'll be right back. NASW Press is the leading scholarly press in the social sciences. Our publications reach faculty, practitioners, agencies, and researchers in social work and related disciplines. Visit naswpress.org for scholarly books, reference works, brochures, and periodicals. And we're back. Dr. Jill, can you tell us, as you were editing this groundbreaking book, what were some of the themes you saw that you feel readers will find most impactful?

One of the takeaways we have from today's conversation is that the study of death, loss, grief, and bereavement is really a specialty field, but yet there's a lot of people who armchair quarterback it or don't have the skills or the competency in it and really subscribe to a lot of old non-modern grief theory. So using superheroes to understand postmodern grief theory, like the dual process model, multicultural models, you know, most of our grief support is rooted in really deep systematic biases, beginning with Freud's claims that we need to talk about our grief with therapists and Kubler-Ross's stage model that said you had to go through, you know, she studied the dying and we took that and applied it to the bereave. And so a

lot of our early cultural understandings also kind of give meaning to grief and how people cope with grief on observations from a white middle-class culture and people over the age of 55. So my hope is that the book will bring a multicultural viewpoint and also some justice to the lens of grief that we need to look at how people adapt to loss from a multicultural informed viewpoint and understanding types of grief. With superhero case examples, we can look at this multicultural perspective from the multiverses and multidimensional funeral rites, rituals. I'm hoping that the book will help people with using superheroes to understand

postmodern grief theory, things like continuing bonds theory, the dual process model, understanding grieving styles, styles, attachment-informed grief. So like I said, skills, competency, and practices in thanontology, which is a specialized field. Understanding types of grief. What is ambiguous loss? What are secondary losses? What's anticipatory grief? So helping to help increase that knowledge and understanding. Grief in the family systems. You know, one of my favorite chapters in the book is about Thor and the death of Loki. How our relationships with members of a family can influence how we grieve. Challenges in bereavement, you know, bereavement is not

unnatural. It's not pathological. We've certainly gotten away from that, and there's still a lot of judgment and stigmatization of the bereaved and misunderstanding, but responses and grief can be dangerous, and they can impair our ability to adapt. Learning about post-traumatic growth and the five factors and stories from the bereaved. Also, leadership. What is grief leadership, especially these days, what encompasses grief leadership. There's a beautiful chapter written in the book by my great friend and colleague, Joyelle Mulheron, who brings a call to action through her organization, Evermore, that she is trying to create a national standards on bereavement care

to change our government's policies on the care of the bereaved. And also, I hope the book helps people find superheroes all around us, how we can be a hero to the bereaved, how we can better understand the bereaved. Like I said, the bereaved have been stigmatized, misunderstood, and again, a lot of jargon thrown around and medicalized for bereavement. People want to fix it right away. People don't really understand it. And how we can be a hero. I helped bring this league of heroes, what I call all the thanatologists from around the world, really, this is an edited volume, because 75% of the people who wrote for this book really didn't understand the superheroes. I developed each of these chapters

and assigned them the movies to watch because they wrote about it through the lens about which their research, support, or clinical work with them. So how we can find heroes all around us while grieving too are supports. I think that's really important lessons and takeaways I'd like for people to have from the book. With so many of us being isolated from each other, let's chat briefly about how this book can help those dealing with self-care, especially since many of us are at home and we're unable to engage in the kinds of self-care activities we would have in the past. I want to speak to social workers directly. Social workers, we talk about self-care, but we're probably the worst at it. I had to have a social work colleague last night remind me that I needed

to get to bed early because i had this podcast today um because there's so much you know there's so much need out there what we can learn from this book especially in these times is that as our grief is amplified we need to amplify our own self-care we need to find either find new superpowers um find new ways of coping one of the things i've done recently is i started engaging in more meditation practice and really making time and space for myself to do that. We need to be superheroes to ourselves. We've donned the cape so many times for others. And there's so much anxiety and compassion fatigue, uncertainty and death. And those of us who are called to serve, it really pulls at us. It really gives us conflict, wanting to be there for others,

but having to need there to be there for ourselves. And we often see this with superheroes. You know, we saw when Tony Stark in Avengers Infinity Wars, you know, he was just so burnt out that he couldn't function anymore. And Batman's always at his worst when he's super burnt out. You know, be a superhero to a colleague or a friend. Reach out to them. Ask them, are you getting enough rest for yourself? Is there anything I do, even though I can't be with you, is there any way we can connect? These are some of the things that are helping me cope, how to give myself space.

Give yourself space. Give yourself some time. And that's not always easy. Take a breath. Put a mask on. Go outside if you can. Take a breath. Remove yourself from your work. Set limits and boundaries for yourself. It's easy if you're working at home to basically sit at this computer all day long and interface and not set some boundaries around it. Have a start time and a stop time. I think it's really important, the journey of the superhero. We see this, Captain America is very, he's very good at this, really setting up groups for others. His friend Sam Falcon reminds him, he goes running with him and he says, I'm on your left. and we see in Avengers Endgame as Black Widow keeps operating in a degraded, ineffective state and she throws herself into her work while Captain America kind of pulls back and is more reflective and takes care of himself and his team. But we need to be like Superman once in a while and go into our fortress of solitude and work things out for ourselves. So again, I think as the grief and

the loss is amplifying, we need to find ways to be superheroes to ourselves and amplify our own self-care, which is a lot easier said than done. One of my favorite chapters in the book is finding superheroes all around us. And you write that heroes for the dying and bereaved also come in many other forms using varying superpowers and abilities. And then you have here the power of kindness, the power of intuitiveness, the power of thoughtfulness. Talk about some of these other powers that people may not think of as superpowers, but they really are. Superpowers don't have to be mind, you know, shape-shifting or all powerful or super even. I work with a mom recently whose son died by suicide and her ability from a strengths perspective, her ability to get

out of bed and brush her teeth and comb her hair and come attend a therapy session with me on the computer and never meeting me in person and come to me at her most vulnerable and broken place in life, I acknowledge that, just the strength to get out of bed. So I think it's really important to acknowledge really things that we might not recognize as we think of strength as being super strength. And sometimes being able to get up out of bed with the thousand pound elephant of grief on your chest after just losing a child, the strength in getting up alone and surviving the day and keeping your head above water is exceptionally important. The strength to be able just to focus on work, maybe after your bereavement leave is over and you go back to work a couple of

weeks later. Maybe it's the strength of being able to go to the grocery store for the first time and being afraid that you might be confronted with somebody and you might burst out into tears. Maybe it's the strength to be able to reach across the aisle with a family member because death gives us an opportunity to extend forgiveness to people or work out a lot of unfinished business or complicated business. So maybe acknowledging those strengths. I think, you know, acknowledging heroic acts come both in their large and small. And I think that especially with the dying and the bereaved, things like the superpower of understanding. I remember after when my own father died, I inherited his motorcycle, and it took me a long time to just bring myself to go to the motor vehicles and have the registration changed. And I was standing at the counter, and I was super flustered, and I got up there, and the clerk, she could see that I was disoriented and reaching for papers and very upset. and she was just extremely patient and kind with me and actually said to me I'm really sorry when she saw it was for my deceased father's father's motorcycle I'm really sorry for your loss that was

so powerful she didn't have to say that she could have just stamped my paperwork and said all right next next number so it's extending that bit of kindness and compassion and understanding I think our amazing superpowers, especially when people are in immense pain. Why do you think grief education and training, particularly in bereavement, is important? Well, like I said before, most of our understanding of grief and bereavement really comes from the study of Freudian psychology who told us that we needed to de-cacect ourselves from the deceased and these old ingrained social concepts, and also not from a multicultural viewpoint. Because even though people treat grief like the common cold, and it's natural and universal to all humankind, but it is the most

distressing of all human experiences. And it comes with a lot of pain and a lot of distress. And some people need skilled intervention. And unfortunately, counselors and psychologists and mental health, A lot of people say they treat grief, but they're also very dismissive of it. They overstep their bounds on their knowledge and their skills, especially when it comes to the intersection of trauma and bereavement, which is really a specialty field. I'm seeing some more in schools of social work programs having classes on grief and loss. But again, I think they teach more about natural death versus unnatural death. In terms of our social work ethics of competency, I think that, you know, our first frame of reference is to do no harm. And there's so much stigmatization and misunderstanding on grief. I recently saw an article that was the new show WandaVision, which I've been following, which really just focuses a lot on the character's grief. I saw an article written by some psychologists and saying her grief was complicated grief, which is, again, people throwing around these terms with not really knowing it.

That's not clinically accurate or diagnostically accurate. It's a complete misrepresentation about what complicated grief is. Just because grief might be complicated doesn't mean it's complicated grief. So grief is complicated when those persistent acute grief symptoms, that inability to really come to accept all the realities of the loss, the rumination, the intensity of the grief for years to come feels like the day one, two, and three after that person you loved died. It somehow impairs an ability to naturally adapt to the loss. And there are many influences in grief that can lead to complicated grief. But just because there's complications in grief doesn't mean that it's what is called complicated grief. So prolonged grief disorder includes a tendency to blame oneself or others for a loved one's death.

We do see this as a process that suicide survivors go through. So suicide survivors are often much more at risk for complicated grief, but that doesn't mean they necessarily will have complicated grief in years to come. When someone dies by suicide, often self-blame or perceived responsibility of the death is something that survivors, is a prominent theme with them. so oftentimes we accompany the survivor on that journey of trying to find a bearable narrative and to work through some of those issues of self-blame and self-responsibility so yeah it can lead to be a risk factor for complicated grief and so an understanding of suicide grief would let us know that suicide grief is confusing it's complicated it doesn't mean it's going to lead to complicated grief, but sure, it's a risk factor. Excessive avoidance of

places or situations that remind one of the deceased, and excessive avoidance. And this usually, and social withdrawal, survivor's guilt, for years and years and years, that impairs a person's ability to function. This is when you're starting to see these symptoms persist for a year or more after the death. So by definition, WandaVision, Vision's been dead for about nine days. We wouldn't, by any, anybody who's trained in complicated grief wouldn't be slapping on the complicated grief diagnosis on her. Complicated grief is grief that has something complicating the natural ability for a person to adapt to their loss. But again, it's not instantly. And I'm watching WandaVision now, too. And from your perspective, how are they handling her processing of the death of Vision?

I think they're doing a beautiful job by showing how one of the things Bill Worden says is, Dr. Worden, who wrote the book on grief therapy and grief counseling, is that they're influencing factors. So homicide bereavement. She's definitely a survivor of those who've died by homicide in her life. And, you know, after Vision died, what we see beautifully here is her wanting the dual process model of wanting to push out the reality of his death and kind of the avoidance of it. But then being poked in by reality, people from S.W.O.R.D. keep coming in and especially Monica Rambeau. But Monica Rambeau is trying to connect while other people are judging her anger and they're angry with her or they're trying to pull her out of this reality. Monica's in there trying to connect with her because Monica lost her mom saying, I get it. I understand you. So there's a lot of judgment and anger toward her grief and not understanding her anger at losing vision and her whole world.

So I think that they're really constructing a beautiful sort of narrative to explore spousal bereavement or the death of a spouse or the death of a partner and how this wanting to avoid, this is part of the natural process people go through. now it doesn't mean it can't be dangerous so separation distress is often the hallmark of acute bereavement when we lose someone we love just like in early days when we learn how to attach to people because attachment is really about survival and it's rooted in love we protest losing you know the first time we're separated from our caregiver we protest that separation and so if we have a secure attachment style we will be able to work through the pain and relocate the deceased somewhere in our lives. But right now, I think what they're showing is a lot of her separation distress, and the anger and the protest. And wouldn't we, and she had to basically

kill Vision to save the universe, and then have to watch him get killed again, and have everybody in her life killed. She's angry. As a therapist, if I was able to kind of meet with her and talk to her and join with her, we would definitely normalize that. But how she's acting on it, these are the things that can become dangerous for people, but I wouldn't pathologize it for her at all. How somebody dies, when somebody dies in our life, if there's trauma associated with the death, and trauma doesn't necessarily mean that the death has to be sudden and violent. There could be trauma right now. We're seeing this with people who have COVID-19 in their family members. There's relational trauma that's going on there. The trauma of separation, of not

being able to be with their family members where they're dying, a lot of unfinished business. Dr. Jill, thank you so much for joining us. And listeners, you can find details about the resources we've discussed and Where to Buy Superhero Grief, The Transformative Power of Loss, edited by Jill Harrington and Robert Niemeyer in the show notes on our website. Thank you so much. We appreciate it. All right. Thank you. Have a good day. All right. You too. You have been listening to NASW Social Work Talks, a production of the National Association of Social Workers. We encourage you to visit NASW's website for more information about our

efforts to enhance the professional growth and development of our members, to create and maintain professional standards, and to advance sound social policies. You can learn more at www.socialworkers.org. And don't forget to subscribe to NASW Social Work Talks wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for joining us. We look forward to seeing you next episode.