Grief is always NEAR

Grief is always NEAR – What to do When Clients are Grieving

By Susan Zimmerman, ChFC, CLU, LMFT

With the aging population, it’s not just long term care insurance and Medicare Part D with which our clients are struggling. Many people are facing the death of a loved one for the first time in their lives.

Baby boomers have often been educated to achieve and succeed. Set goals that are specific, measurable, tracked, and take the steps needed to accomplish the goal within a clearly defined time-frame. Success is a wonderful thing but it can leave people with a false sense of control. This can actually work against them emotionally in times of significant personal loss. Grief emotions are foreign, frightening, and unpredictable.

Because successful advisors work with goal-oriented people, the focus is primarily on the monetary part of their success and financially planning to preserve that component. But what happens emotionally when a client loses a loved one? How do we communicate in times like that when neither feels naturally equipped or therapeutically trained to talk about the emotional excursion of bereavement? 

I am grateful for the therapy training that helped me become more comfortable when others share their emotional pain. As an advisor, it helps me find words that comfort, while asking therapeutic questions to help my clients move forward with their highest priority matters.

You don’t have to BE a therapist to listen like one. Knowing the basic stages of grief can also be tremendously helpful when your client is grieving. The easiest way I have found to help advisors remember them is using the acronym NEAR:

• Numbness is part of the shock in the early stages of grief. There is often an intellectual grasp of the loss, but the full emotional load is not yet felt.

• Emotions of many depths and dimensions can become nearly overwhelming in their intensity. Often the bereaved feel angry, guilty, lonely, and afraid. The sheer lack of familiarity with such feelings can heighten the fear that they are going crazy. The ability to make decisions is diminished. But emotions like this are normal.

• Acceptance occurs over time, especially with people who pursue healthy avenues of expressing their sense of loss and ways to focus on their remaining strengths to function in a changed life.

• Rebuilding is when life has incorporated the changes brought on by their loss into a new structure.

We and other advisors now give clients the book Rays of Hope in Times of Loss: Courage and Comfort for Grieving Hearts. I wrote it to help people at all phases of the grief process, offering beauty with simplicity and meaningful tools for navigating through the unfamiliar terrain of grief. You can simply say, “Please accept this as my gift and expression of deepest sympathy.” This alone opens up a meaningful dialog. Tera Wiggins, CFP, ChFC, CLU, a financial advisor in

Alabama

said, “Everyone loves the book. We have been giving it to hurricane Katrina relief victims as well as clients in times of loss. It’s a perfect gift to give to someone who is grieving a loss.” Our primary job is to listen, and if the client is in the emotional phase, keep the essential financial transactions as simple as possible, with a suggestion about what parts can wait. Your client will appreciate your patience, sensitivity, and prioritization, and will welcome hearing from you again.