Grief Counseling in a Natural Setting | Kaili Van Waveren of ThorpeWood

I think that for people who are concerned with the climate and biodiversity crises, there are a lot of intense emotions that come up, whether that's anger or despair, hopelessness, anxiety. These emotions can be really overwhelming and I think that they can be paralyzing. People can feel so overwhelmed by them that they feel any action they could take is insignificant because the problem is so huge. Or they can get sort of mired in those negative emotions in a way that is damaging to their well being. And ultimately, to make any impact, we need people who can stay in the game, so to speak. And I think that part of that is helping people to develop distress tolerance skills and emotion regulation techniques that work for them. The more we engage in this work and the further we get into the crisis, the harder it's going to be, I think, to stay in the game.

Welcome to the Mental Health Entrepreneur Podcast. We are here to inspire creative ideas and connections for entrepreneurs and advocates working to address our mental health crisis. As you listen, I hope you will experience new ideas and motivation to innovate in your business, your community and in your life. Welcome everyone to the Mental Health Entrepreneur Podcast. I am your host, Rachel Harrison, and with me today is Kylie Van Waveren. She's the executive director of Thorpe Wood, which is a property and farm that nurtures farm therapeutic relationships with our natural world to promote empathy, wonder and restoration. Kylie, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me, Rachel.

So let's dig in a little bit to Thorpwood. How did Thorpwood get started? What is kind of the mission? What is the goal of this property and the people who work on it?

Thorpwood got started back in 2001 and it's undergone multiple evolutions since then. Thorpwood initially was set up through a charitable trust and the goal was to really serve the community at no cost through the natural resources we have available to us here. And for the first decade or so that Thorpwood was operating, the focus was really on working with youth who had been involved in the juvenile justice system and providing mental health and social emotional learning opportunities for them that were nature based. And then there was sort of a change in staffing and a redirection from leadership about 10 years ago to just focus on nature education. And then the reason why I was hired actually was to return Thorpwood to its original mission. So now we're really trying to do evidence based practices to develop nature based mental health and social emotional learning programs again.

Give me an idea of who comes to Thorpwood. What does it look like when they come sure.

So we have a three pronged approach to providing service to our community. And the first is through establishing partnerships with local nonprofits to co author curricula that are tailored to the unique needs of their clients. So in our community, we work with a group called Centro Hispano that works with a lot of unaccompanied minors or English learners. We work with a program called Kids Like Us that is a support program for kids who have been impacted by substance use disorder. So whether that's having an incarcerated parent or a parent who's died from overdose, or maybe they have family member who is actively battling addiction. And we also work with our Frederick County Public Schools and a number of other groups. But the goal of these partnerships, again, is we don't know their clients, but they do. And so they can tell us what those needs are. And then with our expertise, we can craft something that addresses those needs. The second part of our programming is really warpwood created. And so it's looking directly to our community and assessing what the needs are. My scope of practice specifically is grief counseling. So a lot of what we're doing is nature based grief support. I recently hired a licensed social worker and she's sort of expanding our original program offerings beyond grief work. And then the last sort of prong of our program is our climate Grief support program. So all of these take place, at least primarily on Thorpe Wood's 156 acre property. Groups come up here or we put an invitation out to the community, say if we're doing a grief hike or something like that. And a lot of what we do also is nature education, believing that there's a symbiotic relationship between the mental health crisis and our neglect of our planet, sort of. That this connection between humans and nature has been severed, and it's resulting in both the mental health crisis and the climate and biodiversity crisis.

Okay, so kind of tackling two pretty major issues with the same treatment, if you will.

Yeah, that's the goal. And I think that's really reflected in our climate Grief program. That's a combination of a traditional grief theory lens and grief support group curriculum with opportunities for sustained activism. And so sort of doing that internal work that's required to engage in sustained external activism of some kind.

Okay, I gotta dig into that a little bit. What type of internal work do you see as required for that activism?

I think that for people who are concerned with the climate and biodiversity crises, there are a lot of intense emotions that come up, whether that's anger or despair, hopelessness, anxiety, These emotions can be really overwhelming and I think that they can be paralyzing. People can feel so overwhelmed by them that they feel any action they could take is insignificant because the problem is so huge, or they can get sort of mired in those negative emotions in a way that is damaging to their well being. And ultimately to make any impact within these crises, we need people who can stay in the game, so to speak. And I think that part of that is helping people to develop distress tolerance skills and emotion regulation techniques that work for them. Because the more we engage in this work and the further we get into the crisis, the harder it's going to be, I think, to stay in the game because there are going to be setbacks. If you look at the news on any given day, there's something disheartening around what's happening to our planet. And so we need to find ways to weather that, to feel the emotions that come up around what's happening and then to channel these emotions in a healthy way into action. So that's what's at the core of the group is, you know, how do we acknowledge first of all the emotions that come up and put a name to them. I've discovered that that's been really powerful. Just using the phrase climate grief and people having an aha. Moment of yeah, that's, that's what this is. And I'm not the only one experiencing this. And there's an opportunity for peer support within this experience. And so just validating that for people has been powerful and then helping people to learn how to sit with those emotions. So a lot of what we do is mindfulness based. It's where is this emotion showing up in your body? And then, okay, so now what? Right? And how do we continue to be checking in with ourselves as we're engaging in activism and honoring the emotional experience of that.

Wow, that sounds really powerful. And I wonder if sometimes there's resistance for people to dig into those emotions. They can be heavy to carry or feel.

I think there is resistance and I'll say that broadly speaking, so far my experience has been that the people who sign up to participate in our group, it's healing ourselves and our planet. So people who sign up, they're kind of already in a place where they're willing to engage and willing to experience these feelings. But I think inevitably all of us are more comfortable with some emotions than others. I find that a lot of folks are much more comfortable feeling angry than feeling sad. And so they'll, they'll more easily shift into Experiencing that righteous anger around what's happening. So sometimes there is a bit of encouragement needed to say, well, okay, maybe what's underneath this anger actually is grief and is sadness. Is this really hard to bear witness to?

So when people are able to connect with nature on your property, I'm wondering what kind of things you notice.

Yeah, I think it's pretty profound in many cases. And I'll use an example of a program we just concluded. It was Corpwood Ecotherapy Ventures. This was a pilot program with Frederick County Public Schools. And we had four schools participate, four middle schools, and the school counselors and school social workers were tasked with identifying 10 students from each school that had chronic absenteeism because of anxiety. Or in some cases there was also significant life change or death in the family. But anxiety was really the presenting issue. And so we had these four cohorts come up to engage in programming. And it really was in most ways sort of light touch, nature based, social, emotional learning, but with the goal of addressing anxiety and building strong coping and emotion regulation skills to build self confidence and anxiety management. And so through the program, we did a series of visits. And initially it just looked like establishing a sense of safety and comfort in a green space. We had a number of students come who maybe their frame of reference for nature was Baker park or another park in the city. And so just being in a space like Thorpwood was already huge. And being able to, over the course of our visits, not only build that sense of safety, but to help to develop a relationship with nature, broadly speaking, and with Thorpwood in particular. So with each visit, getting to know the trails better and having favorite spots on the property where they might go sit, and encouraging them to create different art things that sort of had psychoeducation built into them that could be left here, for example, the paving stones we have in our garden to really, again, instill that sense of connectedness with nature and then doing a lot of age appropriate mindfulness things. Right. So how can we be in this natural space and just tune out of our thoughts for a little bit to focus on what we're seeing or hearing or feeling on our skin? And can we take a break from our anxious thoughts or some of the emotions coming up and then maybe ease back into them? What does that look like for you? Collecting some preliminary data and getting the feedback forms from those students at the end of the program was, I mean, truly brought tears to all of our eyes on the Thorpewood staff to read statements like, thank you for accepting me, thank you for Letting me be myself or I've learned that even when things are hard, there are solutions. I've realized that I'm able to connect with other people when I'm feeling upset. These kinds of statements and the feedback we received was so powerful that Frederick County Schools actually is encouraging every middle school in the county to participate in our program next year.

That's phenomenal. And I love that frame of a relationship. So it looks different for every individual as they engage with the natural world around them. At Portwood specifically, it has to look different.

We're all different people. And so for myself, one of the ways that I've always processed difficult emotions is by just walking in the woods. I've done that since I was a child. And for me, there's so much comfort. And to have my body be moving and to be surrounded by nature, I'm able to work through emotions in a totally different way than if I'm seated somewhere inside. I think we have a number of people who process in the same way. It's one of the reasons why when we do our grief support groups here, we have 90 minutes of traditional talk based grief support followed by an hour of hiking. To be able to bring people back into sort of emotional stasis of some kind of. And then to offer that opportunity for processing. But for other people, that doesn't feel as helpful as finding a quiet, peaceful place to sit. For other people, even doing something active like fishing feels more meaningful. So it's really a privilege to be able to offer people so many options to connect with the natural world through the bounty of our property.

Mm. So what excites you about the future, about going forward, and maybe even some creative or innovative ideas that you have?

For me personally, as I mentioned, my scope of practice really is grief counseling. And it's something that I sort of stumbled into, but has been one of the great blessings of my life. I just really, as strange as it sounds, I love working with grieving people. Of course, I'm so sorry that any of us have to go through losing someone we love. But the honor of being allowed to come alongside someone as they're going through the most painful thing they've ever experienced is something that's never lost on me. And so being able to take my years of experience working in bereavement and now shift that into a natural setting is really exciting for me. I spent years working for a large healthcare system and being in a super clinical, sterile space. And so this is just radically different in every possible way. And I mentioned the Grief hikes. And we've had so much demand for these. I mean, we opened the registration and because we have two of us who are able to run these grief support groups, our registration cap is 20 people and the registration fills up in one to two hours. And we have a waiting list every month. So recognizing that demand, that need, and that desire for nature based grief support has really encouraged us to think about what else this could look like. So we're planning some different nature based grief retreats here. We actually have had a lot of requests to do something around pet loss. So I think we'll try doing a grief retreat in August. That'll be interesting to see. And sort of identifying different groups that we could offer grief retreats to just because of the shared experience and the value of peer support, I think specifically around stigmatized losses like, you know, suicide grief or overdose grief. So I feel really excited about that. But I also feel excited about the numerous opportunities that seem to be organically coming to us to be able to work with children and adolescents. And I really struggled with some mental health challenges throughout my youth and into my 20s even. And I wish that I had received this sort of education around mindfulness and nature based mental health practices when I was young, because they would have been life changing for me. I just sort of naturally gravitated towards spending time outdoors. But I believe that that's not enough. Right. And we can even look at a map of the United States for suicide rates, and you'll see that we have many more suicides in rural areas than urban ones. Just being in sort of natural settings on its own isn't enough. There should be some intention behind it. And I think that intention is really about mindful presence and engagement with nature, not just being in it.

That's a really interesting concept. I had not heard that before. You said you kind of stumbled into grief work. Can you say a little bit about that process? Sure.

It's kind of a fun story to tell. I actually used to own a business in the fashion industry, and I did wardrobe curation and personal styling with a niche in vintage couture. So, you know, vintage Chanel and Gucci and all that stuff. And it was extremely lucrative. And for a long time it was very fun. And then it started to feel really unfulfilling and even sort of morally ambiguous. And so I started to think, what's the opposite of this? And that's really how I became a grief counselor. I initially was interested in gerontology and I worked with an organization called Compassion and Choices. For years. And then I just was really encouraged to move into grief counseling and resisted initially, but just kept having these sort of serendipitous opportunities to continue on that path. And again, I'm so grateful because it's not what I would have chosen for myself specifically. But it's been so rewarding and I think it's been a good fit that I just wouldn't have anticipated.

Life sort of leads us sometimes in a direction. I like that. What would be your words of encouragement to leave with people that are maybe thinking about starting something, maybe investing in something new?

I think that where magic really happens is when we're able to see the intersection of our skills and abilities with our passions, and that can be really difficult to find. I think that many of us wind up in careers out of necessity and not necessarily out of passion, or we become involved in something and think it's going to be one thing and it turns out to be something very different. So I think if we take the opportunity to sort of step back and say, what things am I really skilled at or really experienced in and how can I redirect those things to intersect with the things that I feel passionately about? So I say that of course, based on my own experience of loving grief counseling, but really, really not liking working in a clinical setting where I felt that patient care was undermined by policies and bureaucracy, and having to work in a space that didn't feel warm and welcoming. And so then, you know, being able to say, I love nature and I've experience the transformative power of being in nature on my. My holistic wellness and for me, as I've navigated, significant losses. So I'm very privileged and I know that that kind of combining of experience and passion or hobby even doesn't feel viable for some people. But I think that there's often space for at least a little bit of connection between those two things.

I love that. Well, thank you very much for taking the time. I'm excited to see what happens with Thorpwood as you continue to grow programs there. And for everyone listening, there's details in the show notes if you want to learn more about Kylie and the programs at Thorpwood. So please make sure you connect.