Center for Grieving Children: Executive Director Gretchen Johnson

Today I have with me the executive director of the Center for Grieving Children, Gretchen Johnson. Thanks for coming in today. Thanks for having me. So I actually had the opportunity to interview Ann Heroes many years ago, and her daughter actually went to school with my sister Sarah. So I feel like I've had this intimate connection. She's the former executive director of the Center for Grieving Children. So I feel like it's so fascinating and such a privilege to be able to have you come in and have this conversation with me because you're like the next era. You're the evolution of this organization that I've long known about and respected. It feels full circle. It does. Absolutely. You have such an interesting background to me. I mean, you have this background in mental health counseling. You have a master's in mental health counseling, but you did forensic interviewing, right? Yeah. I've had a lot of different pieces of my life that feel like they've all woven together to get me to where I am now. And yeah, you never would've predicted that I would've ended up here based on where I started, but maybe it all makes sense too. In hindsight it's easier to know that, right? But tell me about, well, since you're here now as the executive director, the Center for Grieving Children, and you've now been doing this three months. You've had a chance to kind of get your feet under you a little bit. A little bit. So talk to me about how this was the thing you decided to do right this moment. It was a lot of luck and being in the right place at the right time for many years in a row, it takes years for an overnight success. So it took a lot of growing and building and learning and just knowing where I needed to be when, and then the opportunity presented itself at the exact moment that I was ready. So there was some good fortune involved, but it was also just really remaining connected to what I kept being drawn to, really recognizing what kept drawing my heart and just staying close to that so that I was ready when the time came up. Well, I want to ask you what you needed to grow and learn, but first, for those who are listening and don't know what the Center for Grieving Children is, talk to me about that. The Center for Grieving Children is a nonprofit organization here in Maine. It's the only one in Maine, and we are not connected to other grief centers, although there are grief centers in many states across the country. The Center for Grieving Children was founded in the mid eighties by Bill Hammons whose sister had died. And when he took responsibility for his niece, realized there weren't any resources for his daughter to talk about her loss and talk about her sadness and her grief. And the understanding is that grief is a very natural reaction to losing someone you love. But when grief is unresolved, it causes all kinds of problems. There can be emotional, mental, physical ramifications for not resolving grief in a way that helps the person get through it. So the Center for Grieving Children provides volunteer led peer groups, age-based peer groups for anyone from three to 93 years old, for people who have lost a loved one. And the grief can be a result of the death of a loved one. It can be grief based on a life-threatening diagnosis, and it can be grief that new Mainers experience when they've fled violence and generalized community loss and come here to Maine seeking safety. I never knew that final piece. That's such an interesting broadening of the definition of grief, and yet it makes so much sense. It does. There are many different kinds of loss. The one we think of most often is bereavement after the death of a loved one. And that really is the foundation of our work. And everything has sort of grown from that bed. But our TLC program is the one where we help families who are processing a diagnosis, a life-threatening illness, sometimes a terminal illness. It's anticipatory grief, so it's grief that they know may be coming, but it's also the grief over the loss of the future. You thought you would have the loss of the life that you did have the presence, the full well presence of your loved one. So that's a unique kind of grief and we address that. But then our intercultural program, which is the one I mentioned before as well, is really exceptional. It's a really special program where kids who are new to Maine, new to the area can find community with each other and shared experience, and that might involve fleeing, persecution, violence, war, natural disaster, whatever it might be. We've all come to understand the negative impact of what they call ACEs or adverse childhood events. And recently I read an article and I think it was called PACES or something like that, but it was the opposite of that. It was the positive impact of positive events. And as you are describing this work, it actually strikes me that this could be an example of one of those things that put in the right place at the right time could really promote resilience for children and families. That's absolutely right. I'm glad you said that because it's true. We spend a lot of time talking about ACEs and the negative effects of adverse childhood experiences, and there's enough research that shows absolutely things that happen to children that are unresolved or conflict or exposure to negative outside experiences absolutely has long-term ripple effects that carry throughout their lives if they're not repaired. But the positive impact is it's incredibly powerful, and that's exactly what our programming is designed to do. But because we have these peer groups led by volunteers, it's nonclinical. And while therapy is incredibly powerful, I studied therapy. I'm a true believer, it's what I thought I would do for a career. Grief is, like I said earlier, it's a natural reaction. It can be resolved non therapeutically in many cases by community, by communication, connecting with people not feeling alone in it, and the positive impact builds resiliency. That sense of connectedness to community builds the resiliency that kids and their families need to heal and turn that negative into something that grows their strength. It's not just getting them back to neutral. It's actually empowering them with new resources to handle future negative effects, negative events. I'm always impressed by the emails that I get from the Center for Grieving Children because even though the title is the Center for Grieving Children, the emails are very positive and they're very optimistic and they're very hopeful. And I love that juxtaposition. I mean, you are absolutely acknowledging the very real element of loss and grief. And also over here, we're going to bring you forward with these resources, these supports, and we're going to frame it in such a way that you will, as you say, hopefully get better on the other side. I think normalizing the experience of grief within the context of everyday life is really important for people. I think it's important for people who come to us to know that it's okay to laugh, it's okay to smile. It's okay to find joy. It takes time. It's not going to happen right away, and it won't happen every day all the time. But I hear from so many people, friends, family, community, connections, they say, oh, center for grieving Children, it must be the saddest place in the world. And I love being able to correct people and say, it's actually one of the most optimistic, hopeful, joyful places I've ever been because you're helping people out of the darkest place, the worst thing that's happened, you are helping people find the journey forward. And there's nothing more gratifying than that. This idea of normalizing things. And I think to the opposite or maybe kind of related non something like grief, I think it is an inclination that we have that if we can put a diagnosis on it, then maybe we can treat it with something clinical or medical, whether it's therapy, whether it's medication, whatever it is. But if we say, well, actually this is something that we would expect because you've lost something, and I'm glad that we're getting to a place where we now acknowledge that and that it's okay to be a human who's experiencing the range of emotions one would. And it almost, it's like we're getting to that place where, but it's also returning back to the way I think we're wired to be. I think when you're grieving, when you've experienced a loss or when you're going through something traumatic, you seek connection. And we don't really live in a society that allows space for that. We don't live in a society that gives people the time and space to find their own journey. We try to ascribe a certain amount of time that you're allowed to grieve. You're given this many bereavement days. Your family may say you should be over that by now, that there's some expectation of the outside world, that there's some hard and fast rule of when you should be over it. Well, it's been a year. You should be fine by now. And yet people don't feel fine and then they feel abnormal. And yet we're trying to help people understand that however long it takes is completely normal because it's your journey and it's unique, which is why we offer our services for free for as long as people need them. We don't say you get three sessions or you come for three months and then you're done. We have people who've been with us for years because they just need that connection and community. They're just not quite to the place where they feel like their own internal reserves of strength and resiliency are quite strong enough yet. Or we have people who leave because they feel great and then come back around the time of an anniversary, a milestone, something triggers something that they just feel like they need that extra boost of support, and they come in knowing that we'll be there for them. You've described one larger experience of grief coming from a place where your former life was disrupted by war conflict, some sort of economic issue that's forced you away. I wonder if we are experiencing really a global grief response to covid and to being disconnected. Because I was talking to somebody yesterday at one of our art openings and they were talking about their child who's graduating from high school and how they are still dealing with the after effects of being educated during covid, this very pivotal time of their development. We pulled them away from their social supports, which is something that most of us go have when we are adolescents. And I'm sure that's not the only group. I think we'll see this bubble travel, this demographic bubble. I think we will see sort of the ripple effects that the Covid experience had throughout their lifespan. And I don't know that as the outside commentary, like we're adults looking at juveniles, adolescents saying, well, this seems like a challenge. I don't know that we can really fully understand it unless we look at it from a developmental perspective. And the developmental job of an adolescent is to be connected to peers, to be forging those relationships outside the home. I can't even imagine what the long-term ripple effects are going to be because that natural process of development and differentiation and finding place in their peer group has been so disrupted. I think you're right. We will absolutely be seeing effects of that. And so hopefully there will be more opportunities like the center where kids who experienced that and who lost so much, they lost the rituals of adolescents, they lost prom and graduation and they lost all those experiences that are so part of our culture to come together and to reconnect. Because I think relying on social media or relying on video, it's nice to have that option, but it can't really replace the connection that comes from being in person with people who are your peers. I mentioned earlier in our conversation that you have a background as a forensic interviewer. Explain to people what that is. When I was in college, I got interested in working with kids in the court system. I went to Cornell and there was a professor who was doing research there, and I did some research with him after I had graduated, I stayed around and I just really got fascinated with the idea of kids and memories and how trauma affects memories and how resistant kids are to influence on how their memories are created. So I did the research and then after graduation, I got a dream job working for the district attorney's office in Middlesex County, which is just outside of Boston. And I was a forensic interviewer, which meant I coordinated teams that involved police officer, social worker, victim witness, advocate and prosecutor so that the child would have reduced harm. We know that being involved in the criminal justice system is never going to be a positive childhood experience, but we sought to reduce the negative effects of being in the court system. So I would conduct the interview. I was trained to basically take their statement, so instead of talking to a police officer and then also talking to a prosecutor and then also talking to a social worker, the team would be observing and sharing in the question, asking in one event. So I would conduct the interview, I would help the team screen the viability of further criminal investigation, and I would testify in court when cases went to trial. And it's the kind of job I've said I could have only done when I was in my twenties when I was able to compartmentalize. I was able to leave work at work. Now that I have a child of my own, I can't imagine being able to do that work again. But I'm really glad I did it when I did because it was an incredibly gratifying experience. And some of my best friends are the people that I worked with when I was doing that job. So it was an incredibly important part of my life, and I always wanted to get back to working with kids and families who had experienced trauma. I think that I discovered I really enjoyed the experience of helping people after something, helping people find their road back to wellness. What you're describing is, well, it's very relatable for me because I remember early on being a family medicine resident and talking to people, but these very difficult things that had happened. And I was not very old. I was in my mid twenties and I had my own children at the time. So I would talk to people and I would see patients and I would have these experiences with people who were just going through these very dark and difficult times. And it was really hard. It was so difficult to kind of be in that space and then be able to leave that space and as you say, compartmentalize. I don't think I was actually very good at it. It sounds like maybe you were better at it than I was. I think I was for a time, and I think it was just because I was living with friends in Boston, I think because I didn't have the deep roots in my own personal life yet, and I didn't necessarily feel what I was hearing as personally. I think now with my own family, I think it would be a very different situation, but I think I compartmentalized, but also I think you have to acknowledge and you can't just compartmentalize for a long time. I think that's why I also had to step away. I also stopped doing that job, and I think it's because you can only compartmentalize for so long. It does creep in and it does start to affect the way you look at the world. Even today, I still have a very, I think, I don't know, I'm very suspicious of different situations. I keep my eyes open all the time. When my daughter was little, I was probably a little overprotective in some ways, but I had already seen the worst that people can do. So you do carry it with you. So as much as I think I was compartmentalizing, maybe not entirely, there are definitely parts that I've carried with me, but in ways that I'm also really pleased to carry because it was, like I said, the job was a privilege And I definitely acknowledge that about my own experience, that I would never go back and not want to have done that because it is such a, I guess I'll call it a privilege, although that word has got weird connotation these days, but maybe a blessing. It was some sort of advantage to having been in that situation and feeling like, oh, these people who, they're not connected to me, they don't have to share with me if they don't want to, but they are. They're showing up, they're sharing their lives with me. They're bringing in this most vulnerable place in their current existence. And I think I felt the same way that that was truly something that changed me and impacted me moving forward. And I think you're probably also right that I just happened to have already had children at that time. So I would see people on these horrible things would happen to their babies, and I'd be like, I have a baby at home. This could happen to my baby. I'm just not that far away from this potential. And you touched on something really interesting too. I think that that's the really interesting point, which is I think it made me skeptical and maybe aware of the negative, but also I think I keep getting drawn back to it because it is also an opportunity to see the beauty of human strength and how many people out there and how much connection there is and how many people seek connection and how much trust there is. People who've been through the worst are still able to trust another person. And to, whether that's in my original job as a forensic interviewer or now at the Center for Grieving Children, people who have been through really heart wrenching experiences and have been hurt are able to still reach out and seek help from people and to feel that trust to open up to another person. It's really beautiful. And as you're saying this, I'm remembering multiple different occasions where I have been with adult survivors of abuse and they've brought this up in the course of a regular medical or even a non-medical conversation. And I feel the fact that they're willing to share this with me, and then it gives me so much more context for who they are and where they're coming from. I mean, it's such a gift that they've given that they trust me to that extent. So you're right, I think that there is that entering in that is something important. And I think that's one of the outcomes too that we're seeing post covid or maybe even during, maybe a little bit before, but people are so much more comfortable now talking about mental health than I think they ever were before. And I think that's a real asset. That's definitely helping people seek out support when they need it. Again, normalizing these conversations around things, making it less taboo to talk about death, making it less taboo to talk about sadness, anxiety, grief, depression, making it okay for people to say, I need help here. Especially where we do tend to medicalize things, which there are medical treatments for so many things, and it's not that that's wrong. It's an and situation. You may need medical or clinical support and connection to a community and being able to talk about things in a way that doesn't feel isolating can really, really speed the healing. Yes, good point. So I'm thinking back to one of the conversational threads we didn't originally take, which is becoming prepared to take this role. And where you said you needed to do some self-examination, you need to prepare yourself for a role that didn't even exist. You didn't even really know what you were preparing yourself for, but you were somehow preparing yourself. Tell me about that. I think you just have to really pay attention to where your heart is pulling you. And I remember listening to Leanne Leahy from Via agency at one point talking about, I think it was her dad telling her to run towards the fire. And that resonated with me. I really liked the idea. And then I read it again in a book by Glennon Doyle, just saying, what breaks your heart is your mission. Find what breaks your heart and do that because you'll always be fueled. You will find your purpose. And so working with the kids in the court system absolutely broke my heart, but I knew that I was doing important work. And then when I switched careers and I moved into the legal world and I was doing business development and marketing, even though it didn't necessarily resonate in my heart, it was very intellectually stimulating and I was learning so much and building so many skills, and I met really fascinating people and I loved learning all the time. So I knew that I was sort of filling my toolkit and I didn't know just what I was going to use it for yet. I knew that there was going to be something. And in the meantime, I was just enjoying the journey. I was having fun. I was loving my job, I was challenging myself. Like I said, just learning a little bit about so many things and learning how to do so many more things so that when I was ready to step away from working in a law firm, this opportunity came up and I had been a volunteer at the Center for Grieving Children, so I knew the organization really well. I had volunteered there as a facilitator for five years, and I had served on the board. So I knew both the program side and I knew the business side, sort of the organizational side of it a bit. And so when the opportunity came up to apply for the executive director position, it really was one of those moments where you almost hear the ding where I felt this, this is what I was waiting for. So it sounds like kind of having faith in the process that it would get you to the place even though you don't know what that place is. And that's a big sort of, I dunno if it's a slogan or a catchphrase or it's a phrase we use a lot at the center, which is trust the process. And we mean it in the sense that your journey is your journey. When you're grieving, trust the process, just keep at it. Don't put expectations on what it's supposed to look like or feel like or how long it's supposed to take. Trust the process because it's yours. And so while on the one hand, I'm always skeptical of anything, that's a process. I always challenge the process in many ways. And I think, no, just because something's been this way for a long time doesn't mean it has to be this way. Now I understand the meaning of that phrase, which is just trust the journey. I am so in agreement with this idea that processes is both incredibly important, and also if it's not the right process, you don't have to keep doing it. We're doing a lot of that now, taking a look at what has worked, what makes the center, what it is, what makes this work work, and how do we stay really true to that and amplify that as much as possible, and how do we shed the things that maybe are getting in the way of that? How do we make transitions from things? My goal is not to change everything, and I don't necessarily think I have to change anything, but how do we evolve? What is the next step? What's changed around us? Right now, we're doing this process where we're having conversations, small group conversations about what around us, what in the environment, what in our environment has changed, what are the outside influences that we need to adapt to, positive or negative? And some are a little bit of both or neither, they just are. So just being really aware of the environment in which we operate and how factors outside of our control affect how we respond. One of the things that we mentioned earlier was that you have been now in this position for 90 days and Heroes was in this position for, well, 20 plus years and total 30 years in her affiliation with the center. And I know that there can be, and she's granted she's not the founder, but there can be a bit of a founder's effect to somebody who has kind of put their mark on an organization. And I know that all the work she's done has been incredibly positive and now you're coming in. So I feel like this is an interesting opportunity for you. It's very different than if you were just coming and taking over for somebody who had been there three years and that was it. And then move on. Yeah, I would say I spent a lot of time in these past three months listening and talking to people and learning what really worked well. What about this place and the mission and your job and your role in it, and Ann's leadership and anyone else, what works really well? What helped you do your job best? And so trying to learn from the legacy that she's left and yet also not just fall into the tracks and make sure that I'm looking forward and always keeping my eyes on the horizon instead of in the rear view mirror. So it's been an interesting blending of learning from the legacy and the long history and the rich stories of the origins of the center and bringing it into today's world and looking forward to the future, and how can we grow and meet the changing needs of our community Because the people who came to us when we first started are very different. They bring to us different stories than the stories we're hearing now. The stories we're hearing now are, there are just sadly more deaths through traumatic means. And to go back to the mental health conversation, we're seeing more families who are dealing with death by suicide and overdose, and there are different emotional layers when a death comes like that. So just trying to attend to the needs of the community in the biggest and most helpful way that we can. It sounds ike what you're describing is a very creative process. You have to think about something from a new perspective. When we reached out to you to learn more about you, you talked about the fact that your father is an artist and enjoy creative pursuits, but you don't have necessarily your one creative pursuit that's calling you right now, but actually this is entirely of itself a creative pursuit working in this organization and understanding things and kind of recreating or continuing to evolve something that's a creative process. Yeah, I absolutely believe that creativity is bigger than sometimes I let myself think of it. That creativity to me is being able to think of something that hasn't been thought of before. It's creating something. And for some people that's creating art. And I'm a huge consumer of art. I'm a big fan. My dad's an artist. I have beautiful art in my home that he's done and his friends and artists that he's known. So I have art around me. I go to as much live performance as possible, whether that's theater or music, the symphony, I'm a huge fan. I love to read literature. I love to read, I love to write. I like to do all those things. But for me, my creativity, I think really does manifest more in strategic thinking, which I think is super creative. Being able to take all these pieces and organize them differently or think about things outside of a construct that's been there before, thinking about reorganizing things in a new way for something that's greater than the sum of its parts. To me, that's sort of the exciting creative process. It's not necessarily creating a painting or a piece of music, but to me it's creating something that hasn't been created before. So there's creativity in it. I agree definitely. And I also am interested in this idea that a lot of times we have people who are coming in here who are artists at the Portland Art Gallery, and theirs happens to be more visual arts, and you're describing performing arts in live music and live performance. And I think that's its own very different, very important form of creativity. So talk to me about that and why did you become interested in that in particular? I think the performing arts fascinate me because the experience is shared. It's something that you share one time. It's unique and it's a unique experience shared by a room full of strangers. To me, it's kind of magical. It's something that will never be exactly the same performed in the same way. Again, it may be recorded, but that's not the same. It's not sharing the live expression of artistry. So for me, whether it's going to the theater, whether it's going to rock concert or whether it's going to a symphonic concert or ballet dance, any kind of a dance performance, I just think that being able to sit there and share beauty with people, like I said, that's unique, is just special to me and it's fun. But I also totally enjoy going to galleries and seeing the more sort of traditional visual arts sculpture and paint and all the different, I mean, anything that someone uses their emotion to create, I'm all in. You are tapping into many elements of yourself in your life, that there is this creativity that you're tapping into. There's this strategic thinking that you're tapping into. I'm assuming there's quite a bit of operational stuff that you're needing to, and you have all of these interesting back stories that are all kind of leading up to where you are now, which you couldn't have anticipated, would've been the case. Not at all. So if you were to give advice to somebody who was kind of early on in their career and was like, oh, I think I want to be a forensic interview forever, what would you actually say? Oh, that's a great question. I would say pursue it with everything that you have, but always keep your eye inward and recognize when what's driving you to do that changes. Recognize when that shift, you'll know it if you're paying attention, you'll know that moment. I remember having that moment when I was doing the work, and I just remember having that conversation with myself saying, this work is still really, really important to me, but I don't feel like I'm giving it a hundred percent anymore. And it matters too much to me to give anything less than everything I have. And I think these are the early signs that I could burn out. I'm not there, but I think I could, and I respect this job and the people I serve too much to give them anything less, it's time for me to do something else. And it took a little bit of a leap of faith because I absolutely, I didn't know where that jump was going to take me. I ended up moving to Maine. I ended up changing careers. I mean, it was a big leap, and I had to go back a couple paces before I could really get my momentum back again and kind of get through the inertia of change. And I think that's the other thing I would tell somebody is don't mistake the inertia of change for a mistake. It doesn't mean that you're not on the path to bigger, brighter things sometimes right after change. It's a little raw, so just sit with it. It's okay. That is great advice. So if I were talking to my younger self and you were talking with your younger self and our younger selves were talking, I think my younger self would really appreciate that advice as well. I wish I had been able to give my younger self that advice too. Wouldn't it be so nice to be able to go back in time and say, you k