#when you're a genre-savvy goth whose closest gods are anubis and badb catha idek what to say for myself ha

[bean-chaointe]

I enrolled in INELDA's death doula training course today, and I'm glad I did so with a full 2.5 months before the live sessions of the training because that gives me more time to step very, very carefully through the absolute minefield that is my own grief as I process through the recorded 'pre-work' sessions.

Even just THINKING about the training has gotten me twitchy af.

I'm still extremely wary of the idea of offering death and funerary support as part of my scope of service, given the way my grief has calcified over the past 15 years into a hard shell that simultaneously flinches away from the slightest touch, but grief is a normal and natural emotion that commonly comes up in peer counseling even when the sessions is focused on another matter. Mostly I'm hoping that this will crack said shell in a way that therapy never managed, basically by coming at it sideways from the familiar perspective of being a service provider and therefore be less "threatening" to my hypervigilant brain, and that it will do so before I end up being the end-of-life caregiver for a parent for the second time.

GIMME THOSE COUNSELING TOOLS AND IDEOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK BEFORE I HAVE TO DO THIS AGAIN /GRABBY HANDS