LGBT Caregivers and Grief Support Group
WHEN: First and third Monday of the month, 5:30 p.m.
WHERE: LGBT Community Center, 3909 Centre St., Hillcrest
INFO: Bryan McNutt, (888) 328-4558

New group helps LGBT community deal with loss, caring for the terminally ill

By Dave Schwab/GSD Reporter

A newly formed LGBT support group is helping relieve the psychological and emotional burden of people who are caring for loved ones with terminal illnesses, as well as helping console those who’ve recently faced a personal loss or death.

The group meets the first and third Monday of each month at the LGBT Community Center in Hillcrest, under the guidance of Bryan McNutt, director of family and support services for Silverado Hospice, which is facilitating the 90-minute sessions.

“We take very seriously the different, unique situations families and patients face. (That’s) one reason why we wanted to focus on providing a support group specifically for the gay and lesbian community,” McNutt said. “We’re well aware that the different social and legal implications LGBT caregivers and patients might face make the grief experience that much more challenging.”

It was McNutt who believed the hospice’s model of care for patients and families could be adapted to serve the LGBT community. He said he championed the new caregivers support group out of concern for, and recognition of, those caregivers’ special needs.

“We wanted to make a real effort to have a direct connection for this community,” he said, adding the new group, while meeting a special niche within the larger community, is helping LGBT caregivers overcome obstacles specific to their situation.

One psychological issue common among LGBT caregivers is something McNutt refers to as “disenfranchised grief,” which he described as the complicated grief process experienced by individuals’ suffering losses accompanied by social stigmatization.

“It’s that experience of grief where the necessary social validation for the loss is missing,” McNutt said, noting that the meaning and substance of a gay or lesbian relationship might not be recognized by the couple’s families, or by society at large.

“For the surviving partner, this adds another layer of complication … that the loss might not be as important as that in a heterosexual relationship,” he said.

McNutt said LGBT caregivers may have additional emotional hurdles to clear, such as dealing with a lack of family acceptance or anxiety over “what’s going to happen with the home they’ve lived in for 20-plus years because it isn’t under both of their names,” or all the other legal questions that might arise related to health care and the standing of their relationship, even if they have a domestic partnership.

“A group like this can focus specifically on gay and lesbian issues and cut through a lot of the barriers,” McNutt said.
The therapeutic approach employed within his group is flexible, in part because it needs to be.

“There is no blueprint for grief,” McNutt noted. “Every grief, and its expression of mourning, is individual. It’s going to affect everyone differently, (and) be different depending on the kind of illness or loss experienced. What is the right or wrong way to cope—everyone finds out on their own.”

Helping the aggrieved find their own way of coping is what the LGBT Caregivers and Grief Support Group is all about.

“Support groups like this focus on trying to build external relationships with people,” McNutt said. “Caregiving 24 hours a day at home is an isolating experience. Groups like this allow people to be pulled out of that isolated experience, and reminds them there are other people facing similar situations, giving them encouragement and hope.”

McNutt said the group also provides an outlet for stressed and overworked caregivers to start taking care of themselves.
“Someone lost in caring for someone else loses themselves,” he said. “All their focus is on the ailing loved one and they’re not taking care of themselves. This group gives them the space for their own emotional needs, supports them in the struggle they’re going through.”

While caregivers within the LGBT community were once focused on AIDS, an improvement in HIV/AIDS medications during the past 15 years and an aging generation of LGBT baby boomers has shifted the demographics.

“Now that we’ve moved out of the more direct AIDS epidemic era, the general public is beginning to recognize that gay people die of other diseases—cancer, dementia, COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease)—beyond … AIDS.”
McNutt said group members dealing with a recent death are often able to provide encouragement and guidance directly to caregivers who are anticipating a loss, reminding others that the experience is “something that can be survived; that they can make it through.”

The group’s structure is informal; people come as often as they like.

“A group like this is more focused on processing our experiences and the emotional challenges and difficulties members are going through,” McNutt said. “The focus of the group is not me presenting material in a purely educational form, but trying to work with emotional material that the clients bring. There really is no agenda.”

Those interested in the Caregivers & Grief Support Group should contact McNutt at (888) 328-4558.