Last month, in this column, I wrote about the grief of the families going through the unexpected death of their children due to school shootings. This month, I’d like to explore that idea further, of what behaviors and thinking patterns happen to members of these families and all families dealing with traumatic losses.

In my tenure as a C.D. Counselor, (chemical dependency), I had the privilege to work with many families. I had never dreamed of being a family counselor, helping those going through intense grief due to one thing or another. I’m going to go through a number of counseling cases, dealing with grief in one form or another.

I’ll start with my family. In 1968 my brother Jerry was killed in an automotive accident due to alcohol. Jerry went home with someone who had been drinking to make sure he got home. Tragically, it was an icy night and speed was a problem of wrapping the car around a tree on the passenger side. When my brother Joe called me at midnight, it was like someone had hit me with a left hook.

I was in disbelief, angry, stunned, anxious, depressed and in fear. We don’t have a premium on events like this. When I grew up I witnessed other families in my city go through intense grief due to losses. When the big elephant is in the room, family members can try to deny it happened, not refer to it, get enraged that it is there, or start blaming each other for whatever.

Every family will encounter feelings of anger, rage, shame, guilt, anxiety, depression and fear. In 1968, we didn’t have the type of psychotherapy that could help families manage these feelings better. How about your family? When tragedies happened, how did your family members behave and think?

Four years later, my first wife, Irish, died in childbirth. This was not a normal happening. A mistake was made and she died, but the baby survived. We had barely healed from Jerry’s death and here we were starting over again. It was intense. Family members were totally depressed.

At times, behaviors were bizarre by members who had “been normal” and now walked around in confusion. I always felt that God led me to be a C.D. Counselor based on my life’s background of pain, by helping others with their pain.

When I worked in the halfway house in Friends of Cazenovia Manor in Buffalo, I had a male client that had gone on a yearlong binge dealing with the murder of his two young daughters by his wife. Besides wanting to kill her and himself, he withdrew from a respectable job, society, and became an alcoholic living under bridges, getting arrested weekly for breaking and entering, thefts, fights and other behaviors.

This was a good guy, college-educated, intelligent, who was committing “slow suicide” by torturing himself for a behavior that he did not commit. He blameds himself for not seeing the signs and getting his wife help. During his year with me, we were finally able to get to acceptance, that he would never wish this behavior on anyone, wasn’t a therapist that may have noticed something was wrong, and still had no answer or thinking as to what she was thinking when she took the lives of a 4- and 2-year old. He had all of the seven deadly factors of anger, rage, shame, guilt, anxiety, depression and fear. This client, for me as a counselor, was the beginning of empathy and patience, from the ashes he was buried in to climbing his way out and trying to manage his response to a tragic situation.

Thank God for trauma specialists, I was able to hook him up with a beautiful specialist in Buffalo and between her and myself, we made great progress with him through many, many painful episodes.

Another case concerned a client that got hooked on heroin due to the closing of one of the automotive plants in his hometown. His response was to withdraw, turn to heroin to function, curse the state and government and spend four years at Rikers Island prison. Again, another person using to cope, living in crack houses, illegal behaviors, and finally the court telling him to go to a halfway house for a year, prison for five more years. He chose sobriety, went to job retraining and low and behold, became a counselor, who, in the present day, is now the director of a rehab for men and women in the Midwest.

As you can read, grief comes in many forms, but it is still grief and has stages that people go through in therapy. It isn’t easy, nor was it meant to be. Back in the 1980s, after Vietnam, I worked with veterans, coming home from a war that confused many of them when they returned home. At that time, many of the vets were classified as “schizoid” due to irrational behaviors. If you’ve ever seen Tom Cruise in the movie “Born on the Fourth of July,” you’ll know what I mean. What was really going on was “PTSD,” post-traumatic stress disorder from the war they had just left. Blaming the president, government and an indifferent society that didn’t consider them heroes due to the opposition of many against the Vietnam War, made their return difficult. Families were in turmoil. It was a difficult time for many, who gave all to their country, and got so little back.

Fathers and mothers who have lost young children like at Sandy Hook and other irrational behaviors are to be valued as people. If they ever get to the point that they would be able to share their thinking and feelings with others, make no mistake about it, there are parents who want privacy and want no part of people coming into their homes. I have complete respect for them. I’ll not rate them or express my thoughts onto people that have gone through 100% stress from the loss of their child.

As you can read between the lines, all families suffer some losses, and a few more than others. I often think of the Kennedys and all the losses they have incurred and yet when I met Carrie Kennedy about five years ago, I found her to be one of the nicest persons I had ever met, in spite of all the behaviors that have happened. She states the family has a strong faith in God and knew some day she would be with her whole family. I could understand 100% when she stated, “this world is only a stopping place for something greater to come.” I concur. I hope this will give some of you out there, who are suffering, a little bit of peace. As Maya Angelou said, “be a rainbow in someone’s cloud.”

Mike Tramuta is a Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy counselor. He can be reached at 716-983-1595.