Camps, boot and grief.

This is a photo from the first episode of the summer reality show "Losing it With Jillian," in which the boot-camp style trainer from "The Biggest Loser" moves in with struggling families for a week to try to help them get their health back on track.

A few seasons ago on "The Biggest Loser," Jillian's mother was a guest on an episode. Turns out she's a therapist, which goes a long way toward explaining why Jillian is so darn good at getting inside people's heads. I envy her assessment skills. On episode after episode of both of these shows, she asks her trainees a few well-chosen questions and gets right to the heart of the psychological issues behind their struggles. Then, she designs her interventions to address both the physical and the psychological issues. In some ways, she reminds me of Dr. Murray. As far as I know, Dr. Murray never screamed at people and made them cry, but she did incorporate really creative phsyical interventions (like running) into her therapy.

I expected "Losing it With Jillian" to be more about emotional issues than food or exercise, but I've been surprised at how much of it is about grief. In the first episode, the family above shared that they had lost a son in infancy and not talked about it for 22 years. Instead, they grew heavier and more distant from one another with each year. The second episode centered around a mother and children who had struggled since losing their husband and father. It looks like the next episode will be about a woman suffering after a divorce. With all of these families, the change that Jillian makes by getting them to talk about their grief is far more significant than any changes she makes through diet or exercise.

I'll be spending this weekend volunteering for Camp Forget-Me-Not/Camp Erin DC, a weekend grief camp for children and teenagers put on by my clinical placement site, the Wendt Center for Loss and Healing (http://www.wendtcenter.org/). At this camp, the kids get a chance to spend a weekend away from school, friends, family, and responsibilities in a place where its okay to talk about grief and loss. I was already excited about volunteering for this camp, but watching "Losing It" the past few weeks has reminded just how important programs like Camp Forget-Me-Not really are.

If I've learned one thing doing grief counseling, its that loss and grief are everywhere. Loss is a universal experience of life. We all go through it over and over again. Yet, we almost never talk about it. So many people move through their lives carrying huge burdens of unexpressed pain. Often (as on "Losing It"), they wind up literally carrying it on or in their bodies. Sometimes they carry it as financial debt, addictions, bad relationships, or other destructive behaviors. Talking about it doesn't make it go away, but it releases some of that destructive energy and helps people make connections between their feelings and their behaviors. I'm really glad to see this being demonstrated in such a popular, public forum.