Diana and Karsten Decker looked back on the pandemic and recognised there had been a lot of unsupported loss.

People usually turn to family and friends to help them through difficult times but the social restrictions that were then in place made that impossible.

The couple were convinced that many adults had lost their coping skills and that young people had never learnt them so started offering grief support groups and individual and family counselling as part of “a holistic approach” to repairing “mind, body and soul”.

“What we've recognised with other helping professionals in Bermuda is that people have been experiencing loss in every possible way and that it's affected them on every level,” said Mrs Decker.

“A lot of helping professionals have recognised that there is a connection and a need for a holistic approach to handling most things that people are facing in their lives – whether it's the loss of a loved one or the loss of a partner through divorce or a break-up. It’s adapting again to life, bouncing back from the last couple of years.”

Mr Decker, now semi-retired as a pastor, worked at Peace Lutheran Church until he and his wife left Bermuda in 2017. They returned last year and formed Integrated Family Counseling Ltd, which they insist is not religious based.

“It's for everyone and it is important to me that people know that,” Mrs Decker said.

“I really feel that I have to connect with people from all backgrounds, all spiritual backgrounds and ways of life. We don't want people to think that they can’t come. We can help people if they're not Christians. We help people because they're human beings and as human beings we have all the same needs – to be treated with honour and dignity and compassion.”

Clients are given a set of tools, one of which is Alan Wolfelt’s book, Understanding Your Grief, and its accompanying journal.

“People say they feel completely out of shape [but] don't feel like exercising. They just feel like sitting at home, watching Netflix – I just don't have the energy right now to do the things I feel like I could do – and that kind of depresses them because they don't have the motivation they need to do that,” Mrs Decker said.

Their work draws on their experience in “the helping professions for three decades” in Bermuda, Germany and in the US, with people of all ages and from various backgrounds.

“We do work from a family systems perspective, using multiple evidence-based interventions,” Mrs Decker explained. “And what we are incorporating in particular is what we call eco-psychotherapy, which is basically nature therapy.”

Depending on the weather, the Deckers take people into “green spaces or blue spaces” to improve their wellbeing through ocean activities or work in a community garden at Gibbs Hill Lighthouse.

“What we've seen is that people feel much more relaxed in that kind of setting,” Mrs Decker said.

It has proven particularly helpful with children with low self-esteem.

“It's a real issue with their cognitive ability to concentrate in school and focus. They're so unsure of themselves. They lack self-confidence and self-esteem and we haven't had a lot of chances for them to be socialised in [recent years] so we see a lot of poor self-regulation.”

She believes it is important to help people understand that loss should not be ignored and that there is no single solution for coping with it.

“Trauma is something that we've all experienced,” Mrs Decker said. “It needs to be addressed; people need just to be aware of it. Very often we're not even aware of how it's affecting us in our daily life.”

The pandemic made the impact of trauma easier to overlook, her husband added.

“The normal process, the normal rituals that we have in place to help people when they have loss, were all taken away from people. I spoke with people who couldn't even visit their wife or their mother in the hospital before they died; they couldn't have a funeral. We couldn't have the rituals that normally are there and our friends weren’t allowed to visit to help us. So there is a lot of delayed grief and people are stuck in it,” he said.

According to Mrs Decker, it has led people to feel disconnected from society.

“People are feeling emotionally overwhelmed, which is leading to a lot of health problems because, of course, then their immune system goes down. They're wondering why they have physical pain, why they are so tired all the time and not sleeping well – we’re finding that with kids in particular. So we’re recognising that coping with any kind of emotional overwhelm requires looking at the multifaceted part of our wellbeing and that is our physical, mental, cognitive and spiritual [aspects].”

A pilot programme held in conjunction with the Salvation Army over a 12-week period “really impacted lives”.

Mrs Decker’s idea is to move it forward with “innovative ideas” that connect people to social groups. The hope is to partner with schools, Child and Adolescent Services and the Family Centre.

“What we're really seeing is people are suffering from isolation, whether it's through bouncing back from grief, or the pandemic recovery is what I call it. Young people kind of got cheated out of weddings. In our family, I didn't even make it to my son’s wedding. I got locked down here when he was in Germany. So we all had losses and a lot of times we're not even aware of how they impacted us but they do impact. They impact our immune system and our wellbeing.

“People are having a difficult time with the more emotional side of grief; with the more difficult emotions such as anger and resentment. A big part of grief is the relational part of it, which is often forgotten and our whole life’s about relationships. How do we interact with each other now? How can we find a new normal or new pathway after all this change? We have to try to get people to open up their minds to see the world through a new lens, not as a frightening place, and just embrace it and say it's going to be OK. We just need to manage our stress. What little things that we can do? And that's the important thing, to get an upward spiral.”

Depression or anxiety comes from “always having to be ready” and “the uncertainty of not knowing what's coming”, she added.

“I really see my job now, as a counsellor and psychotherapist, is to help people to find meaning for their lives again, because they feel like they're having to rethink what's meaningful to them.”

An important message that they try to get across to clients is one detailed clearly in the second edition of Dr Wolfelt’s book: “We can't control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond to it.”

“We can learn how to get a toolbox to deal with our emotions,” Mrs Decker said. “We want to stop it or numb it. It's a lot of work. We recognise that it takes a lot of courage to decide hey, I’m kind of tired of going in circles with this. I really want to learn something or do something different.

“Overall wellbeing is basically when you get up in the morning as an adult, or as a child going to school, and you feel that you can get up and do difficult things, that it's not going to be so scary. That you can tackle what comes your way even though it’s a big thing to do at the age of seven or nine or ten.”

She continued: “It makes a huge difference in our mental wellbeing, in our physical wellbeing and our immune system. Because when you get stuck in that fear response, which for the last three years we have been conditioned to respond to, sometimes we can really get stuck in a pattern.”

• For more information on Integrated Family Counseling Ltd: 599-0606; diana@counseling.homes