Not my cup of tea.

But I’m completely fucked up, so there’s that.

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Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

Maybe not the same thing, but I've been to mandatory Critical Incident Stress Counseling. Not my thing and I would have avoided it if I had been given a choice. It was a bunch of people trying to make more of an event then it deserved. Death is part of life, and bad things happen. Move on and let it pass.

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"...the street finds its own uses for things"

Who cares what other people have experienced - they are their experiences, not yours. Why don't you try one session and see how it goes?

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clm
Nashville, TN
https://twitter.com/ironclm | http://ironclm.typepad.com

Our first child was born 3 months premature, lived for two days, then died. My wife and I went to grief support meetings for other parents like us. I only made it to two meetings. They were so incredibly depressing for me. I'm not one to share my feelings well with strangers and many of the other parents had genuinely worse experiences than us. I thought I was handling my grief well and appropriately, and would feel 100 times worse after the meeting. I refused to go after the second meeting. My wife kept going, made some friends, shared her feelings, and seemed to benefit from them. So try one or two and see if they work for you.

If it looks to be helpful and needed for you, then by all means stay with it.

But part of what stood out in your post was the connection that this done through work. That makes it feel weird and uncomfortable too. And that unease would probably limit how open and therefore how helpful the sessions could/should be. (Unless that nature of work involves grief and suffering, so employees need support to be able to cope?)

What if you found out that one of your direct-reports were in the group? Or your immediate boss? I imagine that could complicate work relationships ... Do you favor them in some way with less stressful assignments? Or if business requires tough decisions about letting them go, does this come into play? .... Does HR then have this on your file? How might that be used in employee evaluations, and succession plans? ... And a whole bunch of other issues can come up.

And if you're all sitting around in a support group at work, shouldn't you all be working instead?

Unless it's work related, keeping personal stuff separate works best.