ethnographer, addiction consultant, grief advisor, creative-developer metamorphoses story therapist and candidate family consultant.
Her early childhood experiences are determinative in her relationship with losses, since she used to spend a lot of time with her elderly grandmother, visiting sick people and even funerals. So for her it was no taboo but only natural that loss and grief are part of human life.
She originally graduated as an ethnographer, she has been researching her own culture and living it too as a folk dancer. She ended up as a helper due to one of her own great losses, and she has been working with addicts and their relatives for almost twenty years. Dealing with addiction and learning about the fate of many clients she has seen the apparent desolation these people were coming from. As an ethnographer she has seen that the lack of traditional culture is one of the prominent causes for forming an addiction, particularly the inadequate ability to process losses.
This is why she finished the training to become a mourning group counsellor eight years ago, and she has been using and enriching this knowledge in all of her activities: individual and family consultation and workshops processing loss.
Upon losing a close friend, her attention turned towards children’s grief, as her friend was left alone with four children. Through following their story she learned about all the difficulties experienced by such families as they saw, say, a father being sick and then lost him, and she tried to find opportunities to help them. When she participated at a conference about children’s grief, she learned that there is a well-established Finnish process for leading mourning groups for children. In collaboration with the lecturers, Albertné Bereczky Éva and Borbély Veronika, they sought out funding and started the first groups for half-orphaned families in Hungary in 2015, and these have been continuously operating ever since. Later on they expanded their activities, since they wanted to make the groups available not only in Budapest but also the countrywide. Under the framework of the Eclipse Association they have worked out the group leader training for children’s mourning groups, and Timea has been taking part in the trainings ever since. Thanks to a fundraiser campaign the Flower of Hope Program is currently still ongoing, allowing the launch of new groups and the organisation of meetups for families who visited earlier groups, thereby strengthening the peer community supporting its members. Another important element of the Flower of Hope Program is organising professional training days for different professionals working with children, providing trainings about children’s grief and opportunities to help. Thanks to their efforts there are more and more professionals in our country who can organise groups and help children process their loss with the right knowledge.