Coming Home to Ourselves: Because You Matter — A Conversation with Shelley Brunskill-Matson
Content note: This article discusses suicide loss and childhood grief.
Some conversations begin with a person’s story and gradually reveal a question that belongs to all of us. In my conversation with Dr Shelley Brunskill-Matson, that question was simple but profound: Do I matter?
Shelley’s life and work have been deeply shaped by suicide loss. In 1984, when she was 12, she went Christmas shopping on the first day of the school holidays. Her mother was meant to collect her, but instead a neighbour arrived and told her that her father had been in an accident.
From her neighbour’s window, Shelley watched police, an ambulance and eventually a hearse arrive outside her family home. When she was finally allowed to return, the adults gathered outside fell silent as she walked past them. Inside, her mother told her that her father, Tony, had taken his own life.
Shelley can still see that day clearly. Yet the essence of her story is not only what happened to her. It is what she has chosen to create from what happened—and the care she has taken not to assume that her experience gives her the right to speak for every other grieving child.
The work that found her
Shelley did not begin her career with a plan to work in suicide bereavement. After university and several years in government, she trained as a life coach, although the title never felt entirely comfortable. To her, it suggests that a person had life sorted out. What she valued was something quieter and more honest: helping people reclaim their agency, understand what they wanted and take meaningful action.
Over time, she noticed that many of the people finding their way to her were grieving. Her work gradually moved into the grief space—not because she had carefully planned it, but because people trusted her with their stories.
Her own lived experience led her to ask what support was available to people bereaved by suicide. That question took her to Skylight Trust and the WAVES programme, an eight-week programme for adults affected by suicide loss. As a facilitator, Shelley saw the difference that suicide-specific group support could make. But she also noticed a significant absence: where were the equivalent programmes for tamariki and rangatahi?
That question became the beginning of Tony’s Place, the charitable trust named in honour of her father. Its vision is to create a welcoming front door—currently a virtual one—through which whānau bereaved by suicide can find age-appropriate group support, whether the person needing care is six, sixteen, thirty-six or eighty-six.
Tony’s Place is now the kaitiaki of WAVES and is developing MySpace, a research-based, activity-based programme for children aged six to twelve, with the longer-term intention of creating support designed specifically for teenagers.
Listening before deciding
Before establishing Tony’s Place, Shelley completed a PhD exploring the care and support experiences of tamariki aged six to thirteen following the suicide of someone close to them. She did not undertake the research to qualify. She wanted anything created for children to be informed by children themselves.
She entered their homes carrying a container of toys, sat on lounge floors and played beside them. She asked three direct questions:
What was helpful?
What was unhelpful?
What would ideal care and support have looked like for you?
The children were remarkably clear. Even those with fewer words could communicate what helped and what did not. Their needs were also changeable. Something that comforted a child one day might feel unhelpful the next. There could therefore be no universal checklist for supporting a grieving child. Adults had to keep asking, listening and offering choices.
This may be the most important quality Shelley brings to her work. Her lived experience gives her a deep connection to the subject, but she does not use that experience to claim expertise over another person’s grief. She understands that even having once been a bereaved 12-year-old does not mean she can assume what another bereaved child needs.
The child remains the expert in their own grief.
When care communicates that you matter
Shelley’s central finding was that mattering mattered. Children experienced an adult’s behaviour as genuinely caring and supportive when it reinforced that they mattered. They wanted their grief acknowledged, their voices heard and their choices respected. They wanted to be active participants in their grief rather than passive recipients of decisions adults made.
One child described returning to school after her brother’s death. Teachers embraced her parents and asked how she was doing while she stood beside them, yet no one spoke to her directly. When she later returned to class, no one acknowledged what had happened. The silence left her not only wondering whether her grief mattered, but whether her brother—and she herself—mattered to others.
Another child repeatedly told her mother that she did not want to stop at the cemetery after school because seeing her mother upset was difficult for her. Her request was not heard. The example was not shared to blame a grieving parent, whose needs were also real, but to reveal what the experience felt like from the child’s position.
There were also beautiful examples of support. Nine-year-old Ben was told he could leave school whenever he felt overwhelmed. He tried going home once and decided he preferred staying at school. Yet the option itself made him feel supported. Other children made memory boxes with their mother and chose what to put inside.
The difference was not necessarily a grand intervention. It was the experience of being asked rather than managed, included rather than overlooked. It was care offered with a child, not care done to them.
Shelley also recognises the impossible burden often placed on grieving parents. They may be expected to become their children's primary support while struggling simply to breathe and move through their own days. Families need programmes such as MySpace, while teachers and counsellors need stronger guidance informed by the voices of bereaved children themselves.
Mattering belongs to all of us.
Although Shelley’s understanding of mattering emerged through research with bereaved children, the conversation gradually opened into something much wider. Mattering is not only a suicide-bereavement issue. It is a human conversation.
Many of us carry meanings formed during childhood: that we are not enough, that we are too much, that we must behave perfectly to be accepted, or that our needs are less important than everyone else’s. These beliefs are not necessarily true. We attached them to experiences when we were young and trying to understand the world. Yet they can remain with us for decades, shaping how we interpret relationships and moments of uncertainty.
Making those beliefs conscious allows us to question them. It gives us the chance to release messages that no longer belong to us.
Mattering also lives in everyday interactions. Shelley recalled how someone she worked with remembered her daughter’s name and asked about her football months after their original conversation. It was a small gesture, but it told Shelley that she had been listened to and remembered. She calls these experiences “moments of mattering.”
We create such moments whenever we notice someone, remember what they have shared, ask what they need or allow their answer to change. We remind another person that they are not invisible.
The courage to become more fully ourselves
This conversation also arrived while Shelley was standing at a personal crossroads. Burnout and the sudden deaths of two close friends had brought new clarity about the uncertainty of life. She remains committed to suicide-bereavement work, but she also feels another part of her asking to be expressed through writing, speaking and a broader exploration of mattering.
For years, she felt pressure to fit everything she did into one box. Now she is learning to trust herself enough to hold more than one calling. The next chapter is not about abandoning what came before. It is about letting another voice within her grow louder.
That requires the courage to listen not only to the mind, but also to the heart and gut—especially after years of prioritising other people’s ideas about what one should do. Shelley hopes her future self will be staunch about who she is. She wants to own herself more fully.
When I asked what she would say to her younger self, her answer brought the entire conversation home:
You matter, and you will be okay.
That is also the essence of Shelley herself. She has transformed personal loss into a commitment to listen—not to speak over others, but to create the conditions for their voices to be heard. Her work asks us to replace assumptions with curiosity, control with agency and silence with acknowledgement.
Near the end of our conversation, Shelley reflected that we are all walking one another home while also coming home to ourselves. Coming home means returning to the part of us that existed before we learned that we were not enough. It may mean trusting our own voice again while helping others hear theirs.
And perhaps it begins with the simplest message one human being can offer another:
I see you. I hear you. You matter.
Watch the full conversation: Coming Home to Ourselves: Because You Matter — A Conversation with Dr Shelley Brunskill-Matson
