Grief counseling is a form of psychotherapy that aims to help people cope with the physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and cognitive responses to loss. These experiences are commonly thought to be brought on by a loved person's death, but may more broadly be understood as shaped by any significant life-altering loss (e.g., divorce, home foreclosure, or job loss). [1]
Grief counselors believe that everyone experiences and expresses grief in personally unique ways that are shaped by family background, culture, life experiences, personal values, and intrinsic beliefs. [2] They believe that it is not uncommon for a person to withdraw from their friends and family and feel helpless; some might be angry and want to take action. Some may laugh while others experience strong regrets or guilt. Tears or the lack of crying can both be seen as appropriate expressions of grief. [3]
Grief counselors know that one can expect a wide range of emotion and behavior associated with grief. Some counselors believe that in virtually all places and cultures, the grieving person benefits from the support of others. [4] Further, grief counselors believe that where such support is lacking, counseling may provide an avenue for healthy resolution. Grief counselors also believe that where the process of grieving is interrupted, for example, by the one who is grieving having to simultaneously deal with practical issues of survival or by their having to be the strong one who is striving to hold their family together, grief can remain unresolved and later resurface as an issue for counseling. [5]
Grief counseling is commonly recommended for individuals who experience difficulties dealing with a personally significant loss. Grief counseling facilitates expression of emotion and thought about the loss, including their feeling sad, anxious, angry, lonely, guilty, relieved, isolated, confused etc.
Grief counseling facilitates the process of coming to terms with the loss that the individual has experienced, and processing through the natural progression of feelings that might come with different stages of coping with the loss. Grief counselling sessions also encompass segments on increasing an individual's personal and social resources to cope better with grief. There are considerable resources online covering grief or loss counseling such as the Grief Counseling Resource Guide from the New York State Office of Mental Health. [6]
There are various types of grief that individuals might go through. [7] The most commonly seen types of grief fall into these four categories:
Anticipatory grief
Anticipatory grief refers to a sense of loss before the actual occurrence of loss. This can occur when a loved one has a terminal illness, [8] or one is personally being diagnosed with a chronic illness, or when one faces the imminent loss of some human function.
Normal grief
Normal grief is the natural experience of loss and emotions accompanies the death of a loved one, and usually subsides in intensity over time. Normal grief is usually accompanied by the symptoms of a depressed mood, sleep disturbances, and crying. [9]
Complicated grief
Grief that is prolonged and resultant in severe behavioral concerns such as suicidal ideation, addictions, risk-taking behavior, or displaying symptoms of mental health concerns. Research shows up to 10% of bereaved adults may experience prolonged grief. [10] In these situations, more in-depth counseling and psychotherapy would be important in helping the individual recover from the traumatic loss.
Disenfranchised grief
Disenfranchised grief is grief that is not made known to, or not recognized by, others. An example could be the case of an extramarital lover whose lover passed on. In these cases, the grieving process is compromised as they are unable to process through this grief with others and receive the social support they need to overcome their grief.
Joanne Jozefowski in 1999 through The Phoenix Phenomenon: Rising from the Ashes of Grief [11] summarizes five stages to rebuild a shattered life:
The most commonly acknowledged and cited grief model is the Five Stages of Grief by Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, [12] which posits that individuals who experience grief tend to go through a cycle of these five stages:
There is a distinction between grief counseling and grief therapy. [3] Counseling involves helping people move through uncomplicated, or normal, grief to health and resolution. Grief therapy involves the use of clinical tools for traumatic or complicated grief reactions. [13] This could occur where the grief reaction is prolonged or manifests itself through some bodily or behavioral symptom, or by a grief response outside the range of cultural or psychiatrically defined normality. [14]
Grief therapy is a kind of psychotherapy used to treat severe or complicated traumatic grief reactions, [13] which are usually brought on by the loss of a close person (by separation or death) or by community disaster. The goal of grief therapy is to identify and solve the psychological and emotional problems which appeared as a consequence.
They may appear as behavioral or physical changes, psychosomatic disturbances, delayed or extreme mourning, conflictual problems or sudden and unexpected mourning. Grief therapy may be available as individual or group therapy. A common area where grief therapy has been extensively applied is with the parents of cancer patients. [15]
At present (as of 2008), a controversy exists in the scholarly literature regarding grief therapy's relative efficacy and the possible harm from it (iatrogenesis). Researchers have suggested that people may resort to receiving grief therapy in the absence of complicated (or abnormal) grief reactions and that, in such cases, grief therapy may cause a normal bereavement response to turn pathological. [16] Others have argued that grief therapy is highly effective for people who suffer from unusually prolonged and complicated responses to bereavement. [17]
In March 2007, an article in the APS journal, Perspectives on Psychological Science, included grief counseling and grief therapy on a list of treatments with the potential to cause harm to clients. [18] In particular, individuals experiencing "relatively normal bereavement reactions" were said to be at risk of a worse outcome (i.e., an abnormally prolonged or difficult grieving process) after receiving grief counseling. The APS journal article in turn has been criticized in the British Psychological Society's publication the psychologist as lacking scientific rigour. [19]
Some mental health professionals have questioned whether complicated grief exists. [20] [21] New diagnostic criteria for "complicated grief" have been proposed for the new DSM, the DSM-V. [22] One argument against creating a classification for "complicated grief" holds that it is not a unique mental disorder. Rather it is a combination of other mental disorders, such as depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and personality disorders.
Empirical studies have been attempting to convincingly establish the incremental validity of complicated grief. [23] In 2007, George Bonanno and colleagues published a paper describing a study that supports the incremental validity of complicated grief. [24] The paper cautions, "the question of how complicated grief symptoms might be organized diagnostically is still very much open to debate." As this is a current debate in the field, new research on this topic is likely to appear in the scientific literature.
Anticipating the impact of loss or trauma (to the extent than anyone can), and during and after the events of loss or trauma, each person has unique emotional experiences and ways of coping, of grieving and of reacting or not. [25] Sudden, violent or unexpected loss or trauma imposes additional strains on coping. When a community is affected such as by disaster both the cost and sometimes the supports are greater.
Weeping, painful feelings of sadness, anger, shock, guilt, helplessness and outrage are not uncommon. These are particularly challenging times for children [26] who may have had little experience managing strong affects within themselves or in their family. These feelings are all part of a natural healing process that draws on the resilience of the person, family and community. [27]
Time and the comfort and support of understanding loved ones and once strangers who come to their aid, supports people healing in their own time and their own way. Research shows that resilience is ordinary rather than extraordinary. [28] The majority of people who survive loss and trauma do not go on to develop PTSD. [29] However, some remain overwhelmed and trapped in their fight-or-flight state.
This article addresses counseling with complex grief and trauma, [13] not only complex post-traumatic stress disorder but those conditions of traumatic loss and psychological trauma that for a number of reasons are enduring or disabling. For example, where an adult is periodically immobilized by unwelcome and intrusive recall of the sudden and violent death [30] of a parent in their childhood.
Because of the interconnectedness of trauma, PTSD, human development, resiliency and the integration of the self, counseling of the complex traumatic aftermath of a violent death in the family, for example, require an integrative approach, using a variety of skills and techniques to best fit the presentation of the problem.
The post-traumatic self may not be the same person as before. [31] Personality changes due to the effects of trauma can be the source of intense shame, secondary shocks after the event and of grief for the lost unaltered self, which impacts on family and work. [32] [33] Counseling in these circumstances is designed to maximize safety, trauma processing, and reintegration regardless of the specific treatment approach. [34] [35] Post-trauma individuals must have space to safely face and process the event. There is no specific treatment approach for each individual, but processing and reintegration must be the focus.
Grief is the response to the loss of something deemed important, particularly to the loss of someone or some living thing that has died, to which a bond or affection was formed. Although conventionally focused on the emotional response to loss, grief also has physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, cultural, spiritual and philosophical dimensions. While the terms are often used interchangeably, bereavement refers to the state of loss, while grief is the reaction to that loss.
Psychological trauma is an emotional response caused by severe distressing events that are outside the normal range of human experiences. It must be understood by the affected person as directly threatening the affected person or their loved ones generally with death, severe bodily injury, or sexual violence; indirect exposure, such as from watching television news, may be extremely distressing and can produce an involuntary and possibly overwhelming physiological stress response, but does not produce trauma per se. Examples of distressing events include violence, rape, or a terrorist attack.
Complex post-traumatic stress disorder is a stress-related mental and behavioral disorder generally occurring in response to complex traumas.
Disenfranchised grief is a term coined by Dr. Kenneth J. Doka in 1989. The concept describes the fact that some forms of grief are not acknowledged on a personal or societal level in modern Eurocentric culture. People might not like how you may or may not be expressing your grief or view your loss as insignificant, and thus they may feel uncomfortable, or judgmental. This is not a conscious way of thinking for most individuals, as it is deeply engrained in our psyche. This can be extremely isolating, and push you to question the depth of your grief and the loss you’ve experienced. This concept is viewed as a "type of grief", but it more so can be viewed as a "side effect" of grief. This also is not only applicable to grief in the case of death, but also the many other forms of grief. There are few support systems, rituals, traditions, or institutions such as bereavement leave available to those experiencing grief and loss.
Childhood trauma is often described as serious adverse childhood experiences. Children may go through a range of experiences that classify as psychological trauma; these might include neglect, abandonment, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and physical abuse. They may also witness abuse of a sibling or parent, or have a mentally ill parent. These events can have profound psychological, physiological, and sociological impacts leading to lasting negative effects on health and well-being. These events may include antisocial behaviors, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and sleep disturbances. Additionally, children whose mothers have experienced traumatic or stressful events during pregnancy have an increased risk of mental health disorders and other neurodevelopmental disorders.
In psychology, posttraumatic growth (PTG) is positive psychological change experienced as a result of struggling with highly challenging, highly stressful life circumstances. These circumstances represent significant challenges to the adaptive resources of the individual, and pose significant challenges to the individual's way of understanding the world and their place in it. Posttraumatic growth involves "life-changing" psychological shifts in thinking and relating to the world and the self, that contribute to a personal process of change, that is deeply meaningful.
George A. Bonanno is a professor of clinical psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University, U.S. He is responsible for introducing the controversial idea of resilience to the study of loss and trauma. He is known as a pioneering researcher in the field of bereavement and trauma. The New York Times on February 15, 2011, stated that the current science of bereavement has been "driven primarily" by Bonanno. Scientific American summarized a main finding of his work, "The ability to rebound remains the norm throughout adult life." Bonanno has been honored with several major awards for his work.
Vicarious trauma (VT) is a term invented by Irene Lisa McCann and Laurie Anne Pearlman that is used to describe how work with traumatized clients affects trauma therapists. The phenomenon had been known as secondary traumatic stress, a term coined by Charles Figley. In vicarious trauma, the therapist experiences a profound worldview change and is permanently altered by empathetic bonding with a client. This change is thought to have three requirements: empathic engagement and exposure to graphic, traumatizing material; exposure to human cruelty; and the reenactment of trauma in therapy. This can produce changes in a therapist's spirituality, worldview, and self-identity.
The terms delayed grief and unresolved grief are variations of grieving after a loss. The meaning of unresolved grief is any aspect of grieving that has yet to be resolved.
Transgenerational trauma is the psychological and physiological effects that the trauma experienced by people has on subsequent generations in that group. The primary mode of transmission is the shared family environment of the infant causing psychological, behavioral and social changes in the individual.
Prolonged grief disorder (PGD), also known as complicated grief (CG), traumatic grief (TG) and persistent complex bereavement disorder (PCBD) in the DSM-5, is a mental disorder consisting of a distinct set of symptoms following the death of a family member or close friend. People with PGD are preoccupied by grief and feelings of loss to the point of clinically significant distress and impairment, which can manifest in a variety of symptoms including depression, emotional pain, emotional numbness, loneliness, identity disturbance and difficulty in managing interpersonal relationships. Difficulty accepting the loss is also common, which can present as rumination about the death, a strong desire for reunion with the departed, or disbelief that the death occurred. PGD is estimated to be experienced by about 10 percent of bereaved survivors, although rates vary substantially depending on populations sampled and definitions used.
Ambiguous loss is a loss that occurs without a significant likelihood of reaching emotional closure or a clear understanding. This kind of loss leaves a person searching for answers, and thus complicates and delays the process of grieving, and often results in unresolved grief. Causes include infertility, termination of pregnancy, disappearance of a family member, death of an ex-spouse, and a family member being physically alive but in a state of cognitive decline due to Alzheimer's disease.
Trauma focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT) is an evidence-based psychotherapy or counselling that aims at addressing the needs of children and adolescents with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other difficulties related to traumatic life events. This treatment was developed and proposed by Drs. Anthony Mannarino, Judith Cohen, and Esther Deblinger in 2006. The goal of TF-CBT is to provide psychoeducation to both the child and non-offending caregivers, then help them identify, cope, and re-regulate maladaptive emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Research has shown TF-CBT to be effective in treating childhood PTSD and with children who have experienced or witnessed traumatic events, including but not limited to physical or sexual victimization, child maltreatment, domestic violence, community violence, accidents, natural disasters, and war. More recently, TF-CBT has been applied to and found effective in treating complex posttraumatic stress disorder.
The dual process model of coping is a model for coping with grief developed by Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut. This model seeks to address shortcomings of prior models of coping, and provide a framework that better represents the natural variation in coping experience on a day to day basis.
Miscarriage and grief are both an event and subsequent process of grieving that develops in response to a miscarriage. Almost all those experiencing a miscarriage experience grief. This event is often considered to be identical to the death of a child and has been described as traumatic. "Devastation" is another descriptor of miscarriage. Grief is a profound, intensely personal sadness stemming from irreplaceable loss, often associated with sorrow, heartache, anguish, and heartbreak. Sadness is an emotion along with grief, on the other hand, is a response to the loss of the bond or affection was formed and is a process rather than one single emotional response. Grief is not equivalent to depression. Grief also has physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, cultural, and philosophical dimensions. Bereavement and mourning refer to the ongoing state of loss, and grief is the reaction to that loss. Emotional responses may be bitterness, anxiety, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust and blaming others; these responses may persist for months. Self-esteem can be diminished as another response to miscarriage. Not only does miscarriage tend to be a traumatic event, women describe their treatment afterwards to be worse than the miscarriage itself.
Child bereavement occurs when a child loses someone of importance in their life. There is substantial research regarding grief in adults, but there is less focus in literature about grief among children. Children will experience instances in their life that could involve losing a parent, sibling, or friend through suicide, unintentional injury, homicide, or natural causes. The levels of grief and bereavement differ among children, including uncomplicated and complicated bereavement. Unlike adults, children may experience and express their grief and bereavement through behaviors, and are less likely to outwardly express their emotions. The children who experience bereavement and grief can receive treatment involving group intervention, play therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy. Different forms of treatment for children experiencing bereavement and or grief can help to reduce symptoms of anxiety, depression, social adjustment, and posttraumatic stress. Research has shown that it is important to be aware of the difficulties in predicting how losing a closed one can impact a child’s emotionality and how their coping abilities will differ across ages and cultures.
Suicide bereavement is the experience of those who are grieving the loss of someone to suicide. Over 800,000 individuals die by suicide every year. It was stated by Shneidman (1978) that every suicide leaves behind 6 "survivor-victims". However, new research shows that each suicide leaves behind approximately 135 who personally knew the decedent. The #not6 hashtag has been used by Cerel and colleagues to represent that suicide bereavement is many more than publicly portrayed.
In psychology, social constraints can be defined as "any social condition that causes a trauma survivor to feel unsupported, misunderstood, or otherwise alienated from their social network when they are seeking social support or attempting to express trauma-related thoughts, feelings, or concerns." Social constraints are most commonly defined as negative social interactions which make it difficult for an individual to speak about their traumatic experiences. The term is associated with the social-cognitive processing model, which is a psychological model describing ways in which individuals cope and come to terms with trauma they have experienced. Social constraints have been studied in populations of bereaved mothers, individuals diagnosed with cancer, and suicide-bereaved individuals. There is evidence of social constraints having negative effects on mental health. They have been linked to increased depressive symptoms as well as post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in individuals who have experienced traumatic events. There seems to be a positive association between social constraints and negative cognitions related to traumatic events. Social constraints have also been linked to difficulties in coping with illness in people who have been diagnosed with terminal illness such as cancer.
Perinatal bereavement or perinatal grief refers to the emotions of the family following a perinatal death, defined as the demise of a fetus or newborn infant. Perinatal loss affects one in every ten women across the globe with the worldwide perinatal death rate at approximately 2.7 million deaths per year. Perinatal death is recognized as a traumatic life event as it is often sudden, unexpected, and devastating to parents who have had little to no direct life experiences with their child before their death.
Bereavement groups, or grief groups, are a type of support group that bereaved individuals may access to have a space to process through or receive social support around grief. Bereavement groups are typically one of the most common services offered to bereaved individuals, encompassing both formalized group therapy settings for reducing clinical levels of grief as well as support groups that offer support, information, and exchange between those who have experienced loss.
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