BEREAVEMENT COUNSELLING - GRIEF COUNSELING
FEELINGS & EMOTIONS of GRIEF and BEREAVEMENT in
GRIEF COUNSELLING & BEREAVEMENT COUNSELING
Bereavement counselling and grief counselling, statistically, there is a growing demand for. Officially admittedly training is poor in grief counseling, especially in bereavement counselling. So is counselling education on the psychological and biological effects on the clients feelings and emotions, making empathy less effective in bereavement counselling and in grief counselling.
Grief, mourning, bereavement; words synonymous to lay persons seeking bereavement counselling or relevant grief therapy.
Grief counseling is mostly sought as bereavement counselling. Beravement counseling often involves loss of someone dear -which is so painful that it has found its way to lay dream interpretations as symbolising predicted sorrow, of the type sought in grief therapy or bereavement counselling.
Grief therapy seekers' pain often, and in bereavement counselling, is death. Death's pain has always moved the lay person and the specialist alike -literarily as well as academically and professionally. The lay person has, varying from culture to culture, his traditions; the specialist his researches, theories ~places are named after the dead, investigations carried into out-of-body experiences -whether death is considered sad or joyous, physical or spiritual the interest continues, grows -whether the bond is broken with the dead or not those left behind are seriously affected by a need to adjust to the changes caused. Grief management involves more than knowledge of grief process. In managing grief it must not be forgotten that the feelings differ of clients of grief therapy and more so in bereavement counselling.
Grief therapy relevant and bereavement counselling deal with what is of utmost importance in death loss and grief recovery. "If we go to the root of it," said Dag Hammerskjold, "it is our concept of death that decides our answers to all the questions which life poses." Jung agrees that "when a human life comes to an end before our eyes the question of the meaning and worth of life never becomes more urgent." It makes bereavement counselling and guidance the ultimate in grief counseling.
Grief therapy and counseling training, on grief and bereavement counseling, have ignored what adds Jung: "...or agonising..." It is; the composer, the poet, the story-teller agree, as do the scientist and cleric. Laing only hints at the effect: "You'll cry, when I die; you'll yawn, when I'm gone; you'll be bored, unadored", and the reasons why is sought grief counselling in grief therapy, especially bereavement counselling.
Grief counseling clients, the bereaved seeking bereavement counselling, are not necessarily fully functioning persons. Death ~ intentional -suicide, abortion; unintentional ~ sudden or expected -accidental or violent, or with stigma and shame... Loss ~ something/someone precious taken away -perhaps with little or no memories of to cherish; bereavement ~ the experience of the loss -the vacuum felt and necessity for struggle (to re-organise personally and socially -chores and bills, cultural expectations and friends avoiding not to upset); grief ~ the emotional response to bereavement -sadness, guilt, rejection, fear, anger, self-worth, hopelessness; mourning ~coming to terms with grief -through its stages (numbness -shock, searching -'why me!?', depression -loneliness, low mood, and recovery -acceptance, adjustment)… Painful enough for the fuller functioning person! More so for most seeking grief counselling, the client in bereavement counselling.
Bereavement counselling clients, the bereaved needing counselling in grief therapy, include those whose 'organismic valuing process' has not developed enough to manage the 'tasks of mourning'; their grief is not 'typical'. It may be delayed, not yet experienced (perhaps a child, a teen-ager); chronic (necessitating medical attention); inhibited (can't grieve properly, perhaps married and lost a lover and needs exercising treatment); abnormal, years later still setting the table also for the lost loved-one... To such the pain of the anxiety and distress is unmanageable. Without education in these is training in counselling in respect of bereavement counselling and grief counseling.
Grief therapy may be needed only, or grief counselling also in the form of bereavement counselling; when one realises uncontrollable behaviour, be it identifiable such as moodiness or 'something wrong' affecting adversely personally and/or sociably, these are neglected considerations: "Even in a simple organism such as a sea-snail's, learning changes the structure of the cells within the nervous system" says Agras, director of behavioural medicine at Stanford university; within the brain cell learning and biological processes are joined -biology influences behaviour, but behaviour affects biology. Such education is not coupled with training specific to grief counseling or bereavement counselling.
Bereavement counselling training, and grief therapy lack essential education. Even in the case of pathological depression the bereaved client can be helped by bereavement counseling. David Burns, founder of Behavioural Sciences Research Institute, says "The medical model implies purely medical, or biochemical solutions, but the 'interactionist model' implies that the therapist can break into the mind-body loop at several points: physical symptoms, behaviour, thoughts" -thoughts being based on feelings, on emotions. Bereavement counselling this is important to; yet, training is without such education in grief therapy on bereavement counseling.
Bereavement counsellling, therapy involving grief counseling, and counselling generally, assume that some clients cannot be helped. A client seeking counselling can be; not only if he is defensively seeking to reject his grief and to attribute his problem to something else, but even if he is seeking to displace his grief onto other persons or one counselling. Frijda tells us "Most human emotional behaviour consists of intentional behaviour in the restricted voluntary sense. It is behaviour prompted by outcome expectations and, to a large extent, by conscious anticipation of those outcomes" and that "Emotional action tendencies (...) are states of readiness to achieve or maintain a given kind of relationship with the environment." The client has sought help, is ready to be helped in grief counselling or by bereavement counselling.
In Grief therapy the patient needing bereavement counseling, the bereaved seeking bereavement counselling, can be helped: "All needs evoke corresponding drives toward their satisfaction," writes Assagioli, "Therefore every need arouses, sooner or later, a corresponding will." The counseling client having exercised that will, in Glanwill's words, "the will therein lieth, which dieth not - who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigour?", if the counsellor uses her skills with such knowledge in grief counseling or bereavement counselling.
Clients differ in grief therapy, also so if needing counselling, be it grief counseling or specificly bereavement counselling. Not all affected by grief seek specifically grief counseling or therapy, not all affected by bereavement seek bereavement counselling aware of grief as the underlying cause; some seek counselling without consciousness of grief -e.g., delayed grief. Frijda says that sometimes no emotion of fear is conscious of as having to do with grief: "They may lead to tears and to despair, but in between, life is filled with other things; actions to fill the emptiness or seek contact with the lost person by arranging flowers before her portrait or dusting his clothes in the closet. Evidently the absence is continually present and reacted to; there is no continuos grief, but in some other sense an action-readiness change." Only the counsellor's educated skills can discover grief as the underlying cause of the problem of a client who is seeking neither bereavement counselling specifically nor grief counseling or therapy.
Grief counselling, bereavement counselling, as other counselling, also vary in approach, e.g. 'person centered'. "It's All about Loving" say Mearns and Thorne, "Jean looks very attentive -as though she's really trying to understand as fully as she can.. she reaches out, holds Jim's hand.. he cries.. Jean shivers..." ~ she does not seek to interpret, nor to impose her or the society's values on him, for she is a 'companion' -congruent, non-judgemental, empathic.. 'loving'... But 'Jean' counselling with tearful eyes!? Does that help in counselling for grief, to a client seeking bereavement counselling?!
Whether grief counseling or bereavement counselling, 'Jean' is human -her training has not made her less capable of feeling, emotion. The Bozarth, Thamner, Brodley Prepositions consider the optimum in relation to the creation of the core conditions of congruence, positive regard, and empathy, and say that the client must be the primary reference point. It is much advocated, popularly in the 'person centered' approach, that the counsellor must grow herself to be able to deal with her own feelings first, so that she can better understand the feelings and emotions of her client. It is recognised that "The anguish of another touches, on the whole personality of the individual called upon to help," and the counsellor's training does not seek to make her inhuman and incapable of feeling and emotion. But she knows, at first consciously and later habitually, also to protect herself from harmful or self-injurious non-discrimination between sympathy and empathy, in seeking to understand 'Jim'... This matters even more in grief counselling, especially in bereavement counselling.
To a terminally ill client, not a grief therapy patient seeking bereavement counselling, asks Carl Rogers: "Is that a hurt you think nobody could understand?" and "A client needs," he explains, "to be understood". But the counseling client needs also, in Egan's problem-solving way, to be helped to understand himself. Indeed in the Gestalt way to be shocked into that, and even in the way of Ellis his economic wellbeing to be concerned with, in counseling and so also in grief counselling, especially if bereavement counselling –in a CNN program on kinds of counselling, e.g., Rogers, counselling, cannot avoid suggesting a solution
Grief counseling, especially bereavement counselling, calls for more than the way counselling of one or of another. Grieving over a loved one is a natural and necessary process, says Worden, that most people are able to experience, and emerge from in a healthy manner. 'Sorry to hear that...' helps quickly create opportunity for the client to talk about it, to feel less bad about it, although some may react differently -which is also fine, and the counsellor works not with facts but feelings. Yet, grief therapy and counseling training and do not include basic education on feelings for grief or bereavement counselling.
In Grief counseling, more if bereavement counselling, the feelings the counsellor works with must be those of the grieving or bereaved client himself. This may necessitate the counsellor's also teaching the client how to express his feelings of grief or bereavement. "We need," writes Marco deVries, "to let go of our feelings of impotence in the face of death, whether we are aware of them or not -feelings that make us see death as the only thing we cannot rule, which therefore inflicts an unavoidable defeat on us." This emphasises the client's own feelings. On the first afternoon of a session, say Rijke deVries and Rudy Rijke "none of the participants used the word 'I', but, instead, they talked in terms of 'my husband says...' and 'my children want...' and 'my doctor thinks..'; but by the end of the second afternoon, by simply talking about some basic ideas, the participants developed, in their own respective ways, a 'relative I', to take responsibility for themselves, making choices that were realistic and meaningful (to themselves)." The 'person centered' approach stops where Sartre does, "hell is other people!" The bereavement counseling client is capable of learning to express his own feelings, if the counsellor in grief counseling helps this essential, in bereavement counselling or 'work of mourning'.
In grief counseling, especially in bereavement counselling, the client's perceptions have to do with his feelings. There are generally recognised stages to the process of mourning; but, even on the basis of gender, men and women grieve differently. Special attention may require a client whose pain is coupled with stigma or shame -to do with crime or an unsociable disease, or whose pregnancy is coupled with miss-carriage or still-birth; also, if there are no memories to cherish, or when the client is child with no adult perception of death. In grief therapy for the terminally ill apply Jung's words: "Dying, therefore, has its onset long before actual death. Moreover, this often shows itself in peculiar changes of personality which may precede death by quite a long time." Therefore the client's feelings can constantly change in grief or bereavement counselling.
Grief therapy and counselling training, only on bereavement counselling or grief counselling but on counselling generally, lacks basic education on perception -not many counsellors have even heard of the Ames room, even among those preferring the related system of counselling. Insight into perception enhances the ability to deal with feelings that are based on the client's perception in counselling for grief, especially in bereavement counselling.
The counselling trainee, with or without interest in grief counselling or bereavement counselling, in counselling – generally, need not be enabled to argue the differences in psychology of, e.g., Freud, Jung, Adler -nor even of counselling systems of Gestalt, Egan, Ellis, and Rogers. But while many, e.g., 'person centered' counselling trainees, may know of Lao Tsu, many counsellors forget, e.g., that Carl Rogers's reason for not becoming a minister is said to be his disfavouring the idea of maintaining a rigid set of beliefs, and on a counseling training-video he reveals what he describes as being hurt and fear, itself, as illness, almost worse than the illness itself, by the question "...because you didn't dare express the person that you really were...?" Yet, training in grief therapy does not attach importance to education on feelings to better help the patient express his feelings, nor does counselling training specifically to grief counseling and bereavement counselling.
In bereavement counselling and grief counseling, in its interpretation that "the self-concept is unalterable" but that attitudes or behaviour can be modified or transformed, in its task "to create new conditions of relationship where the 'growth-process' can be encouraged and the stunting or warping can be remedied", the 'person centered' approach, and other approaches to grief or bereavement counselling, demand the consideration that "everyone experiences grief in his own way." In his own way should grief counseling enable, with education on feelings, the client seeking grief counselling or bereavement counselling, to express his experience of grief.
In counselling, especially in bereavement counselling and generally in grief counselling, the client is depressed. "Depression is tied in, to a great extend with loss" suggest experts. Depression rates highest, 100, on the Holmes and Rahe Social Readjustment Scales in the case of the death of a spouse, and as high as 5th in the case of death of a close family member; and "Talking is very important, especially if there is genuine interest on the part of the counseling person encouraging the conversation -the important thing is for the depressed person to be sure of the counseling person's concern." This concern cannot be shown best without the person giving grief counseling or bereavement counselling having basic education on feelings.
No less in grief counseling, especially bereavement in counselling, does it applies that the client "needs to be understood in the darkest corners of his experience" as says Carl Rogers. In bereavement counseling, he needs to talk and grieve, and he must be made to feel safe, he must be empowered to do so, encouraged to perform or complete what Worden calls 'the tasks of mourning' -accepting the reality of the loss, experiencing the pain of grief, adjusting to the new environment, looking ahead and investing in the future. Without basic psychology education on feelings and emotions bereavement counselling, grief counseling generally, is dissadvantaged where constantly change the client's feelings.
The effectiveness of grief counselling and bereavement counselling depends also on the availability and effectiveness of training in grief and bereavement counselling. Expert research conclusion and recommendation is that "there is need by training support" in the medical profession for doctors and nurses responsible for breaking bad news and the "confusion which lies in the terminology between bereavement counselling and professional counseling." This is more alarming in grief therapy involving grief or bereavement counseling.
The departed do 'know' this (form a poem by Orhan Seyfi Ari -translated.): "Since to mourn and remember us there is someone," … "That's what counts -we can assume our duty to've done."
On grief in bereavement, "I am I and you are you," wrote Henry Scott Holland, "whatever we are to each other, that we are still. (...) Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effect." -of grief in bereavement.
So it can be for clients of grief and bereavement counselling -with a little more concern on the part of counselling trainers with grief or bereavement counselling.