Depression Depression comes when the bereaved person fully confronts their loss. This is the stage of grieving that looks to the outside world the way grief “should,” characterized by persistent feelings of bleakness, unhappiness, numbness, and poor concentration. Physical symptoms, including fatigue, muscle pain, insomnia, and lack of appetite, may also arise. Acceptance The final stage of grieving comes, if it does, with a sense of letting go, that the loss a person has sustained is still present, but not overwhelming. Acceptance is not synonymous with happiness, and it does not mean forgetting the person lost or returning to the way things were. Kübler-Ross notes that not everyone reaches this stage of grieving and instead may experience what is known as “complicated grief,” which will be discussed later in this course. Kübler-Ross also notes that acceptance may wax and wane with time. The Sixth Stage of Grief In an extension of Kübler-Ross’s work, her collaborator, the psychiatrist David Kessler recently proposed a sixth stage of grief in his book, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief . Kessler emphasizes that a complete sense of closure after the death of a loved one is unrealistic and that grieving, in some form or other, is likely to go on indefinitely (Skinner, 2021). Rather than an end to grief, the sixth stage Kessler describes is a process of personal growth that can happen in the wake of a loss if a bereaved person can resist the urge to turn away from the grief and instead processes what has happened and thinks about their loss’s place within the greater scheme of their life. the deceased person meant to you and celebrating their life with others but also include fixating on the death and isolating oneself. Restoration-oriented responses include taking care of yourself and moving into new roles and ways of living, but also denial and avoiding thinking about the loss. The oscillation occurs when one kind of response becomes too overwhelming, or other clamors for the attention of the bereaved. The Dual Process Model can help you and your clients understand why they may move unpredictably between different moods and different priorities. away from the full weight of their pain. Worden notes that the pain of a loss is there whether the bereaved person is willing to acknowledge it or not. Pressure to tamp down the pain of loss may come from within, from one’s community, or from society at large. There are many ways to ignore, deny, or block out pain, but if it is not allowed its full expression soon after loss, it can lead to complicated grief. Task III: To Adjust to a World Without the Deceased The third task is divided into three areas: external adjustments, internal adjustments, and spiritual adjustments. ● Making external adjustments involves realizing what the loss means for your daily life. Working on this task means figuring out how to do alone the activities you used to do with the deceased and taking on new roles to fill the hole left by your loved one’s death. For someone who lost a dear friend, this may mean finding someone new to talk to about the things you only discussed with your friend. For someone who has lost their life partner, this may mean figuring out how to take care of their children alone. ● Internal adjustments involve understanding yourself in a new light. A widow or widower working on this task may have to move from seeing themselves as half of a couple to their own, full person. Making external and internal adjustments may be intertwined as the bereaved person takes on new
reality and totality of loss sinks in, denial gives way to the next stage: anger. Anger When a grieving person can no longer deny their loss but is not ready to truly accept that loss, anger is a natural response. The direction of that anger may not make sense to those around the bereaved; it may point toward strangers, friends, family, God, or the deceased. Kübler-Ross notes that anger is a particularly hard response for those not experiencing the loss to understand or empathize with. This can lead to the bereaved feeling that their response is inappropriate and this in turn can lead to feelings of guilt and shame at the anger they feel. However, there is an internal logic to the anger of loss, since it can act as an “anchor,” “giving temporary structure to the nothingness of life.” As an immediate emotion that prompts action, anger allows those grieving to feel the intensity of their loss without collapsing under its weight. As the intense energy of anger fades, mourners move into the third stage of grief: bargaining. Bargaining This stage of grief signals that the bereaved is beginning to come to terms with the full reality of their loss. For a terminally ill person, bargaining may take the form of a “deal with God,” to spare them if they promise to live a better life going forward. For the bereaved, this may form “a maze of ‘if only…’ and ‘what if…’ statements.” People may be filled with a sense of guilt, and the possibly irrational belief that they could have acted to prevent their loved one’s death. Bargaining may be thought of as an intermediate stage, in which some of the energy leftover from recent anger is channeled into holding the totality of loss at arm’s length. When these efforts fail, a fuller experience of grief follows. The Dual Process Model The Dual Process Model of grief, proposed in 1999 by psychologists Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut offers an alternative, non-linear, view of grief. The model describes grief as an oscillation between “loss-oriented” responses and “restoration-oriented” responses (Williams, 2022). Loss-oriented responses involve focusing on the death of a loved one itself, whereas restoration-oriented responses are focused on the other elements of life and its new shape after loss. Each kind of response can be healthy or unhealthy. For example, loss-oriented responses include meditating on what The Four Tasks of Grieving In his book Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy, psychologist J. William Worden described the process of healthy grieving as the completion of four tasks (Luchterhand, 2019). While Worden’s tasks move from simple and immediate to more complex and ongoing, a mourning person may not move through them in strict sequence. They may work on multiple tasks simultaneously, spend time away from the work of this kind of grieving, or revisit The first of these tasks lines up neatly with the completion of the Denial stage in the Five Stages model. Completion of this task may mean finally being able to talk about the loss after initially refusing to, beginning to refer to the deceased in the past tense, or beginning to make funeral arrangements (Worden, 2018). Although the bereaved person may still have enormous trouble truly accepting the loss and all it means for them, acknowledging the loss on a basic level is a prerequisite for processing the loss. Completion of the first task may take time, with the bereaved oscillating, as described in the Dual Process Model, between confronting the reality of the loss and denial. Funerals can go a long way to helping people complete the first task. Task II: To Process the Pain of Grief The second task could simply be termed “feeling the pain.” This task is completed not when the bereaved person no longer feels pain at the loss of their loved one but when they no longer shy one task after having moved on from it. Task I: To Accept the Reality of the Loss
Page 7
Book Code: FAR0624
EliteLearning.com/Funeral
Powered by FlippingBook