Loss of the Loved Ones. Counselors Approaches

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One of the main challenges, faced by counselors, is finding an appropriate approach to helping people, affected by the loss of their loved ones, to cope with the sensation of an overwhelming grief.

Therefore, there is nothing surprising about that fact that, as time goes on, we witness the emergence of more and more qualitatively new bereavement-therapies.

One of these therapies is based upon the idea that, contrary to the classical conventions of a psychotherapeutic counseling, counselors that deal with grief-stricken patients, should encourage the latter to maintain emotional links with their deceased relatives/friends – whatever illogical it may sound.

Hence, the conceptual premise of the so-called ‘saying hello’ approaches to bereavement-counseling, “I believe that the (proper) process of grief is a ‘saying goodbye and then saying hullo’ phenomenon” (White, 1988, p. 11).

That is, in order for grieving individuals to be able to accept the loss, they should be prompted (by counselors) to refer to their deceased relatives/friends, as such that remain alive and well in the memories of the affected individuals.

The earlier mentioned assumption justifies the deployment of the following counseling techniques, in this respect: encouraging patients to write letters to the diseased person; encouraging patients to write letters back to themselves, on behalf of the deceased person; convincing patients to construct shrines to the deceased person, while attending his or her grave on a regular basis (to ‘say hello’), etc.

As Walter noted, “The purpose of grief is not to move on without those who have died, but to find a secure place for them. For this place to be secure, the image of the dead normally has to be reasonably accurate, shared by others and tested out against them” (1996, p. 20).

The ‘saying hello’ therapeutic paradigm derives out of the theory of social constructivism, according to which, the emanations of the surrounding reality are essentially ‘constructed’ in people’s minds, rather than being objectively perceived, as to what they really are (Benokraitis, 1996; Blaik-Hourani, 2011).

In its turn, this implies that there is no reason to believe that patients must learn to accept the reality of their loved one’s death, as the main precondition for their eventual recovery from grief.

After all, according to the advocates of social constructivism, the notions of ‘life’ and ‘death’ are highly subjective, which is why the counselors’ tendency to accentuate the objectivity of death, while addressing the anxieties of their death-stricken patients, cannot have any positive effect on these patients’ psychological well-being.

Nevertheless, I personally do not subscribe to the conventions of the ‘saying hello’ approach to bereavement-counseling. This is because this approach is innately inconsistent with the very theoretical premise, out of which it derives.

For example, as it was pointed out earlier, the proponents on this approach suggest that since there is no de facto objective reality (according to them, the reality is being constructed in people’s minds); it is specifically the currently predominant socio-cultural discourse, which defines the extent of the bereavement-therapy’s appropriateness/inappropriateness.

This is supposed to justify the deployment of the ‘saying hello’ therapy – after all, as time goes on, more and more people grow increasingly aware of the relativistic subtleties of the surrounding reality’s emanations, which in turn prevents us from referring to the notions of ‘life’ and ‘death’, as being discursively objective.

Yet, the same discourse of relativity, results in exposing the sheer fallaciousness of metaphysical (spiritually intense) perceptional modes – hence, the growing popularity of atheism in the West (Tschannen, 1991).

Because of that, the suggestion that grown up individuals, affected by the death of their loved ones, would benefit from being encouraged to ‘stay in touch’ with their deceased relatives/friends, is likely to be thought of as being intellectually insulting by the very same people, to which the ‘saying hello’ therapy is supposed to apply.

After all, intellectually advanced individuals, are perfectly aware of the fact that there is no ‘afterlife’. Therefore, encouraging them to toy with the idea is emotionally damaging.

There is another aspect to it – contrary to what the proponents of the ‘saying hello therapy’ suggest, people’s sense of bereavement-related grief does not quite reflect their emotional uncomfortableness with having to deal with the absence of their loved ones per se.

Rather, it reflects these people’s own fears of death (Razinsky, 2010). What it means is that, by encouraging grief-stricken individuals to ‘stay in touch’ with the dead, counselors contribute to the acuteness of their patients’ death-anxieties, which can hardly have any therapeutic effect on the latter, whatsoever.

In light of what has been said earlier, the three foremost advices to counselors who specialize in helping people to cope with the loss of their loved ones, can be formulated as follows:

– Counselors should encourage their grief-stricken patients to adopt an intellectually honest/stoic stance, when it comes to facing the death of close relatives/friends, on their part.Even though this approach to bereavement-counseling presupposes the possibility for the patients’ sensation of grief to become more acute initially, once they come to rational terms with their loss, the intensity of their suffering will be effectively subdued.

For councilors, it is important to be able to treat their patients in the intellectually honest manner – this itself will contribute to the rehabilitation of the latter more than anything else will.

– Counselors should take into account the particulars of their patients’ ethno-cultural affiliation.What is common about atheistic and religious views on bereavement, is that both of them imply that, in order for grief-stricken individuals to be able to recover, they should be willing to apply a mental effort into ‘letting go’ their loved ones, in the emotional sense of this word.

Yet; whereas, highly secularized Whites (even those who consider themselves formally religious) would benefit more from counselors rationalizing the earlier mentioned idea, the traditionally minded representatives of racial minorities should be encouraged to contemplate on ‘letting go’, within the theological framework of what happened to be their religion.

– Counselors should strive to encourage grief-stricken patients not to reflect upon the death of their close friends/relatives too much.This is because, while remaining mentally focused on the death of their loved ones, bereaving individuals do not only continue to experience the acute sensation of grief, but they also grow ever more emotionally unstable, due to the fact that their mental fixation on death, increase the intensity of their own subliminal death-anxieties.

The earlier articulated advices also imply what counselors should not do, while trying to help people to cope with the loss of their loved ones – encouraging grief-stricken individuals to cherish the memories of the dead.

This is because, while remaining ‘in touch’ with their deceased relatives/friends, people cannot help but to remain preoccupied with the unconscious thoughts of death, which can hardly have any therapeutic effect on the emotional well-being of the latter.

References

Benokraitis, N. (1996). Marriages and families: Changes, choices, and constraints. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Blaik-Hourani, R. (2011). Constructivism and revitalizing social studies. History Teacher, 44 (2), 227-249.

Razinsky, L. (2010). Driving death away: Death and Freud’s theory of the death drive. Psychoanalytic Review, 97 (3), 393-424.

Tschannen, O. (1991). The secularization paradigm: A systematization. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 30 (4), 395-415.

Walter, T. (1996). A new model of grief: Bereavement and biography. Mortality, 1 (1), 7-25.

White, M. (1988). Saying hullo again. Dulwich Centre Newsletter, 2, 7-11.

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Loss of the Loved Ones. Counselors Approaches

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