Introduction to Grief and Bereavement Issues
Kathryn Patricelli, MA, edited by Mark Dombeck, Ph.D.image by Konrad Summers (lic)While it is true that people require "air, food, water, clothing, and shelter,? in order to survive, we must also add "relationships" to this list because it is a rare person who is able to thrive in the absence of intimate relationships with other people, people, and things.
Grief is the process and emotions that we experience when our important relationships are significantly interrupted or (more frequently) ended, either through death, divorce, relocation, theft, destruction, or some similar process. A related term, ?bereavement?, has different meanings for different people, but all meanings refer to the grieving process. While some view bereavement as a specific subtype of grief that occurs when a loved one (usually a spouse) dies, others think of the term as referring to the period of time during which grief is felt and losses are dealt with.
Grief starts when someone or something we care about is lost to us. We do not grieve for all lost relationships; instead, we grieve only for those that have become important to us over time. These can be relationships with people that we have strong connections to, such as family members, spouses, significant others, and friends; places we feel attached to, such as the house we grew up in or our hometown; or things that are important to us, such as love letters, a watch that a grandparent gave us, etc. We may have loved or hated that person, place, or thing, but we feel grief when they (or it) are gone.
There are two types of losses that we may grieve. The first is the actual loss of the person or thing in our lives. The second is the symbolic loss of the events that can no longer occur in the future because of that actual loss. For example, if a child is lost to parents, those parents lose not only their actual child, but also all the many events they expected to share with that child, including birthdays, graduations, wedding days, and other shared events large and small that make up the ongoing relationship with the lost child that is no longer possible because that child has died.
In many ways, we live our lives through our important relationships. Our relationships define us and who we are; they become intimately intertwined into our sense of self (or self-concept) and are thus a living part of us. It is terribly painful to lose one of these key relationships, because with the loss of such an important relationship, we also lose an important part of ourselves. For this reason, grief is not something that happens 'out there' in the world. Instead, it happens inside each grieving person's sense of self which is personally wounded and damaged by such losses. The work of grief is thus the personal work of healing and regrowing the sense of self.
Grief ends when we have gotten past the acute need for the lost other person or thing in our lives and are able to function normally without them. This doesn't mean that we stop feeling sad when we think about older losses; it only means that we are no longer significantly crippled by them.
Resources
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Articles
- Introduction to Grief and Bereavement Issues
- Grief is a Normal and Natural Process
- Stage of Grief Models: Horowitz
- Stage of Grief Models: Kubler-Ross
- Stage of Grief Models: Rando
- Symptoms of Grief
- Coping With Your Own Grief
- More About Coping With Grief
- Understanding When Grief is Complete
- Helping Other Adults Cope With Grief
- Helping Children Cope With Grief
- What To Tell Children About Grief Depends on Their Age
- Cultural and Religious-Spiritual Implications of Grief
- Understanding Pathological Grief
- Grief Resources
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Questions and Answers
- Do You Know What's Wrong With Me?
- Recent Loss of my Mother is Causing Problems...
- Bipolar, Depression, Grief & Anxiety
- Ending Therapy
- Am I Depressed?
- Therapist Was Fired
- My husband has left me for another woman. How do I let go?
- Is a friendship possible after dating/living together for 3 years
- Children's role-play after loss. Is this an instance of denial?
- How do I help my grieving, substance abusing daughter?
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32 more
- Should I ask for closure 4 months after a break up?
- General Anxiety
- Complicated grief has left me feeling numb
- What to do when your therapist quits?
- how can I cope with what seems unbearable pain of loss upon death of my husband
- How can I help a grieving sister who is angry with me?
- how do i deal with the fact that my therapist is dying?
- Death of both parents
- How to Help My Grieving Mother?
- Sister's Death
- death of a dear friend
- My Fiancee Can't Get Over His Late Wife
- My friend cant get out of love
- love rejection
- I am the product of a rape
- i can't seem to get over any of this
- Lingering Feelings for my old affair partner
- one year out and just starting to deal with grief
- Finding It Very Difficult To Forgive
- Embarrassed and Ashamed of My Weakness
- Grieving All The Time
- Longing For My Son
- Why Did He Back Away?
- Grieving and Clueless
- Sudden Loss
- Bereavement and Grief
- Smoking To Remember Mom
- Trauma/Tragedy
- Broken Heart
- The Aftermath of Suicide
- A Recent Loss
- Losing a Father
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Book & Media Reviews
- 12 and Holding
- 3 NBS of Julian Drew
- After You'd Gone
- All Alone in the Universe
- All Rivers Flow to the Sea
- All Seasons Pass
- Bereft
- Bodies in Motion and at Rest
- Catalyst
- Closure
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47 more
- Comfort
- Death of a Parent
- Don't Go Where I Can't Follow
- Driving My Father
- Emma Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree
- Feather Boy
- Fortress of My Youth
- Going Through Hell Without Help From Above
- Good Grief
- Goodbye Rune
- Healing Conversations
- Honoring Grief
- How We Grieve
- I Remain in Darkness
- I Wasn't Ready to Say Goodbye
- Is There a Duty to Die?
- It Takes a Worried Man
- Liberating Losses
- Life after Loss
- Lost in the Forest
- Love Is a Mix Tape
- Love That Dog
- Michael Rosen's Sad Book
- Name All the Animals
- Nobody's Child Anymore
- Remembering Georgy
- Saving Grace
- Saying It Out Loud
- Seeing the Crab
- Speak to Me
- Still Here
- The Bad Beginning
- The Carnivorous Carnival
- The Color of Absence
- The Dead Fathers Club
- The Death of a Child
- The Hostile Hospital
- The Lovely Bones
- The Measure of Our Days
- The Miracle
- The Scar
- The Truth About Grief
- The Undertaking
- Understanding Grief
- Wake
- What Dying People Want
- Wild Awake
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Links
- [5] Associations
- [3] Community
- [16] Information
- [1] Services
- [9] Videos
- [2] Blogs
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Videos
- The Journey Through Loss and Grief
- Acute Grief: The Initial Response to Bereavement
- We don't "move on" from grief - We move forward with it
- Complicated Grief: Q & A with Dr. M. Katherine Shear
- Grief through a Child's Eyes
- The Adventure of Grief: Dr Geoff Warburton
- The Grieving Process
- 12 Suggestions for Dealing with Grief and Loss
- Dealing With Loss and Grief
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More Information
- An Interview with George Bonanno, Ph.D., on Bereavement
- An Interview with Holli Kenley, MA, on Surviving Betrayal
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