“I’m reflecting feelings, repeating, setting up a ‘holding’ environment where it’s OK to say the unsayable or mention the unmentionable, like ‘I hated my father, I’m glad he’s dead,’” she says. She likes to use Rogerian methods when helping clients process their grief. “We have to communicate that we’re safe - that other people may not want to hear about this anymore, but we do,” says Mustaine, a member of ACA. Whatever clients are experiencing, it is important for counselors to provide a safe place and to validate their losses, Doka says. Clients grieving a loss may feel sadness, yearning, guilt, anger or loneliness, but some may also feel a certain sense of relief or emancipation, particularly if they had a problematic relationship with the deceased, he explains. “People react to loss in all kinds of ways,” says Doka, who has written numerous books on grief and loss, including his latest, Grief Is a Journey: Finding Your Path Through Loss, published earlier this year. Regardless of the nature of the loss, Horn says she approaches grief work with the same goal in mind: to help clients experience and express their grief in a way that is natural for them. “We’ve gone beyond the idea of ‘stages.’ We really see grief as a unique process for each individual.” “There’s so much outdated information about how we conceptualize grief and loss,” Horn says. “Counselors are going to be working with grief and loss really in some regard with every client they see,” asserts Elizabeth Horn, an assistant professor of counseling at Idaho State University’s Meridian Health Science Center.ĭoka, Mustaine and Horn agree that counselors who do not work regularly with issues of loss may need to rethink their concepts of grief. She notes that she has helped clients cope with grief connected to experiences as varied as moving, losing contact with a friend, retiring and aging. Licensed mental health counselor Beverly Mustaine, a private practitioner and an associate professor of counseling at Argosy University in Sarasota, Florida, has taught graduate-level courses in loss and grief for 20 years. Although society expects people to grieve the death of a family member, people also mourn events such as the passing of a pet, a divorce or the loss of a job, Doka says. As American Counseling Association member Kenneth Doka explains, grief is a reaction to the loss of anyone or anything an individual is attached to deeply. In reality, it is a process that follows a different course for each individual.įurthermore, the experiencing of grief isn’t exclusive to the loss of a loved one through death.
#BYOND CONNECTION DIED SERIES#
Despite the continued prominence of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ “five stages” in the public lexicon, experts now know that grief does not move smoothly and predictably through a series of predetermined stages. For many years, mental health practitioners labored under the assumption that grief was a relatively short-lived process that people navigated in an orderly and predictable fashion until they reached “closure” - the point at which the bereaved would move on and put the person they had been grieving in the past.
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