Exam 2 Flashcards
To serve people when they need comfort, counsel and direction. The more we know about people in grief, the better we can serve them. A well grounded understanding of the grieving process. You need to know about grief because that is where the families are. Help solve problems arising from the death of someone in a social circle.
Why funeral directors need funeral service psychology and grief counseling.
- a thorough understanding of grief and bereavement because the general public now has a more in-depth knowledge of the subject.
- be familiar with the purpose and techniques of counseling.
- the funeral director is not a grief counselor and does not and should not be providing therapy to bereaved individuals, but often does assume the role of a counselor.
Things a funeral director should understand
Aside from performing the many legal, administrative and embalming tasks necessary in caring for the dead, are professional caregivers that work with bereaved families providing sensitive, effective intervention during a time of emotional need.
The funeral director
Involves assisting clients to better understand themselves and how to cope with their problems.
The helping process
Bring empathy and specific helping skills to guide clients in exploring their feelings and values, understanding their problems, making choices, and implementing changes in thought, affect and behavior.
The counselor
Hill and O’Brien three stage model for helping and Wolfelt’s phases in a helping relationship fit together nicely to form this.
Matrix for helping clients
Phase 1: The client and funeral director enter into a helping relationship.
(calling a funeral director to handle arrangements and notification of the death is a “cry for help”).
Phase 2: The building of a helping relationship.
(relationship moves from basic to helping as rapport develops between the funeral director and the family).
- Funeral director must be empathetic, warm, respectful, and genuine by showing concern and a willingness to assist the family however is necessary.
The Exploration Stage
Phase 3: Exploration and assistance in helping the family understand their alternatives.
- funeral director gathers information about the deceased, and that family’s needs, wishes and feelings and then explains the options available to them.
Phase 4: Consolidation and planning.
- the funeral director assists the family in planning a funeral that meets their needs.
The Insight stage
Phase 5: Implementation and action.
- funeral director implements the plan desired by the family.
Phase 6: Conclusion of the funeral process.
- funeral director assists the family with a sense of closure
Phase 7: Post funeral follow-up.
- “aftercare”
Action Stage
- Confirm the reality
- Express their emotions
- Modify emotional ties with the deceased
- memorialize the person’s life
- recognize and complete unfinished business
- receive emotional support
- be assured feelings are normal
- be accepted for where they are
- establish stability and security
- provide a basis for building new interpersonal relationships
Needs of the Bereaved
Talking helps survivors to understand what has happened and to make it real. Every fiber of their emotions wants the death not to have happened.
Confirm the reality.
Allow the expression of emotions. Avoid cliches or the suppression of feelings. Emotions can be expressed in the form of crying, screaming, or just quietly saying the words. The form that the expression takes does not matter, as long as the feelings are being expressed.
Express their emotions
Survivors want to acknowledge how they felt about the deceased and to tell others about that person’s life and what type of person he/she was. Can be done at a funeral or memorial service. This can mark the end of the old and the beginning of the new relationship.
-start a charity or scholarship in the person’s name, wealthy may build a wing in a hospital or naming it after the person, not well off people it may be as simple as a headstone about the deceased’s grave.
Memorialize the person’s life
People sometimes have to be shown different ways to complete unfinished business.
- talking to the deceased’s body at a wake, writing a letter to the deceased, visualizing the person and telling them what you wanted to say while they were alive.
Recognize and complete unfinished business
The love and attention given to a bereaved family from family and friends is comforting. They need nonjudgemental acceptance of people who care about them. If not from family and friends, then a counselor can supply this.
Receive emotional support
May have the feeling of going crazy, feelings following a death can be foreign and strange to the survivor. A counselor can relieve the fear and anxiety experienced and assist the survivor in realizing these feelings are normal responses to a major loss.
Be assured feelings are normal
Should not rush the mourning of a survivor. The bereaved should be accepted for where they are in the grieving process. A counselor can help a surviver clarify issues they have and help move them along in their journey.
- never tell the person that he/she should be somewhere other than where he/she is in the grieving process.
Be accepted for where they are
When a loved one dies, a sense of security and stability may seem lost or out of control. Stability and security will come back over time. Life will not be the same as before the death, but their new life can become stable and secure.
Establish stability and security
People may fill the void of the person who has passed by strengthening present relationships and develop new interpersonal relationships. Not always simple and fast. Does not mean the person has forgotten the deceased, but they learn now to nurture and love a new person.
-can be friendship, love, or both.
Provide a basis for building new interpersonal relationships
What have we lost?
What do we have left?
What may still be possible for us?
Schneider’s important questions for the counselor for the family to be able to effectively cope with and adapt to loss.
- The functional position or role the deceased played in the family can affect grief in family members
- an emotionally well integrated family may show minimal grief reaction at the time of death, but members may respond later with various physical or emotional symptoms or some type of social misbehavior.
- The value families place on emotions and the kinds of communication patterns that give a person permission to express feelings or not express feelings can affect mourning.
Worden’s dynamics that contribute to a family’s reaction to and recovery from a death.
Suggests that many of the bereaved’s symptoms were physical. Somatic distresses such as feelings of tightness in the throat, choking, shortness of breath, need for sighing, and empty feeling in the abdomen, and lack of muscular power is extremely common.
Lindemann, in relation to his grief syndome
- Somatic or bodily distress
- Preoccupation with the image of the deceased
- Guilt relating to the deceased and the circumstances of the death.
- Hostile reactions
- The inability to function as one had before the death.
Lindemann’s Grief Syndrome
Postulated that a major task of grieving is to withdraw the libido that was invested in the deceased.
Sigmund Freud
- Dejection
- Loss of interest in the outside world
- Loss of capacity of love
- Self reproach
Symptoms associated with the withdraw of the libido
Soon after death has taken place, mourner is numb and tricks to block out recognition of the loss and painful feelings.
Engel’s 6 step model : Stage 1- Shock and disbelief
Awareness gradually increases, crying, acknowledges the loss, regresses to a more helpless state.
Engel’s 6-step model: Stage 2- Developing awareness
Funerary rights that evoke social support from family and friends.
Engel’s 6 step model: Stage 3: Restitution
Bereaved person reviews the death and focuses mental and emotional energy on the deceased and their entire relationship.
Engel’s 6 step model: Stage 4: Resolving the loss
Stripping the decease of negative qualities, suppresses any and all negative thoughts and emotions about the deceased and may feel guilt.
Engel’s 6 step model: Stage 5: Idealization
Represents the road toward a healthy accommodation to the loss wherein the griever comes to a place where there is less and less preoccupation with the deceased on all of its aforementioned forms.
Engel’s 6 step model: Stage 6: Outcome
The greater the bereaved’s dependence on the deceased (for identity, survival, social standing), the greater the chances that the grief will be intense and the outcome of mourning may be less than optimal.
3 factors that should be addressed:
- The strength of the attachment
- The security of the attachment
- The ambivalence of the attachment
The preexisting relationship
Natural, sudden or considered untimely. Generally natural is easier for the bereaved, sudden or untimely is more difficult.
Type of death
Refers to ways grievers mourned or failed to mourn prior losses. Not the effect of the losses, but how the bereaved perceived and responded to those events.
-Unashamed feelings, repression, fear of social disapproval, denial or escape, confront circumstances.
If this is the first loss for the griever, other life-changing events may interfere with the mourning process such as divorce, change in residence or employment, birth of a child, or economic reversal.
Previous losses
- Recognition of the loss and acknowledgement of the unique grief of each family member
- Family must reorganize
- Family members must reinvest in this “new” family while maintaining a sense of connection with the deceased.
*Open and honest communication plus appropriate rituals and ceremonies can assist the family to accomplish each of these tasks.
Tasks of mourning
- Bereaved children need to know that they are cared for.
- Bereaved children need to know that they did not cause the death out of their anger or shortcomings.
- Bereaved children need clear information about the death.
- Children need to feel important and involved.
- Bereaved children need continued routine activity.
- Bereaved children need someone to listen to their questions.
- Bereaved children need ways to remember the dead person.
Needs of Bereaved Children
