Funeral Service Psychology and Counseling 5 Flashcards

1
Q

A temporary period of heightened psychological accessibility. It is a highly emotional state in which an individual’s feelings of anxiety, grief, and confusion, or pain, impairs his or her ability to act. The person is less defensive than usual, and more open to outside intervention and change.

  • It is not the event but the person who perceieves the event. (what may be a crisis for one person may not be one for other)
A

Crisis

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2
Q

The immediate assessment and short term treatment for individuals experiencing a crisis, with the goal of returning the person to their pre-crisis level of functioning.

A

Crisis Intervention (Crisis Counseling)

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3
Q
  • Short term, usually four to six weeks
  • Usually stimulated by an outside precipitator or emotionally hazardous situation. Precipitators are always situational and frequently of an interpersonal nature.
  • The more seriously threatening the event, the greater the likelihood that primitive coping behavior will be exhibited.
  • Normal reactions such as fear, tension, confusion, or discomfort to an abnormal hazardous event.
  • People in crisis tend to pull away from significant others at a tie when positive interpersonal relationships help resolve crises and the lack of them prolonges a crsis.
A

Characteristics of a Crisis

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4
Q
  • Floods
  • Hurricanes
  • Tsunamis
  • Fires
  • Earthquakes
A

Natural Disasters

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5
Q
  • Homicides
  • Suicides
  • Accidents
  • Terroist attacks
A

Man-Made Events

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6
Q
  • Sudden heart attack
  • Sudden stroke
  • SIDS (Sudden infant death syndrome)
A

Medical Events

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7
Q
  • Mortality- potential for unhealthy reponses with more death and destruction
  • Time- the greater the duration the greater the stress
  • Spatial- the closer the person is the greater the stress
  • Reoccurrence- causes intense fears
  • Seasonal Influence- holidays can make it more severe
  • Racial (ethnic) considerations- different cultures react differently
  • Cause of death and/or severity of the loss
A

Factors to Consider Regarding A Potential Crisis (Roberts)

Statistics

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8
Q
  • Recent Research- as new information comes, our responses change.
  • Myths vs. Reality- Misinformation has the potential to exacerbate a person’s response to the event making it more difficult to cope.
A

Factors to Consider Regarding A Potential Crisis (Roberts)

Medical

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9
Q
  • Cause of death- more difficult to cope
  • Investigation and interrogation- stress and anxiety for survivors
  • Severity of the loss- The closer the relationship, the more difficult the loss
  • Relational Problems- makes adjustment more difficult becasue there are no more opportunities left to resolve the problem.
A

Factors to Consider Regarding A Potential Crisis (Roberts)

Grieving Challenges

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10
Q
  • Anxiety, fear, panic or anger
  • Emotional numbing
  • Difficulty sleeping
  • Walking throughout the night
  • Nightmares or daydreaming
  • Exhaustion or mental fatigue
  • Change in appetite
  • Disbelief or denial of events
  • Reliving images of the traumatic evvents
  • Dwelling on the event
  • Easily angered or upset
  • Depression or worsening of depression
  • Problems concentrating
  • Accident proneness
  • Increasing frustration or impatience
  • A tendency to isolate or withdraw
  • Neglecting responsibilities
  • Reluctance to assume responsibilities
  • Fear or reluctance to express emotions
  • Headaches, stomachaches, indigestion
  • Children acting younger or less responsible
  • Children returning to bed wetting
A

Typical Reactions Following Potential Crisis Events

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11
Q
  • ABC Intervention Model
  • Achieving contact with the individual
  • Boiling down the problem to its essentials
  • Coping with the problem
  • Negative ways of responding to those in a crisis
A

Crisis Intervention

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12
Q
  • Achieve contact wtih the person
  • Boil down the problem to its essentials
  • Coping mechanisms should be discussed and implemented
A

ABC Intervention Model (Stone)

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13
Q

The initial contact between the cirsis counselor and the potential client.

  • Major task- establish rapport, convey genune respect, trust and acceptance
A

Achieving Contact with the Individual

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14
Q
  • Filtering out irrelevant data
  • Identifying the major problems
  • Examine the dimensions of the problem including the “last straw” or precipitating event
  • Identifty and legitimize the feelings and emotions of the person
  • Communicate the problem the client as simply and directly as possible
A

Boiling Down the Problem to its Essentials

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15
Q

Explore and help the client identify successfully past coping skills.

  • May have tried familiar coping skills alread that have not worked well
A

Coping With the Problem

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16
Q
  • Help client develop successful coping mechanisms and goals
  • Inventory the client’s personal resources, determine which will be helpful
  • Formulate alternatives for strategies that are not successful
  • Review and refine the plan as necessary
  • Take action
  • Follow-up when possible
A

Plan for Coping- Steps

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17
Q
  • Quick advice
  • False assurances- insincere
  • Bromides
  • Asking too many questions or asking closed-ended questions
  • Judgemental pronouncements- ignores the person’s real problem
  • Debating or arguing- causes distance between the counselor and the client
A

Negative ways of Responding to Those in a Crisis

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18
Q

Summarizing issues into something too simplistic.

A

Bromides

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19
Q
  • Usually the first professionals who are experiencing a crisis meet, who have some understanding of what grieving individuals are experiencing.
  • Provide a calming environment
  • Give perposeful activity when they are feeling helpless and out of control
  • An opportunity to view the deceased
A

The Funeral Director’s Role in Crisis Intervention

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20
Q

A means of supplying support to a family after a death has occurred. Usually begins after the funeral has ended and continues for about 12 months. Two basic forms:

  1. Information oriented services
  2. Direct care services

33% of funeral homes offer this.

A

Aftercare

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21
Q
  • Sending family grief oriented literature one or more times after the funeral
  • Cards, letters, brochures, books, newsletters, or a directory of local grief support groups or agencies.
A

Information Oriented Services

22
Q
  • Having a grief counselor at the funeral home
  • Sponsoring a support group
  • Sponsoring grief related seminars or workshops
  • Special ceremonies during holidays
  • Providing a personal visit to the family’s home
A

Direct Care Services

23
Q

Who stated that: “Each of us holds fears, doubts, anxieties, and questions about death.

A

Welch

24
Q
  • Having to handle a loss similar to a loss they personally experienced. e.g., death of their child.
  • Having unresolved loss issues that arise when dealing with a grieving family.
  • Handling a particularly horrendous death.
  • Having a close personal relationship with the deceased.
A

Reports of Funeral directors on their own issues of grief that can surface when dealing with these situations.

25
Q
  • Do you feel comfortable talking about your own death?
  • Being a funeral director, you help people with death every day. However, are you comfortable talking about your own death?
  • If you are uneasy talking about your own death and haven’t thought about what you believe happens when you die, most likely you aren’t comfortable talking about your own personal death.
  • Try to get to a point to where you can when friends and family, plan your own funeral, write instructions, ask family for beliefs about what happens after death - you will be learning and integrating a diversity of information and will be able to be more sensitive when planning family’s funeral services.
  • Having a clear sense of what happens after you die will aid you personally when you experience a loss in your life. (People who believe in an afterlife tend to cope with loss better).
A

Kelley Baltzell - parts from her “Yellow book news”

26
Q
  • To be aware of her interactions and limitations in working with different clients and different kinds of grief situations.
  • Discover unresolved loss issues.
  • Identify resources that helped her and may help her client.
A

Looking into one’s own experience with death and grief can help a funeral director do these things.

27
Q

Self and analysis of loss. One way to initiate this is to start a loss time-line.

A

Loss analysis

28
Q
  • Draw a straight line and on the left end put your year of birth; at the right end, put in this year. In the middle, place the year that divides the line in two equal blocks.- Next, divide the two halves of the time-line into blocks of years.- Review your life for loss events and place them on the line in the appropriate spaces.
A

Loss Timeline

29
Q

An inventory of loss.

A

Loss inventory

30
Q
  1. Did you have any anticipatory grief? If yes, how did you feel and respond physically, emotionally, and spiritually?
  2. When the death occurred, how did you feel and respond physically, emotionally, and spiritually?
  3. What do you remember most about the experience?
  4. What helped you in coping with each loss?
  5. What did you learn from these experiences that can help you in counseling others?
A

Questions to ask yourself about your losses for loss inventory.

31
Q

Ways to look at your own losses in life. (2)

A
  • Loss analysis
  • Loss inventory
32
Q

Who stated that: “The first practical step in dealing with our own beliefs is to acknowledge their existence! From there you can go on to deal with them.”

A

Bright

33
Q

Life events that exert pressure or strain.

A

Stress

34
Q

Any event capable of producing stress.

A

Stressor

35
Q
  • Medical
  • Human service
  • Business
A

Similar stress producing factors common in other professional groups (to the funeral director).

36
Q
  • Immediate involvement with the human body of individuals.
  • Contact is similar to that of a pathologist in that the human is dead.
  • Must be knowledgable about the scientific aspects of public health and disease in order to protect himself and the people in the community.
  • When handling someone with a contagious disease, must worry about being infected. - do not want to pass to members of family, especially if the funeral director lives in the funeral home.
  • Must restore the dead human to normal appearance (like a doctor would restore someone back to being healthy)
  • Skills similar to surgeons and plastic surgeons are required.- Stress of wanting the family to be satisfied is always there.
A

Medical stressors

37
Q
  • Stress caused by emotional strain - dealing with people with emotional strain.
  • Have the responsibility of helping people with a plan (the funeral) for dealing with the acute period right after the death.
  • Help “customize” activities that will help clients individually heal.
  • Worry a great deal about making sure everything goes “just right” and that the survivors needs will be met and satisfied.
  • Helping families deal with the bureaucracy and trying to get the benefits due them.
  • Social security, veterans’ agencies, and insurance companies can be heartless and uncaring in the way they deal with survivors.
A

Human service stressors

38
Q
  • Uncertainty and lack of control over their time.
  • Working unscheduled hours, holidays and special family days, as well as disturbed sleep.Causes marital and parenting problems.
  • Owner/manager deals with these problems themselves, but also must help his staff deal with them also.
  • More than just money, takes creativity, understanding, and communication to retain and motivate good professionals.
A

Business stressors

39
Q

True or false:

All stress is not negative and harmful. Some stress in our daily lives is desirable and even necessary.

A

True

40
Q
  • Stress of hunger to keep us from starving
  • Excitement and anticipation makes big events more enjoyable.
  • Depends on the mental attitude and ability of our bodies to deal effectively with outside influences.
A

Good stress

41
Q

True or false:

What is positive and exciting for one person can be negative and destructive to another.

A

True

42
Q

When a person is confronted with a stressful situation, whether it is positive or negative, the body responds with the “flight or fight” response.

A

Physiology of stress

43
Q

Chemical messages are sent from the brain to the hypothalamus gland, which stimulates chemicals that are sent in two routes. - Pituitary gland- Down the brain stem and spinal cord

A

Bodys’ response to stress

44
Q

This is where the chemicals are changed into hormones that enter the blood stream and travel to the cortex of the adrenal glands, which produce chemicals that increase blood sugar level and metabolism.

A

Pituitary gland path

45
Q

From there, it goes to the core of the adrenal glands. There, adrenaline is produced to help fuel the muscles and brain, and norepinephrine is produced to increase heartbeat and blood pressure.

A

Path down the brain stem and spinal cord

46
Q

The body preparing itself to take physical action in response to the stressor. A positive defense mechanism when the situation calls for a physical response.

A

Flight-or-fight response

47
Q

A condition where your mind and body are relentlessly strained when you develop physical, emotional, and mental fatigue. It produces feelings of hopelessness, powerlessness, cynicism, resentment, failure, depression, and unhappiness.- occurs when the stressors are long-term and do not generate physical response, the tension activates a series of responses that wear away a body’s health. (Grollman)

A

Burnout

48
Q
  • Exhaustion and loss of energy
  • Irritability and impatience
  • Cynicism and detachment
  • Physical complaints - Disorientation, confusion
  • Omnipotence and feeling indispensable
  • Depression
  • Minimization and denial of feelings
A

Characteristics of stress and burnout by Wolfelt

49
Q
  • Create periods of rest and renewal
  • Be compassionate with yourself about not being perfect
  • Set limits and alleviate stress you can do something about
  • Learn time management skills
  • Cultivate a personal support network
  • Understand your motivation for working in funeral service
  • Develop healthy eating, sleeping, and exercise patterns
  • Identify ways in which your body informs you that you are stressed.
A

Recommendations for Reducing Stress for the Funeral Director (ABFSE):

50
Q
  • talk about worries
  • Realize that you and others are not perfect
  • Control your “what if” scenario
  • Delegate some responsibility and authority
  • Identify stressors in your life
  • Control your mental confrontations
  • If necessary, blow off steam
  • Perform some type of physical activity
  • Try soaking in a hot bath
  • Use one or more relaxation techniques daily
  • Talk with aother counselor
  • You are not a magician
  • Be attentive to other staff members who are working with the bereaved
  • You are permitted to feel helpless at times
  • You are permitted to admit to the feeling of hopelessness
  • KNow what characterizes a “trigger case” for you.
A

Other Suggestions for Dealing With Stress and Caring for Yourself