An Integrative Approach to Dealing with Bereavements

Providing help and support to people experiencing grief after loss is one of the tasks of a psychologist and psychotherapist. Many views of various authors on the process of grieving and criticism of different opinions of each other make it difficult to choose any one theory for dealing with bereavement. The main goal of this paper is to take a holistic view of the course of adaptation to bereavement and create an integrative approach to the process of grieving based on the main principles of positive psychotherapy. To do this, I used the theories of living-through of grieving by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, John Bowlby, William Worden, Margaret Stroebe and Hank Shute, and Nossrat Peseschkian. Thus, an integrative model of the bereavement experience was created, in which the phases and tasks of two processes were identified: orientation to loss and orientation to restoration. Application of this model, as well as the use of the principles and techniques of positive psychotherapy as a guide, can help a therapist have a holistic view of the process of dealing with bereavement and be as effective as possible in the therapy process. Keywords: grief, grief work bereavement, positive psychotherapy, restoration

Introduction

By taking the reader on a cemetery walk in the Eastern part of now-reunified Berlin, the Introduction describes how mourning practices, while constrained by the governmental strictures in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), were made possible through musical practices. It positions the book within musicological work on the Cold War and provides an overview of antifascism, which was the central framework for interpreting the nation’s past in East Germany, particularly World War II. Rather than taking a bifurcated approach to German memory politics during the Cold War, a central premise of Socialist Laments is that music was a medium that facilitated the coexistence of mourning and commemoration in the GDR. To demonstrate, the Introduction articulates a theory of musical mourning that combines psychological understandings of grief work with site-specific hermeneutics, arguing that embodied practices are crucial for understanding how mourning took place within the memorial spaces of former East Germany.

Word Choice and Collocates of Doka and Martin’s Grieving Styles

It has been over two decades since the concepts of instrumental and intuitive grief have entered the field of grief and loss. In this time, there has not been a study that attempts to understand the language used among these two grief styles until now. In this study, a corpus linguistic program called #Lancsbox was used to analyze the collocates of the top words found in each grief style. Results of this study show that the word “death” is exclusive to the top words of instrumental grief over its counterpart. Contrary to what one would expect from the cognitively-oriented instrumental griever, node words such as “like” offered collocates of emotions, while words high in intensity were collocates among the intuitive grief vignettes. This study contributes to the field of grief work and includes several implications for both counseling and research, both of which are provided to the reader. Keywords: graphcoll, collocation, grief, Doka, Martin, corpus linguistics

“How do you grieve a number?” – Unsuccessful Grieving in Jess Walter’s The Zero

"“How do you grieve a number?” – Unsuccessful Grieving in Jess Walter’s The Zero. Accountability and grief, assuming different forms and accommodating a variety of (sometimes antithetical) approaches, seem to be the dominants shaping 9/11 fiction and, consequently, the attendant criticism. Grief is a central theme to Jess Walter’s The Zero, examined in various manifestations, ranging from public to private, from counterfeit to genuine. The claim of this paper is that The Zero explores alternatives of grief only to invite the thought that the work of mourning, in a traditionally ‘successful’ sense, is no longer possible post-9/11. Keywords: 9/11 fiction, exploration of grief, work of mourning, trauma narrative, Jess Walter "