Week 7 B Loss and Bereavement

Integrating Personal and Professional Reflections on Loss and

Bereavement

Many helping professionals have wounded healers (Groesbeck, 1975). While

Carl Jung originated this term, Kerenyi (1959) further defined it as “to be at
home in the darkness of suffering and there to find germs of light and
recovery” (p. 100). There is often a reason that people choose to bear the
weight of the suffering of others, and for some, it is to someone else what no
one was to people when they were most in need (Jung & Sedgwick, 2006).
While many people come into this field to at least in part by the desire to help
others, sometimes your own losses are not as well processed as they could be
(Sussman, 2007). If unchecked and unprocessed, this can lead to poor
professional functioning (Racusin, Abramowitz, & Winter, 1981; Sherman,
1996). Cuseglio (2019) spoke to his experiences in working with an
adolescent whose traumatic experiences triggered those of the therapist.
Often encountering the pain of others can be personally painful to the
therapist, and you must develop ways to both hold the experience of the client
as well as honor, acknowledge, and appropriately contain your own reactions
(Zerubavel & Wright 2012). You hope to teach your clients to honor and
appropriately contain their own experiences of loss. If you are to be effective,
you must also do this in your own life.
Thus far in this course, you’ve learned about various models for
understanding grief and loss, delved into self of therapist issues surrounding
grief and loss, and learned about how various cultures respond to grief and
loss experiences. This week, you’ll have the opportunity to synthesize course
material to develop a structure for providing clinical care for family systems
who are experiencing grief and loss.
Readings include the book or articles you choose to review for the assignment
this week.
References
Cuseglio, R. (2019). After the flood: Reflections of a wounded healer’s
countertransference in adolescent treatment. Clinical Social Work Journal, 1-
10.
Groesbeck, C. J. (1975). The archetypal image of the wounded
healer. Journal of Analytic Psychology, 20, 122–145
Jung C., & Sedgwick, D. (2006). Countertransference. The Edinburgh
International Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis.
Kerenyi, C. (1959). Asklepios: Archetypal image of the physician’s existence.
Archetypal images in Greek religion Bollingen series, 65(3). New York, NY:
Pantheon Books.
Racusin, G. R., Abramowitz, S. I., & Winter, W. D. (1981). Becoming a
therapist: Family dynamics and career choice. Professional Psychology, 12,
271–279.
Sherman, M. D. (1996). Distress and professional impairment due to mental
health problems among psychotherapists. Clinical Psychology Review, 16,
299–315.
Sussman, M. B. (2007). A curious calling: Unconscious motivations for
practicing psychotherapy. New York, NY: Jason Aronson.
Zerubavel, N., & Wright, M. O. (2012). The dilemma of the wounded
healer. Psychotherapy, 49(4), 482–491.

Weekly Resources and Assignments

Review the resources listed below (and previously provided resources, as
needed) to prepare for this week’s assignments. The resources may include
textbook reading assignments, journal articles, websites, links to tools or
software, videos, handouts, rubrics, etc.
 Cures for the heart: A poetic approach to healing after loss
Link
 McClocklin, P. A., & Lengelle, R. (2018). Cures for the heart: A poetic
approach to healing after loss. British Journal of Guidance &
Counselling, 46(3), 326–339.
This article attends to different possible interventions for grief after a
loss.
 It hurts to move (on): A family’s experience with chronic pain, grief,
and healing
Link

Kao, G. S. (2018). It hurts to move (on): A family’s experience with

chronic pain, grief, and healing. Families, Systems, & Health, 36(2),
252–254
This article addresses one family’s reactions to the the death of a child
and the chronic pain of another child.
 Perinatal hospice: Loss, healing, and hope
Link

Hatcher, T. J. (2018). Perinatal Hospice: Loss, Healing, and

Hope. International Journal of Childbirth Education, 33(3), 7–9.
This article addresses perinatal loss and ways to conceptualize healing.
 The “Cruel Radiance of What Is”: Helping couples live with chronic
illness
Link

Weingarten, K. (2013). The “Cruel Radiance of What Is”: Helping

couples live with chronic illness. Family Process, 52(1), 83–101.
This article provides a perspective on how couples can deal with
chronic illness as loss.
 With a little help from my friends
Link
 Levi-Belz, Y. (2019). With a little help from my friends: A follow-up
study on the contribution of interpersonal characteristics to
posttraumatic growth among suicide-loss survivors. Psychological
Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 11(8), 895–904.
This article describes posttraumatic growth among people who are
healing after the loss of someone to suicide.
 Week 7 - Signature Assignment: Develop an Analysis of Grief, Loss,
and Personal Reactions
Assignment

This is a three-part assignment. Develop a paper in which you address the

following:
1. Based on the information learned in this course, create a clinical
practice guide for working with family systems who have experienced
grief and loss. This guide should include a discussion of course readings
that have provided an understanding of different manifestations of grief
and loss, as well as your understanding of systemic coping with grief
and loss experiences. Also, include topics from this course that was of
particular interest, that you plan to use in clinical practice (e.g.,
ambiguous loss, a self of therapist-related topics).
2. In addition, discuss how you would synthesize your clinical practice
guide (step 1 of this assignment) with your chosen theory of family
therapy (e.g., solution-focused, structural, narrative) to guide your work
with family systems experiencing grief and loss.
3. Choose one of the cultures discussed in the text or a culture of your
choice not found in the text. Find three additional peer-reviewed articles
that discuss grief and loss in your culture of choice.

 Summarize what you learned from the readings.

  Explain how you would adapt the synthesis of your clinical
practice guide and theory of family therapy (completed in step 2)
to work with a family system from this culture who is
experiencing grief and loss.

4. When thinking about your clinical guide as it is synthesized with

your theory of change, and the culture you choose from #3, please
describe and be specific about any ethical issues to which you as a
therapist would need to attend.
Length: 10 pages, not including title and reference pages
References: Include a minimum of 3 scholarly resources.