Page 57 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

26 Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilence

“Another kind of therapy helps people understand, express, and resolve
longstanding feelings of grief over losing a husband or loved one.”
Aside from the unintended implication that a husband can’t also be a
loved one, the more serious, intended implication is that, in working with
grief, the goal is to “get past” it. Life’s profound losses are, in this view, no
different from bouts of the flu. When we have sustained a loss, we are ill
and not ourselves for a while, but then we recover our healthy selves. Our
healthy, pristine selves are unblemished by loss. To me, this set of assump-
tions can be extremely damaging, especially when we are not even aware
of it enough to question it.
I imagine Joan Didion’s eyes flashing when, in her poignant account
(2005) of her husband’s death and its aftermath for her, she challenges
received wisdom about the mourning process. Among many similar state-
ments, she wonders how members of the helping professions can presume
to know the meaning of her loss as well as she does. Didion quotes from
an article on “re-grief therapy,’ a technique developed to treat pathological
mourning. The psychiatrist Didion quotes is Vamik D. Volkan, M.D., who
describes a point in the treatment when
we help the patient to review the circumstances of the death—how it occurred,
the patient’s reaction to the news and to viewing the body, the events of the
funeral, etc. Anger usually appears at this point if the therapy is going well …
‘emotional reliving’ may then take place and demonstrate to the patient the
actuality of his repressed impulses. Using our understanding of the psycho-
dynamics involved in the patient’s need to keep the lost one alive, we can then
explain and interpret the relationship that had existed between the patient and
the one who died. (pp. 55–56)
Along with Didion, I see this point of view as assuming that “pathologi-
cal” mourners are unable to comprehend the true meaning of their losses
because they cannot come to terms with the relationships they really had
with those who died. It is assumed that mourning for some specifiable
period of time is normal, and beyond that it is pathological and indicative
of an inability to make repressed feelings conscious. Mourning for “too
long” is seen as the product of an unwillingness or inability to face our
anger, resentment, or other negative feelings toward the person who died.
It assumes that once we are brave enough to face these complicated feel-
ings we will “get over” our abnormal mourning.
Didion (2005, p. 56) questions the idea that a mental health professional
can understand her relationship with her husband better than she does. I
would add other questions. When someone has lost his or her parents or
partner or child or home or some other aspect of his or her life, just what