Grief counseling presents a special challenge to the mental health worker. Most of us go into mental health professions in order to benefit the people who come to us for help, but there is something about the experience of grief that precludes our ability to help. Bowlby (1980) touches on this when he says:
The loss of a loved person is one of the most intensely painful experiences any human being can suffer, and not only is it painful to experience, but also painful to witness, if only because we’re so impotent to help.
Parkes (1972) echoes this sentiment when he says: Pain is inevitable in such a case and cannot be avoided. It stems from the awareness of both parties that neither can give the other what he wants. The helper cannot bring back the person who’s dead, and the bereaved person cannot gratify the helper by seeming helped.
Because the experience of grief makes it difficult for us to be or feel helpful to the person experiencing bereavement, the counselor can easily feel frustration and anger. Or the counselor may be so uncomfortable witnessing the pain in the other person that this discomfort causes him or her to cut the relationship short (Hayes, Yeh, & Eisenberg, 2007).
In addition to challenging our ability to be helpful, the experience of bereavement in others also touches the counselor personally in at least three ways.
- First, working with the bereaved may make us aware, sometimes painfully so, of our own losses. This is particularly true if the loss experienced by the bereaved is similar to losses that we have sustained in our own lives. If the loss in the counselor’s life is not adequately resolved, it can be an impediment to a meaningful and helpful intervention. If it has been adequately integrated, the counselor’s experience with a similar loss can be beneficial and useful in work with the client. The counselor who has lost a spouse through death or divorce, and for whom the loss is very recent, will find it difficult, if not impossible, to work with a person who has sustained a similar loss. However, if this counselor has moved through his or her own bereavement and found a good adaptation on the other side of the loss, this can be useful and helpful in the counseling intervention.
“Treatment of the bereaved needs to emerge from compassion based on recognition of the common vulnerability of all human beings in the face of loss” (Simos, 1979).
2. A second area where grief may get in the way is the counselor’s own feared losses. Everyone who works in this area has sustained various losses in our lifetimes, but we also come to the counseling situation with apprehension over pending losses, for example, our parents, our children, our partners. Usually, this apprehension is at a low level of awareness. However, if the loss our client is experiencing is similar to the one we most fear, our apprehension can get in the way of an effective counseling relationship (Saunders & Valente, 1994).
For example, if a counselor is overanxious about the possible death of his children, and if this anxiety is translated into an overprotective relationship, the counselor may have a great deal of difficulty working with someone whose child has died. This is especially true if the counselor has not adequately brought his anxiety into consciousness and addressed the issue.
3. Existential anxiety and one’s own personal death awareness are a third area in which grief counseling presents a special challenge to the mental health worker. When a client comes for grief counseling, the counselor is put in touch with the inevitability of death and with the extent to which he or she is uncomfortable with this inevitability in his or her own life. This situation is especially difficult when the person who’s being grieved is similar to the counselor in terms of age, sex, or professional status, all of which can greatly increase the anxiety of the counselor. All of us are anxious to one degree or another about our own mortality, but it is possible to come to terms with this reality and for it not to be a closet issue that makes us uncomfortable and hinders our effectiveness.
Because grief counseling presents a special challenge to the mental health worker, we encourage prospective grief counselors in the institute to explore their own histories of losses. We believe that this can make them more effective counselors. In the first place, it can help the counselor to better understand the process of mourning, what it is like to go through the experience of grief, and how the curative process of mourning takes place. There is nothing like looking at a significant loss in one’s own life to bring home the reality of the grief process. It also gives the counselor an understanding of coping strategies and an idea of how long the process can go on before it comes to an adequate resolution (Redinbaugh, Schuerger, Weiss, Brufsky, & Arnold, 2001).
Second, by exploring his or her personal history of losses, the counselor can get a clear sense of the kinds of resources available to the bereaved. This includes not only what was helpful when one was undergoing a specific loss, but also what was not helpful. An exploration of this can make for more creative intervention on the counselor’s part, helping the counselor know not only what to say, but also what not to say. When looking at personal losses, the counselor can identify his or her own coping style and how this personal coping style affects behavior in a counseling intervention.
The counselor can also identify any unfinished business that is still present from prior losses. The Zeigarnik psychological principle suggests that a task will be remembered until it is completed. The counselor who has a grasp on his or her own life knows about and is able to face honestly and squarely those losses that have not been adequately grieved at this particular time, and what he or she still needs to do to resolve these particular losses. Not only is it important to identify currently unresolved losses, but it is also important to identify the conflict that loss portends for the counselor and the way that conflict can be identified and dealt with (Muse & Chase, 1993).
Finally, looking at his or her own grief helps the counselor or therapist know his or her limitations with respect to the kinds of clients and the kinds of grief situations that he or she is able to deal with.
