Bereavement and loss counselling: working with grief

there are two main elements to this film a session with a client called Kate who presents with a number of losses including bereavement and secondly a review with her almost two years later I think I coped with my mother initially fine because she was 88 she wanted she wanted to go and I was kind of happy for her that she went as easily as she did so it almost didn't seem like there was any reason to mourn it seems to got harder than easy at the mall the times gone by so at first it seemed okay that she was 88 and she was ready to go but now as you're talking clearly very upset yes um I would say I wasn't close to my mom but Tim what she was my mum so whatever life was like when she she and I were together I miss her I really miss her now loss is really at the heart of our lives whether we like it or not we all experience a range of losses throughout our lives the most obvious of these are the losses of close relationships our parents perhaps a partner in a breakup or divorce friends other family members even colleagues at work some of them died all of them died at some point some of them just move on some of them break up in a lot of pain so loss is really part of life it's an important part of life something that's inescapable it's it's an it it's a set an essential part of being a human being and the way in which we react and respond to the losses in our lives is really very important when those losses are huge when there are for example a bereavement or a divorce or breakup with someone that one felt very closed with loved those types of enormous losses can be very painful and staying with those feelings can be very very difficult so often it's easier also it feels to put them aside in some way if you like to put them into a kind of inner refrigerator or a deep freezer sometimes and that way we can kind of get on with our lives that that particular time in our lives we can put them in the freezer but at some point they may defrost at some point later in life perhaps triggered by another experience of loss earlier feelings can be defrosted and sweep out and over us there's another way in which avoiding our feelings putting them into the deep freezer can hurt us and hurt our lives and that's simply that when we put the feelings into the deep freezer we also put part of ourselves in there and that part is really an aspect of our heart so in other words it's a bit like taking part of our heart and putting it into a deep freezer and we need our heart we need our feelings with us every day we need to be able to listen to our feelings to our heart and while we have a part of ourselves an important part of ourselves frozen in the freezer we can never really feel at home in ourselves yes the woman friend asked me well if we before if you were feeling like this what would you normally do and I guess despite my distance from my parents what I would have done in the past was to go home and that there isn't home to go to now so I've been feeling homeless it's kind of irrational level but emotionally feeling hopeless that feels very important I'm kind of also seeing you at 18 being homeless to having this having to go and get another home but not really not how to not have had that kind of sense of a good home that you're leaving and can come back to in the traditional medical model which is also applied to mental health there is a doctor and a patient and a treatment and within that model the only real active ingredient is the treatment according to recent research on counseling and psychotherapy together with the treatment there are three other categories of factors that contribute to therapeutic change the most important of them is actually the client or the patient the research suggests that there are a number of client factors that contribute their verdict change and two of the most important of them are hope and distress tolerance or staying with pain for a client to be able to work on their issues to work on their therapeutic change they need hope without hope very little is going to happen so recently particularly there has been a big focus on hope and how that can be facilitated by the counselor or the psychotherapist in the therapeutic session for a long time the researchers have acknowledged the importance of the therapeutic relationship but recently they've begun to look more closely and Charles Gale so for example has identified three distinct but connected elements the first of these is the working alliance the second the transference countertransference relationship and the third what he calls the real relationship and this has had a number of other terms and certainly Rogers talks about it in terms of the client the counsellor being genuine being present and there being a real connection or person-to-person experience between client and counselor in this session and the subsequent review you will see both the connection the person-to-person connection that we've the deep and profound person-to-person connection that we that are in Kate make in that session then in the review her referencing that as really very very important so that was a gift for me so I felt seen by you I felt utterly seen our Natalie heard by you and that was you'll never quite know what the gift that was so although I've just seen it again in the DVD I didn't actually need reminding of and I do I'd almost forgotten that part of the grief was the loss of my home the physical home that been my parents home and I think partly because I've subsequently moved house and for me what that is represented is that I have come home so what one of the things we were looking at was that's right it was it's one of the things that you mentioned and so I was looking at DVD I thought gosh I'm not sure how much work I plan on that and yet actually I physically moved to a place that is truly home for me that sounds really really important - it is it is so there's a sense in which I've finally grown up that's the in the you know that I've taken responsibility for not having some other place be home but here I am the practitioner is also important a particular practitioner the particular self awareness and self development that a practitioner for example brings to the work in this particular session my own self development or the self development that I had previously undertaken over a number of years is very very important from my perspective there is no way that I could sit there with Kate listening to her so well if I had not worked on my own experiences of loss and bereavement experiences that needed I needed to have worked through so that they didn't overwhelm me in that session if I had still got them all frozen away listening to Kate might well trigger the defrost Inc process which would be really probably the worst possible outcome for the session so by the time I came to this session with Kate I had already worked a great deal on these losses and the subsequent implications of them and I was able to sit there and be with Kate in the fullness of her grief something that she found very valuable and which was as I say entirely dependent on the fact that I had worked on my own loss and bereavement you

Channel: The Counselling Channel

Views: 100,932

Rating: 4.7421489 out of 5

Keywords: bereavement, loss, grief, death, hope, therapy, counselling, session, anthony crouch, psychotherapy, trailer

Id: nmtzEFRwYXU

Length: 13min 30sec (810 seconds)

Published: Wed May 09 2012