Living with loss: From grief to wellbeing offers the latest research on adapting to and making sense of bereavement and non-death losses. It evaluates the effectiveness of a range of therapeutic approaches, including various therapeutic writing methods, that facilitate the integration of loss.
Living with loss, whether through death or other causes, is one of the most challenging experiences we face. The COVID-19 pandemic had intensified the impact of these losses and increased the need for professional support and constructive therapeutic approaches. This book offers perspectives on resilience, the need for presence in bereavement, and the assessment of functional impairment following COVID-19 losses. It examines the realities of bereaved students in higher education, presents and explains compassion-focused grief therapy and meaning-focused narrative construction, and evaluates the therapeutic process of grief recovery. This volume also includes a participatory research study into the effectiveness of writing through loss and is aimed at clinicians, grief counselors, multi-disciplinary researchers, lecturers and practitioners of Writing-for-wellbeing, and will also be of value for those grieving a loved one or facing a non-death loss.
The chapters in this book were originally published as two special issues in British Journal of Guidance and Counselling.
Introduction - Living with loss
1. Narratives of experiences of presence
in bereavement: sources of comfort, ambivalence and distress
2. Supporting
bereaved students in higher education: student perspectives
3. How are
worriers particularly sensitive to grief? Tonic immobility as a mediating
factor
4. Determination of resilience factors in individuals who tested
COVID-19 positive
5. Grief and functional impairment following COVID-19 loss
in a treatment-seeking sample: the mediating role of meaning
6. The impact of
expressive storytelling on grieving: how narrative writing can help us
actively and effectively process and reconcile the loss of a loved one
7.
These roots that bind us: using writing to process grief and reconstruct the
self in chronic illness
8. Healing wounds: exploring the hyphen in son-father
relations as an adult child of an alcoholic
9. Grief tending through the
wilderness: toward a poetic consciousness for adult survivors of childhood
trauma
10. Braiding western and eastern cultural rituals in bereavement: an
autoethnography of healing the pain of prolonged grief
11. The literature of
loss: elegy writing as a therapeutic strategy for coping with grief
12. Grief
memoirs and the reordering of life: on resilience, loneliness, and writing
13. A tale of two widows: investigating meaning-making and identity
development through writing in the face of grief
14. Compassion-focused grief
therapy
15. Meaning-oriented narrative reconstruction: navigating the
complexities of bereaved families
16. Assimilation in bereavement: charting
the process of grief recovery in the case of Sophie
17. Rewriting grief
following bereavement and non-death loss: a pilot writing-for-wellbeing study
Katrin Den Elzen is Research Associate at Curtin University, Perth, Australia and a Writing- for- wellbeing lecturer for graduate students in expressive art therapies, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia. She has written a grief memoir and works as a grief counselor and Writing- for- wellbeing facilitator. Her most recent publication is Writing for Wellbeing: Theory, Research and Practice with Routledge (2023).
Robert A. Neimeyer directs the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition, Oregon, USA; actively practices as a trainer and consultant; and has published over 600 articles and 35 books, most on grieving as a meaning- making process. He is also a Professor Emeritus of the University of Memphis, Tennessee, USA. His most recent books are New Techniques of Grief Therapy (2021, Routledge) and The Handbook of Grief Therapies (2023).
Reinekke Lengelle is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Athabasca University, Canada and a researcher at The Hague University, The Netherlands. Her book Writing the Self in Bereavement: A Story of Love, Spousal Loss, and Resilience won the Best Book Award for Ethnography in 2021 and the Qualitative Inquiry Book Award in 2022.
