Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/82405
GRIEF & LOSS Beginning in 1990, I facilitated The process of grieving can be applied to many other life-changing events, including disability, divorce, job loss, financial loss, or other changes in physical circumstances or relationships. hospice bereavement support groups for 12 years. What I learned in that time, as I listened to people of all ages and backgrounds share their stories, has personally enriched my life and significantly informed my practice of massage. I grew to appreciate the perspective, fostered by the hospice movement, that bereavement is a natural, normal process—an integral part of life. With education to help people understand the process, along with social and emotional support, we can all become wiser, more compassionate, and happier individuals. This study of bereavement has strengthened my understanding of losses associated with acute and chronic illnesses, aging, and other physical and psychosocial life changes. I've found that human beings are amazingly resilient and adaptable, all the more so with support from friends, family, and conscientious health-care professionals, including massage and bodywork practitioners. UNDERSTANDING GRIEF AS A RESPONSE TO LOSS Bereavement is most often thought of as the mourning of a death. But the process of grieving can be applied to many other life-changing events, including disability, divorce, job loss, financial loss, or other changes in physical circumstances or relationships. Aging, itself, is a process involving many changes, including losses for which a person may grieve. A person living with chronic illness or disability may undergo an extensive process of grieving over the loss of health or function. Whether a loss is sudden and specific, as with a death, or prolonged, as with a gradual loss of function owing to illness, it is normal for the individual to move through a range of responses and reactions. While Sigmund Freud pioneered the study of bereavement in his essay "Mourning and Melancholia,"1 written in 1917, it was psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross who advanced the study of bereavement in relation to the dying process. In her groundbreaking book On Death and Dying,2 published in 1969, she proposed five psychological stages of dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, finally, acceptance. Her passionate commitment to ease the psychological as well as physical suffering of the ill and dying compelled her to work to bring about awareness of these issues within mainstream medicine and psychology. Her work paralleled the growing hospice movement, which sought to bring compassion and dignity to the terminally ill. British psychiatrist John Bowlby's study of attachment behavior in children contributed to the understanding of bereavement.3 His theory of attachment, presented in the 1960s, provided an explanation for the common human tendency to develop strong, affectional bonds. Grief is an instinctive universal response to separation. In their study of adult grieving, Bowlby and fellow psychiatrist Colin Parkes described four phases of grief: numbness with intermittent anger; yearning; disorganization and despair; and organization.4 An understanding of the grieving process has continued to expand as it applies not only to death and dying, but also to the broader range of human experience. Grieving is not a simple linear process. It applies not only to losses incurred as a result of death or the anticipation of death, but also to 62 massage & bodywork july/august 2011