Loss and Trauma

This study investigated continuing bonds (CB) expressions among bereaved pet owners and the relationship between CB expressions and psychosocial adjustment. The sample included thirty-three participants who had lost a dog or cat within the past year. Participants who responded to a differentiated set of 12 CB expressions reported a tendency to experience CB as more comforting than distressing and the

The world currently faces terrible issues of corruption, conflicts, political instabilities, violence and injustices causing traumatic experiences for humans and nature. Likewise, Hos 4:1-3 offers a link between the corruption of the Israelite society and the wounds of the Earth community. These three verses are generally read as a ‫יב‬ ִ ‫ר‬ genre, in which Yahweh brings a lawsuit against the people of Israel. However, scholars mostly focus on the crimes and fate of humans, and ignore or silence the expression of trauma of the Earth as mourning and its non-human members as languishing. Using the framework of trauma studies, the insights of " Cosmic Covenant " from the book of Murray (1992) and the Earth Bible principles of interconnectedness and voice, this article aims to explore a unique aspect of Hosea's rhetoric of trauma establishing the relationship between people's misdeeds and the wounds of the natural world.

How does a father manage the death of his son or his father? What might a playwright do? This article proposes that confronted with the multiple loss of his son Hamnet and subsequently his father John, William Shakespeare experienced a transformational consciousness event or “spiritual problem” (DSM IV), defined by Grof and Grof as a “spiritual emergency” (SE), which he explores through the making of his masterpiece Hamlet. The play’s central male character is a fine example of an instrumental masculine response to coping with loss. It is argued that the depiction of Hamlet’s struggle towards self knowledge can be explained in terms of Stan Grof’s model of transformation. In his play Shakespeare expresses a unique view of complicated masculine grief and loss. Through Hamlet’s soliloquies he explores and maps the terrifying terrain and rich interior world of his own psychic journey and transformation.


www.jmmsweb.org/issues/volume2/number2/pp95-115

A paper submitted for SUNY Oswego, Interdisciplinary Graduate Certificate in Trauma Studies, Self-Care / Compassion Fatigue, PSY 554-HY1, taught by Douglas J. Scaturo, Ph.D., Fall 2014 that examines the role of women who are perceived by society as being alone, unattached or unmarried (though they may not see themselves that way), as family caregivers. It will address some of the concerns they, like all caregivers, have regarding stress, compassion fatigue and burnout and it will articulate one such caregiver’s vision of how those stressors could be less impactful.

Moving Beyond Personal Loss to Societal Grieving considers how secondary English language arts teachers can thoughtfully teach pieces of literature in their classrooms in which large-scale deaths are a significant aspect of the texts. Each chapter provides practical activities for students to engage with loss through writing, projects, and prompts.

'Nature is like a text into which generations of all beings write their vision', writes Varga, in a sentence that helps to frame the entire work. Varga's process is deeply personal, reflecting his own struggle with the fragility of nature and an ecological vision of the web of connectivity, 'morphic resonsonances' through complex 'morphogenetic fields'. The attempt to record the passage of experiences, an intuitive connection to the floating pulses of nature, and the mental restrictions imposed by education and upbringing are all here. The art here also touches a chord with a much wider world, the collectives' fears, desires, hopes and anxieties for the future for the humanity, and to wider connections into the other than human web of life intimating at a new ecological vision. Art is needed here as a place to feel the feeling we don't want to feel, or don't know that we feel. Our fear, guilt, rage, loss, mourning, mourning for the loss of a world. This paper is an ecopsychoanalytic reflection on Jaro Vargas 'We don't know that we know' art exhibition.

This paper suggests that elaborating Winnicott's idea of ''potential space'' can provide a conceptual approach to psychotherapy across the cultural divide. The first part of the paper discusses the general problematic of intercultural psychotherapy. This is illustrated with an account of therapeutic work with Ethiopian Jews who have migrated to Israel. There is a significant gap between the Ethiopian cultural codes relevant to psychotherapy and those of the Israeli therapist, who is usually trained in the Western psychotherapeutic tradition. A meaningful and effective therapeutic process can take place if psychotherapist and client cocreate a ''mutual creative space.''

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The stigma, misconceptions, and "tough it out" atttitude torwards trauma-related disorders has inspired the development of this document/digital zine, and why the first issue of Modern Minds has been dedicated to concepts relating to PTSD. I hope through the dissemination of this free magazine to broaden the definition of & destigmatize trauma-related 'disorders', encourage others to think critically & promote self-care wherby being kind to ourselves helps us to be kind to all.

The practitioners of village stability operations operate nearly entirely in the spaces of communities damaged by combinations of traumatizing violence, loss, displacement, starvation, death and dismemberment. Their organization, equipping and training is focused on the most apparent physical security and developmental needs by those who fund and support their deployments and to a lesser extent on reparation of political dialogue as part of restorative justice and the reparative process. The psychological and sociological damage that these practitioners encounter however, often leads to frustration, overextension of personnel and resources and eventual failure. This paper explores the existence, nature and depth of psychological and sociological damage to communities traumatized by violent conflict. The purpose of this research is to establish a baseline of psychosocial-cultural intelligence on conflict societies that can be used to plan, prepare and execute peace operations and humanitarian missions. This psychosocial-cultural intelligence or understanding of traumatized communities provides peace operations and humanitarian missions with analysis and method to engage and influence traumatized communities to the point that they are able to provide for their self-sustainment without participation in communal violence. By exposing the pathology of sociological trauma at the family, village and tribal levels of structure, we can begin to unwind and resolve intractable conflicts in failing and failed societies despite limited time and resources of peace operations donors and practitioners.

Contents
The challenge of stabilizing villages and tribes in conflict ........................................................................... 3
Trauma and the family’s sociological structure ............................................................................................ 6
Village stability, trauma and the sociocentric family.................................................................................. 10
Internal identities and external locus of control in sociocentric families ............................................... 11
Communication and meaning in the sociocentric family ........................................................................ 14
The emotional logic of violence, shame, and trauma.................................................................................. 16
The rage of shame in sociocentric community ........................................................................................ 17
Psychological pathways to violence & suicidal terrorism ...................................................................... 21
Connecting failed states to traumatized communities ................................................................................. 22
Intractable cultural conflict: generational transmission of trauma .............................................................. 24
Crossing the trauma barrier - reestablishing meaning in traumatized communities ................................... 27
Relieving sociological trauma and rebuilding society ................................................................................ 31
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................. 33
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................... 35

Marching Through Suffering is a deeply personal portrait of the ravages of famine and totalitarian politics in modern North Korea since the 1990s. Featuring interviews with more than thirty North Koreans who defected to Seoul and Tokyo, the book explores the subjective experience of the nation's famine and its citizens' social and psychological strategies for coping with the regime. These oral testimonies show how ordinary North Koreans, from farmers and soldiers to students and diplomats, framed the mounting struggles and deaths surrounding them as the famine progressed. Following the development of the disaster, North Koreans deployed complex discursive strategies to rationalize the horror and hardship in their lives, practices that maintained citizens' loyalty to the regime during the famine and continue to sustain its rule today. Casting North Koreans as a diverse people with a vast capacity for adaptation rather than as a monolithic entity passively enduring oppression, Marching Through Suffering positions personal history as key to the interpretation of political violence.

These voices of utopia, inseparable from the experience of dislocation, are a unique contribution to the literature of testimony. With her cycle Svetlana Alexievich has established herself as the first major postcolonial author of post-Communism: the daughter of a Ukrainian and Belarusian who uses the Russian language – the only language in which she is completely fluent – to collect and present, from her own subaltern perspective, subaltern accounts of the traumas inflicted by empire.

Based on the research on continuing bonds (CB) with a deceased person to date, the reports of clinicians, and the contemporary theory of attachment, two dimensions of CB were distinguished: (i) a concrete CB, essentially characteristic of unresolved and prolonged grief, and (ii) a symbolic CB, specific to grief resolution. The psychometric properties of the Continuing Bonds Scale (CBS) were examined in a sample of persons from Poland (N = 244) bereaved after the death of a family member from 0.5 to 18 years before the survey (M = 3.45, SD = 2.25). In the first sub-sample (n = 141), the exploratory factor analysis revealed a two-factor structure of the CBS: the concrete and the symbolic dimension of the CB with the deceased. In the second sub-sample (n = 103), a good fit of this two-factor model of the CBS was determined by confirmatory factor analysis. At the bivariate analysis level, the concrete CB with the deceased positively correlated with attachment anxiety, and negatively with grief resolution and time since loss; the symbolic CB negatively correlated with attachment avoidance. When predicting grief resolution for two dimensions of CB (controlling for adult attachment, and sociodemographic and loss-related variables), concrete CB was a negative predictor, and symbolic CB was a positive predictor of the outcome variable. The reliability of the CBS subscales was acceptable. The CBS is a valid and reliable measure of two different CB dimensions. The model of concrete and symbolic CB with the deceased was discussed in the light of the current results and contemporary attachment theory.

This paper reads Roger Simon’s concept of “transactional memory” in relationship to D.W. Winnicott’s theory of the “transitional space” to examine the emotional dimensions of making historical significance. Drawing on a personal memory ofarchival study with Simon, I suggest that his attention to the ethical qualities of remembrance at the same time offers a theoryof remembrance as a work of creative play that sets into motion the painful and hopeful process of working through the anguish ofloss.

The word disaster is derived from the Italian disastro or “unfavorable star” and implies a random act of wanton destruction by nature or by human intervention. Yet, in reality, disasters are a regular part of human experience. They occur in every part of the world, taking different forms and touching many lives. Planning to mitigate their effects and acting effectively to help communities to recover is not only possible but necessary (Kasi, Bhadra, & Dryer, 2007). As social workers, we appreciate that disasters disproportionately affect physically, socially, economically, and politically vulnerable populations (Mathbor, 2007; Ritchie, L. & Gill, D., 2018; UN General Assembly, 2007). As clinicians, we appreciate the ways in which experiencing a disaster, as well as every aspect of relief and recovery, can affect the emotional well-being of vulnerable survivors (Inter-Agency Standing Committee [IASC], 2007). We understand that compromised well-being increases vulnerability, so the role that we play is crucial in supporting a population’s ability to survive, thrive, and struggle as active participants in building the future.
This chapter discusses best practices for clinical social work intervention following disaster and terrorism (see Appendix A). The purpose of this chapter is to compile, clarify, and discuss what has been learned in various countries and situations in order to integrate and build upon that knowledge to create opportunities for effective clinical response. Clinical social work principles and practice inform interventions that preserve well-being, support psychosocial development, and facilitate reconstruction as well as address mourning, loss, and care of the mentally ill. They do so by employing the biopsychosocial model that forms an essential unit of clinical social work analysis. This model uses an ecological framework to examine individual, biological, and intrapsychic life as it is situated in the sociocultural sphere. The chapter refers specifically to social ecological theories of resilience, psychodynamic theories that support resilience, as well as the new study of community resilience and the neurobiological principles that underpin it.

This essay describes contemporary cultural practices related to death, dying and bereavement in Judaism, Mayan Indian and Christian traditions.  Twelve types of loss that a client might experience.  Three influential innovators of loss and grief theory: Bowlby, Kübler-Ross and Worden.  The four tasks of grieving by Worden.  Three complicated grief reactions: delayed grief, masked grief and chronic grief.  And the importance of rituals and experiential activities in response to loss.

Are you interested in losing weight? Are you tired of diets that advocate low or no fats and crave your high-fat meats? You may well be considering going on the keto diet, the new kid on the block. Endorsed by many celebrities including Halle Berry, LeBron James, and Kim Kardashian among others, the keto diet has been the subject of much debate among dietitians and doctors. Do you wonder if the keto diet is safe and right for you??

SUMMARY -- Grief is a universal human experience. Life is a series of gains and losses, attachments and detachments. Some are healthy and gradual while others are unhealthy and abrupt. Sudden losses, unexpected traumas, and intrusive tragedies are most difficult to handle and process. They can be disorienting, destabilizing, and devastating to the whole person, family, organization, or community. Experiencing loss, grief, and trauma is always difficult, tender, and painful. People normally avoid difficult emotions and unpleasant memories. Major losses and traumatic events come in different shapes, forms, degrees, and intensities. They generate a wide range of reactions and responses on the mental, emotional, behavioral, social, and existential levels. They also affect our mood, function, and mental outlook and impact our relationships and roles within the)…... Naturally, we assign meaning to our lives, functions, relationships, and activities. We also set certain expectations of others and ourselves. We have our hopes and dreams as well as our doubts and fears. All those shape the way we act and react, and the way we view the world. Most women, couples, and families place high value on pregnancy as a promise of continuity and a generative way to extend themselves, to reproduce and procreate, and to project life. They look at it as a celebration along the journey and as a part of many important landmarks of living. Of course, for some others, a pregnancy can be a burden or a stress if they were not in a place to welcome the idea positively and consider it as a happy development. So, they become anxious and overwhelmed and quickly look for alternatives. The degree of disappointment and sadness is usually proportionate to the degree of hope people place on the object of their expectation – and the higher the expectation, the deeper the disappointment. Similarly, the intensity of grieving reflects the nature of the relationship(s) with what has been lost. The stronger the attachment and more intimate the relationship, the more profound and more intense the grief. Ambivalence and conflicts in relationships normally produce a mixture of feelings and reactions after the separation.......

Just before Sam died, his son Peter travelled from his home in Hawke’s Bay,
New Zealand, to conduct some preliminary research with his son Oliver who
lives in Leeds, Great Britain. With Peter’s interests in loss, post-traumatic
growth and transpersonal experiences and Oliver’s in theatre making,
performance and pedagogy they begin to discover that they share much
common ground. Shortly after their time together Peter travels to Moscow to
deliver a paper on Hamlet. What follows is a weaving of the thoughts and
recollections of three generations of men touched by loss, trauma and grief.

[AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF
-- TOC and book summary in downloadable .pdf] 
According to the poet Elias Canetti, "All the things one has forgotten / scream for help in dreams." To the ancient Egyptians they were prophecies, and in world folklore they have often marked visitations from the dead. For Freud they were expressions of "wish fulfillment," and for Jung, symbolic representations of mythical archetypes. Although there is still much disagreement about the significance and function of dreams, they seem to serve as a barometer of current mind and body states.

In this volume, Deirdre Barrett brings together the study of dreams and the psychology of trauma. She has called on a distinguished group of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers--among them Rosalind Cartwright, Robert J. Lifton, and Oliver Sacks--to consider how trauma shapes dreaming and what the dreaming mind might reveal about trauma. The book focuses on catastrophic events, such as combat, political torture, natural disasters, and rape. The lasting effects of childhood trauma, such as sexual abuse or severe burns, on personality formation, the nature of memories of early trauma, and the development of defenses related to amnesia and dissociation are all considered. The book also takes up trauma and adult dreams, including Vietnam veterans and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Holocaust survivors and perpetrators, rape victims, and firestorm survivors. Finally, this volume concludes with a look at the potential "traumas of normal life," such as divorce, bereavement, and life-threatening illness, and the role of dreams in working through normal grief and loss.

Taken together, these diverse perspectives illuminate the universal and the particular effects of traumatic experience. For physicians and clinicians, determining the etiology of nightmares offers valuable diagnostic and therapeutic insights for individual treatment. This book provides a way of juxtaposing the research in the separate fields of trauma and dreams, and learning from their discoveries.

Bu çalışmanın amacı, psikolojik danışman adaylarının kayıp yaşantıları ve yas süreci ile ilgili değişkenlerin incelenmesidir. Yaşanan kayıpların ardından ortaya çıkan yas süreci doğal ve evrensel bir tepki olmasına rağmen hangi dönemde olursa olsun bireyler çeşitli sıkıntılar hissedebilmekte; kayıpla birlikte kişilerin yaşam kalitesi düşebilmekte; fiziksel, bilişsel ve davranışsal zorluklar nedeniyle de profesyonel desteğe ihtiyaç duyabilmektedirler. Psikolojik danışmanların etkili bir psikolojik danışma süreci yürütebilmesi için kendi yaşadıkları olumsuz yaşam deneyimleriyle etkili şekilde başa çıkabilmesi ve özellikle kendi kayıp ve yas süreçlerini başarılı şekilde yönetebilmeyi öğrenmeleri gerekmektedir. Bu araştırmada rehberlik ve psikolojik danışmanlık programı öğrencilerinin kayıp ve yas süreci ile ilgili değişkenlerin incelenmesi amaçlanmaktadır. Araştırma, nitel araştırma modelinde olgu bilim deseninde tasarlanmıştır. Çalışmanın katılımcıları uygun örnekleme yöntemlerinden kolay ulaşılabilirlik tekniği kullanılarak oluşturulmuştur. Araştırma Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy Üniversitesi ve İzmir Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi PDR Lisans programlarının 3 ve 4. sınıflarına devam eden 115 psikolojik danışman adayından herhangi bir kayıp yaşantısı olduğunu bildiren 81 gönüllü psikolojik danışman adayı ile gerçekleştirilmiştir. Araştırmada nitel veriler, yarı yapılandırılmış görüşme tekniği ile elde edilmiştir. Sonuç olarak, bu çalışmada psikolojik danışman adaylarının çoğunluğunun aile büyükleri başta olmak üzere ölüme bağlı kayıpları daha fazla yaşadığı; yas süreçlerinde az sayıda psikolojik danışman adayının herhangi bir profesyonel destek aldıkları; kullandıkları başa çıkma stratejileri ve yasla ilgili duygu ve düşünceleri incelendiğinde yaslarını sağlıklı şekilde yapılandırmadıkları görülmektedir. Sonuçlar psikolojik danışma becerileri açısından değerlendirildiğinde psikolojik danışman adaylarının yaşadıkları kayıplarla etkili şekilde başa çıkabilmeyi ve yas sürecini yapılandırmayı öğrenmeye gereksinimleri olduğu görülmektedir. Elde edilen bulgulara dayanarak psikolojik danışman eğitiminde kayıp ve yas konusuna odaklanmak, psikolojik danışman adaylarının kendi kayıp ve yas süreçlerini etkili şekilde yönetmesine yardımcı olmak ve yas danışmanlığı becerilerini kazandırmaya yönelik çalışmalar yapmak önemli bir ihtiyaç olarak görülmektedir.

Reflecting on the role that writing played in the recovery, the author describes the mourning process after loss of her husband during the Virginia Tech massacre on April 16, 2007. She analysis how her traumatization was intensified by the interaction with the public. The private and tranquil space of her home is portrait as the center of mourning and healing. Through writing she regained emotional control in and over literary and figurative spaces of traumatization which enabled her gradual reintegration into the public life.

Ghosting describes a popular contemporary dating disengagement strategy that abruptly ends communication using technological medium(s). For the target of ghosting, the noninitiator, the action usually creates an incomplete account of the loss. This investigation explores the non-initiators’ retroactive rationalization of ghosting as loss. Utilizing Amazon Mechanical Turk, we conducted two studies. In Study I, noninitiators (N=189) provided reasons for why they were ghosted. Utilizing analytic induction, eight themes emerged from non-initiators accounts. In Study II, (N¼169), the themes were further examined to determine validity. The retrospective rationalizations determine the incoherent account-making processes in post-dissolution from ghosting.

Communities often cohere around memories of historical suffering: yet coloured South Africans, a people whose diverse ancestry experienced enslavement, dispossession, genocidal extermination, and apartheid degradation, for the most part, they do not invest in remote historical traumas. Most coloured Capetonians instead focus upon a painful experience within living memory: the forced eviction of 150,000 coloured people from their homes and communities in the Cape Peninsula between 1957 and 1985 under the Group Areas Act. It is this experience that gives coloured identity vital resonance, especially amongst working class people, many of whom have yet to overcome the losses of that trauma.

Based on over one hundred life history interviews with coloured and African forced removees, this article examines the impact of Group Areas evictions on contemporary coloured identity. It suggests that, in the wake of mass social trauma, coloured removees coped with their pain by reminiscing with each other about the "good old days" in the destroyed communities. Their removal to racially defined townships ensured that they mainly shared their memories with other coloured people, and much less with African or Indian removees.

Apartheid social engineering to a large extent thus determined the spatial limits within which coloured memories circulated, creating a reflexive, mutually reinforcing pattern of narrative traffic. Over the past four decades, the constant circulation of these nostalgic stories has developed a "narrative community" amongst coloured people in the townships. This experience of popular sharing and support in the context of loss today gives coloured identity in Cape Town a dimension that would be lacking if it were only mobilized for political or economic purposes.

During this time of suffering, not just because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but also as we go through the season of Lent, the theme of betrayal looms large. Often, it is accompanied by another term, ‘denial’. Although betray and denial appear to go hand in hand, particularly in the passion narratives, a careful study will reveal that they come from two completely different contexts and do not have much in common. I would like to claim that denial stems from fear, while betrayal from a position of profiteering or a sense of loss, and thus, while there could be forgiveness and restoration for both acts, the latter leaves an unbridgeable gap in the relationship, even post forgiveness, which is rarely crossed.

Even during this period of Lent, particularly even as you find more time to reflect on your life and relationships due to the Covid-19 lockdown, you might want to do an exercise and make two lists – the first list of those whom you have denied or betrayed, and a second list of those who have denied and betrayed you. Perhaps some of the insights shared here can illumine you and give fodder to your thought, even as you plan for remorse, forgiveness, restitutions, restorations and new visions that take us to a higher ground.

A true life story of facing war time conflict internally and externally to overcome extreme trauma, focusing on post lobotomy coping mechanisms and empowerment through reframing dynamics situations and sculpting the situation into your favor.

This paper evaluates silence as a therapeutic practice in pastoral care for traumatic grief and loss. Informed by the history of attachment and mourning theory, its research considers the basic effect that empathy has upon the therapeutic relationship around psychic difference. The study appraises the potential resources and detriments that empathic language may have for the grief process. Offering clinical examples in hospice chaplaincy, it refutes the idea that silence is formulaic tool to be used. It instead offers silence as the acceptance of the limits of empathic language and the affirmation of psychological difference and theological wholeness.

Burri’s paintings, with their emphasis upon process, exhibit the effects actions and time have upon matter –the wear and tear of burlap sacks, further stressed in areas by the artist and conspicuously repaired, integrated into the plane in one series of pictures, or the accelerated craquelure of paint in another.  Burri embraces the reality -or materiality- of matter, out of which he builds up a painting.

Abstract Ghosting describes a popular contemporary dating disengagement strategy that abruptly ends communication using technological medium(s). For the target of ghosting, the non-initiator, the action usually creates an incomplete account of the loss. This investigation explores the non-initiators’ retroactive rationalization of ghosting as loss. Utilizing Amazon Mechanical Turk, we conducted two studies. In Study I, non-initiators (N = 189) provided reasons for why they were ghosted. Utilizing analytic induction, eight themes emerged from non-initiators accounts. In Study II, (N = 169), the themes were further examined to determine validity. The retrospective rationalizations determine the incoherent account-making processes in post-dissolution from ghosting.