1. Marriage and Family Interaction HPER F258

2.  In your small group, discuss the experience of writing the letter. Include the following discussion points: ◦ Who mailed their letter or plans to mail it? ◦ Did anyone write to someone who had already died? ◦ Was this a positive experience or a negative one? ◦ Would you do it again?

4.  Grief is not about abandoning the "lost love object”.  Grief is not about giving up the past or your connection to the loved one  Grief is not about working through stages

5.  Grief is about not interacting with that person again.  Grief is about transition and change.  You do not let go of your past, you transform your understanding of your past and your relationship with that person.

6.  There is a great deal of controversy about the entire concept of stages  No support in research for stage models  People are drawn to stages because they give us a sense of security but…  They complicate grief for people who need to believe that grief follows a set pattern.

7.  Grief is the response of the individual to an assault on the "assumptive world" (the beliefs that we hold about how life should be)  Grief is a "redefinition of normal“ ◦ The reality that existed before no longer exists. You are forever changed by your loss experience.

8.  Grief is a highly complicated, highly individual process which is dependent on: ◦ how you organize meaning; ◦ the specific assumptions that make up your assumptive world; ◦ the degree to which the death and surrounding events affect these assumptions;  Includes social context ◦ the coping strategies used.

9.  In your small group, discuss the web-based reading by Dr. Gilbert on “We’ve had the same loss, why don’t we have the same grief?

10.  Relates back to report talk vs rapport talk  Cognitive-solitary grief (“masculine”) ◦ “head-level” ◦ Need to be alone to deal with loss ◦ Can lead to isolation and emotional “freezing”  Emotional-social grief (“feminine”) ◦ Emotionally expressive ◦ Need company of others ◦ Can lead to getting “stuck” and alienating others

11.  Children may respond to grief physically, emotionally, and/or behaviorally  Children’s grief looks very different from adults ◦ What looks to an adult like “resilience” may, in fact, be the child’s efforts to cope with an emotionally and intellectually overwhelming loss. ◦ In particular, the child may use play as a mechanism to help them understand and manage the situation.

12.  Share acknowledgement of reality of death  Share experience of the pain of grief  Reorganize the family system  Redirect the family’s relationships and goals  The meaning of a death and the individual responses to it are shaped by the system of beliefs in the family.

13.  Sharing feelings about the loss (i.e., shared meaning) ◦ facilitate communication, ◦ provide structure and meaning to their interactions, and ◦ serve as the basis for familial coping.

14.  Differential grief – having family members at different points in their grief reconciliation and reality reconstruction process  BUT family members may expect each other to be at a similar place  The result is that family members may be the worst people to help each other.

15.  LISTEN  Don’t make assumptions  Don’t take it personally  Take the initiative (choices can be overwhelming)  Be gentle and kind  Be patient

16.  Coping with grief in families is highly complicated. Discuss how you believe your family would respond in the face of a loss and how you would help a friend and her/his family in dealing with a loss.

17.  Identify one thing you learned about grief that you didn’t know before this lecture.  Turn this in to your discussion leader.