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The Life Cycle: from Birth to Funerals

Monday, January 21st, 2013

Life cycle events between birth and death are specific to families and cultures. What happens on the first day of school? What do families do to celebrate weddings or graduations? These are good questions to ask as you observe the rituals that are an integral part of your life and perhaps take the opportunity to create meaningful ones that your family will cherish.

Starting with the birth of a baby, common birth rituals in some cultures to have baby showers, baptisms, christenings, etc. Some families insist the new child be named after a father, mother, grandparent, etc. While many couples consider it a family honor or tradition to carry on this naming process other couples pick trendy names for their children. The birth of the child can be looked upon as a private affair, or in some cultures, a family reunion. When we had our first child, only my husband and I were at the hospital, but in the adjoining room, a young woman of a different culture had at least 20 people with her.

Going all the way to the other end of the life cycle to funeral traditions we see how cultures deal with grief and death. Some cultures have expectations of stoicism while others do not hesitate to wail out loud. When my husband served in Vietnam, he took several pictures of Vietnamese funerals. In these pictures, all participants wore white or bright colors, and the body was placed on a wagon with bright objects on top of it. In the Jewish faith, the bodies are not viewed for long periods of time. In Jewish funerals the body is buried quickly.

There are as many differences of expressing birth and death, joy and grief, within cultures as there are between cultures. Examine your own family traditions and rituals and if you decide they are lacking, create a new one of your very own.

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Stages of Grief and Loss Counseling Techniques: Ritual in the Grief Cycle

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

Researchers (Holmes and Rahe, 1967 ) have studied grief cycle processes and assigned stress levels to items. Loss of a spouse and loss of a child are the highest stress levels. Others that we may not often think about are losses that occur with moving, changing schools, financial issues, and health problems.

We cannot generalize about the grief cycle or expect everyone to process through stages of grief and loss in the same way. For example, loss of a spouse is rated the highest for causing stress, but consider it from different perspectives. A spouse who dies suddenly may cause more of a loss than the spouse who has been ill for some time. There is no road map for grief, and each loss must be examined aside from any others. Couples may experience the same loss, but they may grieve very differently. When one spouse does not understand the grieving process of the other, marital problems can surface. Different grief and loss counseling techniques are often utilized by therapists to be sensitive to the varying needs of couples going through the grief cycle together.

Grief and loss counseling techniques for couples and families can often find a unifying strength in rituals. Rituals are such an important part of our lives. We often take them for granted and do not even realize that we have rituals, or recognize how they impact our lives. This is also true of rituals surrounding death. Every culture approaches death differently, and every family within those cultures may have its own way of experiencing death. We can make statements and generalize to cultures and groups and how they deal with death and how they ritualistically process stages of grief and loss, but we know many divert from the expectations.

An example of a ritualistic approach to addressing stages of grief and loss is the NAMES Project. The NAMES Project began as a way to affirm the life of every man, woman, and child who had died of AIDS. It was a healing grief cycle ritual where people added squares to a quilt, each square representing a person who had died.

Dr. Judy DeTrude is licensed in Texas as a Professional Counselor (LPC) and a Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and is an Authorized Supervisor for each of the licenses.

Resources

Holmes and Rahe ( August,1967). Social readjustment rating scale. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 11(2).

Walsh, F. and McGoldrick, M. (2004). Living beyond loss: Death in the family.W.W. Norton & Company: N.Y.

Tags: grief and loss counseling, grief and loss counseling techniques, grief cycle, Marriage and Family Therapy Programs, stages of grief and loss
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