CEP 616LEC - Grief Counseling and Issues in Grief & Loss

Grief is the most common and painful experience known to men and women. It affects everyone and at times it affects everyone profoundly. We are born with innate ways of healing from the pain of loss, but our society extinguishes many of these coping mechanisms by adolescence. Unresolved grief is the major reason people seek counseling and a significant cause of health problems, yet it is often unrecognized as source of the problem. The purpose of this course is to discuss how you can respond in helpful and comforting ways to people who are grieving by understanding your own grief, the nature of grief and healing, and the things that seem to help people who are hurting. This course is more personal than academic, more practical than theoretical, yet focuses on the underlying scientific grieving principles to explain why some things help and other things don’t. To help grieving people we need to learn a set of behaviors based on these principles. We also have to unlearn typical ways of responding to people who are hurting. The class is intended to be relatively informal and our time will be spent talking about grief, listening to some tapes, in discussion with questions and answers, and in personal discussion of some of our own experiences. We will focus on counseling grieving people, the aftermath of murder and suicide, crisis interventions in schools, suicide prevention, and the spiritual aspects of death and loss.

Credits: 3