Grief Counseling

Paper Summary:

This paper asks what good does grief counseling do in the aftermath of tragedies felt by entire communities. This paper looks at the issue of grief counseling, examining whether it provides lasting benefits or is simply a fad that like primal scream therapy appeals to a passing and overly simplistic model of human behavior and human emotional needs at those times when people are most bereft.

From the Paper:

"It is a truism about human nature that sorrow shared is sorrow lessened, and so when something terrible befalls a community the assumption should be that such a shared grief is an easier one. But in fact this is probably not often the case, for when an entire community is struck by a tragedy, there are only the emotionally wounded. At a time in their lives when people are most likely to be selfish, most demanding of other people's time and support and attention, they find that each of these other people is at the same moment reaching out to them for support rather than providing it. This is no doubt one of the most difficult aspects of community tragedies that there is no one who is not affected and therefore no one to whom one can turn and be selfish and not feel guilty about one's own emotional neediness."

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