Spiritual Distress in Bereavement: Evolution of a Research Program
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2014, Vol 5, Issue 4
Abstract
Many mourners turn to their spiritual beliefs and traditions when confronted by the death of a loved one. However, prior studies have either focused primarily on the benefits of faith following loss or studied spiritual struggle outside the context of bereavement. Moreover, scales to measure bereavement-related crises of faith and interventions specifically designed for spiritually inclined, distressed grievers are virtually non-existent. Our program of research, which to date has consisted of working with Christian grievers and is outlined below, elucidates complicated spiritual grief (CSG)—a spiritual crisis following the loss of a loved one. For example, our longitudinal examination of 46 African American homicide survivors established the relation between positive religious coping, CSG, and complicated grief (CG), to clarify whether religious coping more strongly predicted bereavement distress or vice versa, with a follow-up study that determined the relation between religious coping and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. We replicated and expanded these findings with a diverse sample of 150 grievers to explore the complex relation between CSG, CG, and meaning making in a comparison study of mourners who had experienced traumatic-versus natural death losses. In a companion study, we qualitatively analyzed 84 grievers’ narratives and interviewed a 5-member focus group to capture and learn from their firsthand experiences of spiritual distress. To close the gap in terms of CSG assessment, we also developed and validated the Inventory of Complicated Spiritual Grief (ICSG). Currently, our ongoing CSG investigation extends in several directions: first, to a sample of family members anticipating the loss of their hospice-eligible loved one in palliative care; and, second, to the development and testing of a writing-intensive intervention for newly bereaved, spiritually inclined grievers.
Authors and Affiliations
Laurie A. Burke and Robert A. Neimeyer
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP25400
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel5041087
- Views 320
- Downloads 8
Spirituality in the Undergraduate Curricula of Nursing Schools in Portugal and São Paulo-Brazil
Spirituality is considered a dimension of nursing care, which is often recognized as being neglected, mainly due to a lack of education. Several studies have addressed nursing students’ perceptions and skills for provi...
Introduction to the Special Issue: “The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World”, Religions 2016
In “The Wayfinders”, a Special Issue for the journal Religions, scholars explore the significance of the biblical wisdom literature for the current day. At the heart of these six articles lies the question: why does an...
Modern Restlessness, from Hobbes to Augustine
Only with difficulty do modern readers grasp the full import of Augustine’s confession, “Restless is our heart, until it rests in you”, or seriously consider that it might be true. An unexpected remedy is to be found i...
Discipline, Resistance, Solace and the Body: Catholic Women Religious’ Convent Experiences from the Late 1930s to the Late 1960s
This paper examines the corporal forms of discipline and techniques of resistance exercised through and by Catholic women religious (sisters/nuns) in Ontario, Canada. Borrowing from Foucault’s conception of controlled...
Religion, Race/Ethnicity, and Norms of Intergenerational Assistance among Older Adults
Using data on adults ages 55 and over from the second wave of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH-2), this study models the main and interactive effects of religious involvement and race/ethnicity on f...