Scrapbooking as an Intervention for Grief Recovery With Children

Children experience grief and loss from death, divorce, parental incarceration, and similar situations of being placed in foster care or adoption. These youths may be challenged in recovery due to lacking the necessary life experience and coping skills. They may also lack the appropriate support networks to work through their grief as their remaining parent or family members may be too grieved to be of assistance. Peers, can even distance themselves out of inability to understand the experience. Children are at risk for developing psychological difficulties that can manifest into psychiatric disorders when lacking coping skills. Therefore, it is critical for parents, teachers, pastors, and other influential adults to recognize the risk factors associated with complicated or unresolved grief. It is also important to remember the child’s developmental age and stage when considering how to help. Some therapy techniques have been found helpful such as motivational interviewing, therapy that also includes a parent or guardian, group therapy, and grief support groups. It is necessary for adults to develop open and honest lines of communication with the child, ensuring that he feels safe expressing how he feels. Lastly, helping in grief and loss can cause secondary trauma. Self-care is vital for anyone helping work the grieving process

As an educator and spiritual caregiver to the bereaved -- and to bereaved parents in particular -- I offer supportive companionship and spiritual healing tools specifically for the grief journey. But I am also concerned with the psycho-spiritual health of my students and clients in general, and in this capacity, I’ve encountered certain theological mindsets that can disrupt psychological well-being. I’ve observed that these mindsets, which tend to be rooted in the Abrahamic faith traditions, have the potential to interfere with the healing process, and in some cases lead to complicated mourning, depression and even illness. I refer to these mindsets as “toxic theologies,” and in this paper will explore the definition of toxic theology, the definition of complicated mourning, and alternative theologies, cosmologies and spiritual practices that may be helpful in supporting people who face these challenges.

In this autoethnographic essay, I consider the experience of my daughter Matilda’s stillbirth. I explore stillbirth, grief, tactile contact with death, and how all of these demonstrate the strictures and ruptures of masculinity in Western cultures. I counterpose these realities against the political, economic, and medical discourses of stillbirth as a means of exploring how social structures mediate and complicate parents’ experiences of their children’s deaths. Fathers’ experiences form the core of my analysis, for both the scientific literature and cultural texts about grief and perinatal death often discursively elide these experiences.

This thesis argues that Christian bereavement care needs to proceed from a solid biblical foundation in determining the goal (receiving comfort from God), model (by focusing on communion with God), and method of care (through narrative and relationship) to guard against secular influences and to bring soul-satisfying comfort to the bereaved. Chapter 1 introduces the thesis. Chapter 2 critically evaluates contemporary bereavement care approaches. Chapter 3 explores the human experience of grief by examining autobiographical narratives and God’s account of the origin of grief in the Genesis narrative. Chapter 4 develops the argument for a theocentric and Christocentric approach. A proposed bereavement care framework is derived from the way Jesus relates to the bereaved and God. Chapter 5 offers practical guidelines on caring for the bereaved using eight relational steps. Chapter 6 concludes by drawing together the arguments to demonstrate how employing narrative in Christian bereavement care effectively connects the bereaved with the heart of God.