Death and grief: the end of the bond?

A narrative constructionist perspective

Grief and social construction

People construct the events that occur around them and do so based on beliefs and values specific to
their culture. Furthermore, the emotional state itself reinforces these beliefs and these, in turn, shape the
way in which the emotion is expressed.

The construction of death and the subsequent processes (grief and mourning), then, place the subject in
an affective context that is permitted and expected for the elaboration of their human and existential
conflict.

Historically, the rites around death, mourning and mourning had the objective of prolonging the bond
with our dead in a new relationship, based on physical absence. Other rites reinforced the meaning of
sharing pain with the community, it was a call that showed pain and demanded social understanding.
Death was a public event. These rites are being lost today.

We no longer talk about death or its pain, nor are the diseases that lead to it named, the language of
death is being replaced by euphemisms, cemeteries disappear and are transformed into parks without
graves. What impact do these changes have on the way people relate to their dead?

These new cultural practices force us to leave our dead behind, stop connecting with them and worse:
they force us to remain silent.

I attribute these changes to 3 factors:

a) the pathologization of grief,
b) the denial of death and
c) its marketing

The pathologization of grief

Pain was previously considered a condition of the human spirit. When and why is this condition
modified? The medicalization of society, which began at the end of the 19th century, leads to
considering an important part of the usual human experience as manifestations of a pathology that must
be prevented or cured. Consequently, mourning went from being a public and community act, to an
individual and private act, from being a ritual that established a new relationship between the living and
the dead, to being an experience of personal pain that had to be silenced.

Lindermann and Kubler-Ross established the well-known stages of grief. Botella and Herrero criticize
this perspective that considers grief as an objective and universal reality, which underestimates the
personal meaning of the loss and reduces the possibility of action for both the therapist and the
consultant.

Robert Neimeyer proposes considering the variability limited to the person who experiences the loss,
depending on their personal, socio-cultural and historical qualities. It rejects the stages of grief
established by previous authors and also the assumption that grief necessarily has to end with a
"recovery."
Not experiencing grief as the norm says is not synonymous with pathology.
The denial of death

We avoid talking about death, it makes us uncomfortable to be in front of someone who is suffering a
loss without knowing what to say to console him/her, we prefer to change the subject or take the
mourner out of his/her state, lull him/her to sleep with drugs or trivial conversation.

The attitude of the mourner, for his part, is the cause and consequence of this fact, he resists crying
although sometimes he cannot prevent it, he avoids talking about his pain, often arguing that he does
not want to bother those close to him, which could increase the pain. the suffering of another person
affected by the event. There is, therefore, no space to share this experience and grief is lived in silence.
What are the consequences of this silence of mourning?

Aznar points out that the act of narrating structures the life of the individual. Narrating is a relational
act that helps us get closer to the world of others and also helps others collaborate in organizing our
mind, allowing us to find a meaning that gives meaning to the experience of loss. The cultural silence
of mourning then ends up causing more pain in the mourner because the less meaning can be given to
the loss, the more the pain is suffered.

This author recalls 3 factors that can complicate the course of this elaboration: that the loss cannot be
talked about socially, that the environment functions as if the loss had not occurred and that there is no
social support network. But what social practices help preserve this silence?

Your marketing

Walter suggests that the notion of complicated grief serves the interests of funeral agencies, health
agencies (psychiatrists and psychologists), and pharmaceutical industries. Denial of death leads
mourners to seek out others to deal with the matter.

Transferring mourning rituals to specialized companies hinders their function of facilitating and
promoting a new bond. The only thing important is to say goodbye, as soon as possible, as if it were the
only way.

It is believed that the DSM will incorporate a prolonged grief disorder, which will consider 6 months of
suffering as the limit of non-pathological grief. This will reinforce its concealment as an experience,
promote the marketing of medicines and make its function of modifying the link even more difficult.
Would it be possible to approach grief from another perspective? It is time to review the clinical
implications of understanding grief from the perspective of social constructionism.

Culture imposes correct ways on people to go through this process, which prevents those who are
grieving from being able to experience this process in their own way. It is common to pathologize
people by expecting something impossible to fulfill: we worry if the sufferer does not show pain, but if
he expresses it, we try to silence him quickly. Thus, in this way, few are saved from being considered
sick or in the process of getting sick.

Marques suggests that we must reestablish the vision of human pain as something natural and
necessary. According to this author, human beings hurt because they are alive and not because they are
sick.
A therapeutic intervention based on social constructionism involves the following terms:

• The human being as an active agent of his own grieving process. Neimeyer points out that
experience is not something that happens to you, but rather what you do with what happens to
you.

• Worden, rather than talking about stages of grief, prefers to propose tasks and the human being
must comply with 4: accept the reality of the loss, express his emotions and pain, adapt to an
environment without the deceased and relocate him emotionally to continue living.

• SH as a reconstruction of meaning: the loss of a loved one constitutes a true narrative break in
the history that people have projected for their lives. The need to reorganize experience is
achieved with an active search for meaning.

• Grief allows us to begin telling a new story, creating a new chapter, co Build a link between past
and present to continue into the future. In Liberman's words: "it is the passage from the absence
of meaning to the meaning of absence."

• Say hello instead of goodbye: M. White, a pioneer of narrative therapy, has questioned the
tendency of modern psychotherapy to approach grief with the metaphor of ''saying goodbye'',
which implies not only saying goodbye but also excluding, something that not all mourners are
willing to do. do. White recommends replacing the metaphor of saying goodbye with saying
hello again, which implies integrating the lost person into our lives, in another place and with
other meanings. For White, a relationship does not end with death, it is only modified.

*Mrs M. Her husband had cancer. She and her children decided not to tell him about her illness, to
avoid further suffering, until she died. Later, this decision not to tell him became a fault that made them
feel guilty. After her death, neither she nor her children talked about it or showed their pain. We thus
see how the denial of death leads, on the one hand, to hiding the illness from the husband and, on the
other, to making an implicit pact of silence about death. The behaviors related to panic attacks and
alcohol abuse on her part seem to be alternative and pathological outlets compared to a normal grief
that has no channels of expression.
Two tasks are carried out: redefining guilt and grief, and generating a family ritual that allows the
deceased husband to be integrated from another position within the family functioning. They chose to
go to the cemetery together to see their father, and there they just talked and cried without inhibition.
They decided to put a portrait of him in the living room of the house. Back home, they continued
talking about their father, they had already overcome the fear of their own and other people's pain. At
that moment, the grief had been redirected into a normal process, which only required accompaniment.