Legitimizing Grief: Challenging Beliefs That Constrain

Abstract

The author explores the commonly held belief that grief, in response to a significant loss, is a finite, time-limited, and predictable process. Examination of this idea suggests the possibility that this belief creates personal and societal expectations that contribute to increased suffering in the lives of grieving people and renders them subject to diagnostic labels fostering incompetence, failure, and pathology. Alternately, the author offers her assumptions and beliefs about the opportunity of developing a relationship with grief that is potentially lifelong, but livable, and as much filled with comfort and creativity as it is with sorrow. A clinical advanced nursing practice model, as developed and presented by Wright, Watson, and Bell (1996), is explored in relation to working with grieving families and to targeting beliefs about grief that constrain families, nurses, and our cultural ideas and expectations of this life experience. Clinical examples and a clinical exemplar are offered.