Complicated Grief, Attachment, and Art Therapy. Группа авторов
list of various arts-based assessments goes on, and there are many existing texts that explore this topic, beyond the scope of this book. Additionally, emerging paradigms in this area attempt to address disorders of extreme stress that are resistant to change, like C-PTSD, through the frame of attachment and neuroscience. Hass-Cohen and Findlay (2015) expand upon this in their Art Therapy Relational-Neuroscience (ATR-N) approach, which is described in greater detail in Chapter 5.
In sum, the impact of trauma and abuse on grief feelings relies upon the severity of the trauma and abuse, the context in which it occurred, the age at which the trauma and abuse occurred, the resulting attachment style, and a comprehensive understanding of underlying developmental factors (pertaining to both the age at which a developmental arrestment might have occurred, and the developmental phase in which the client currently examines it).
References
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Burns, R.C. and Kaufman, S.H. (1970) Kinetic Family Drawings (K-F-D): An Introduction to Understanding Children through Kinetic Drawings. New York: Brunner/Mazel.
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4
The Impact of Culture and Community
Briana MacWilliam, Anne Briggs, Maya Rose Hormadaly, and Dana George Trottier
Cultural influences
Culture and grief
A white, middle-class, female student of mine approached me one day with a clinical concern. She worked primarily with black children of varied ethnic backgrounds, ages 11 to 13, in an urban, school-based setting. Her client was a young girl whose father had passed away the previous year. In a recent art therapy session, the normally defensive and reticent little girl had finally opened up to my student, describing the events of her father’s funeral. In particular, she noted feeling overwhelmed and fearful of the dramatic, emotional outbursts of her aunties. One auntie had even flung herself on the coffin, requiring several male family members to tear her off of it. My student’s concern was that the young girl had created outlandish memories as a way of using fantasy to dissociate herself from the painful feelings of her father’s loss. She feared this might impede the little girl’s ability to successfully navigate the grieving process.
I smiled softly, touching my student’s hand, “You’ve never been to a black funeral, have you?” Indeed, she hadn’t.
In an article entitled “The difference between white funerals and black funerals” a black, South African, male author offers an anecdotal account of the ways in which white people and black people grieve. The nuances he describes are hard to measure and qualify through empirical research and study, but are frequently observed and appreciated through the frame of humor.
The first time I attended a white person’s funeral, I thought I had landed on another planet. The service was meant to start at 9am and by 8:45am everyone was seated, all 27 of us. At promptly 9am, the organ started and everyone rose. Besides the priest, three other people spoke for about three minutes each. Around 9:30am, things were wrapped up and the family proceeded to the crematorium while we went outside to the lawn and grabbed some sandwiches. By 10:15am I was back at my desk at work as if nothing had happened.
Oh no, not our funerals… The first big event on the day of the funeral is when the casket is brought out of the house and the mourners can fully appreciate it in its glory. There’s always that aunt who takes out a hanky, dabs at her eyes and murmurs approvingly, “At least my uncle’s child is going to rest inside a beautiful ‘house’. It must have cost at least 80k.” Towards the end of the whole rigmarole comes the most dramatic part, the viewing of the body. There is always some woman—a cousin of the deceased, thrice removed—who waits until everyone has seen the body before she approaches. She’s