The use of religion in coping with grief among bereaved Malay Muslim parents

The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of religion on bereaved parents after the death of a child. Literature had attempted to understand how religiosity may influence parental grief both in positive and negative ways. However, this area is scarcely explored in the Malaysian context. This qualitative study involved 11 bereaved parents who lost their children due to accidents (n?=?9) and homicide (n?=?2). Open-ended questions that focused on the importance, activities, and role of religion in the grieving process among Malay parents were asked. According to the thematic analysis, some of the main themes found were that the bereaved parents described religion as a beneficial mechanism in helping them to adapt with their losses through various responses that indicated the perception that religion as a guidance. However, other than the positive impact, religiosity can also lead the bereaved parents to experience negative effects of using religion as a coping strategy. The influence of culture is prevalent in the current study as the theme of mystical belief and paranormal experiences were also reported. This study provides some professional implication from the possible use of religion in intervention.     

A Narrative Analysis of Sibling Grief

Sibling grief is linked to serious physical and mental health outcomes, yet remains the least researched of all family bereavement. This exploratory study created a shared sibling grief narrative. Open-ended interviews were conducted with 27 participants who lost a sibling. Primary themes included Shared Life: Identity Within the Sibling Arrangement; Sibling Death: Pivotal Moments in Time; Life After Sibling Loss: Emotional Suffering, Life After Sibling Loss: Missing Roles & Changing Relationships; and The Sibling Lives On. The following study findings clarify the overlooked impact that sibling death has on the surviving sibling and demonstrate the crucial need for more sibling loss research.     

Engagement in community activities and trust in local leaders as concomitants of psychological distress among Israeli civilians exposed to prolonged rocket attacks

Background and objectives: Present study, conducted in the aftermath of the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, investigated psychological toll of exposure to rockets attacks in a sample of residents of central and southern Israel. Analyses focused on the distress-protective functions of collectively grounded resources: engagement in community activities and trust in local leadership.

Design: This cross-sectional study was conducted between 2 and 3 months after the hostilities.

Method: Participants (N?=?764) were recruited by an online survey company that distributed a questionnaire assessing, in addition to focal predictors, sociodemographic factors and prior exposure to trauma. The outcome variables were post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and nonspecific distress symptoms.

Results: Conservative regression analyses revealed that greater exposure to rocket attacks was predictive of higher levels of posttraumatic stress symptoms. Higher engagement in community activities exhibited a partial trauma-buffering function. However, higher levels of trust in local leaders appeared to exacerbate, rather than diminish, negative impact of rocket exposure on PTSD. Symptoms of psychological distress were not influenced neither by trauma exposure nor by stressor interactions with resources. Trust in local leadership exerted a beneficial main effect on distress.

Conclusions: Collectively based resources are important for coping in times of community-wide stressors, yet their role is complex.     

Does Traumatic Brain Injury Attenuate the Exposure Therapy Process?

Research indicates that exposure therapy is efficacious for combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) comorbid with traumatic brain injury (TBI) as is shown by reduced PTSD treatment outcome scores. What is unknown, however, is whether the process of fear extinction is attenuated in veterans with TBI history. Increased PTSD symptomatology and possible cognitive deficits associated with TBI sequelae may indicate additional or longer exposure sessions to achieve habituation and extinction comparable to individuals without TBI history. As such, a more extensive course of treatment may be necessary to achieve comparable PTSD treatment outcome scores for individuals with TBI history. Using a sample of veterans with combat-related PTSD, some of whom were comorbid for TBI, this study compared process variables considered relevant to successful treatment outcome in exposure therapy. Individuals with and without TBI demonstrated similar rates of fear activation, length and number of exposure sessions, within-session habituation, between-session habituation, and extinction rate; results remained consistent when controlling for differential PTSD symptomatology. Furthermore, results indicated that self-perception of executive dysfunction did not impact the exposure process. Results suggest that individuals with PTSD and TBI history engage successfully and no differently in the exposure therapy process as compared to individuals with PTSD alone. Findings further support exposure therapy as a first-line treatment for combat-related PTSD regardless of TBI history.     

Finding character strengths through loss: An extension of Peterson and Seligman (2003)

People can experience positive changes even in the midst of adversity and loss. We investigated character strengths following three recent shooting tragedies. Using an Internet database of respondents to the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS), we compared responses from three groups of participants (N?=?31,429) within close proximity of each event: those who completed it eight months prior to the event, and one month and two months after. Results suggested that for one of the events, participants who completed the VIA-IS after the event showed slightly different levels of self-reported character strengths compared to participants who completed the VIA-IS before the event, with some mean levels higher and others lower. The observed differences in character strengths were inconsistent across follow-up periods, and effect sizes were small (d values from –0.13 to 0.15). These findings raise questions about whether and how tragedies might catalyze differences in character strengths.     

THE TEXTURE OF TRAUMATIC ATTACHMENT: PRESENCE AND GHOSTLY ABSENCE IN TRANSGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION

Work on the transgenerational transmission of trauma refers to unspoken stories across generations, but the actual mode of transmission has remained somewhat mysterious. Utilizing examples from her own life, the author illustrates how attachment patterns are a primary mode of transmission of trauma. When trauma revisits a person transgenerationally through dysregulated and disrupted attachment patterns, it is within the child's empathic attunement and search for a parental bond that the mode of transmission can be found. This will become the texture of traumatic attachment: how it feels to this child to feel connected to the parent.     

Grief and Recovery: The Prevalence of Grief and Loss in Substance Abuse Treatment

Grief from various losses can underlie the process of recovery from substance abuse disorders. This study identified losses that clients encountered prior to abusing substances, losses that occurred as a result of addiction, and losses that occurred upon entering treatment.     

Negative cognitions and avoidance in emotional problems after bereavement: a prospective study

Cognitive behavioural conceptualisations of grief propose that negative cognitions and avoidance strategies play a key role in emotional problems after bereavement. In the current study, this assumption was examined. Ninety-seven individuals who had lost a relative less than 5 months ago completed questionnaires tapping background and loss-related variables, negative cognitions (about the self, life, the future, and one's own grief reactions), avoidance, and symptoms of complicated grief (CG) and depression. Of these mourners, 70 people (72%) completed symptom measures again 6 months later at T2 (7-10 months after the loss), and 60 (62%) completed symptoms measures still 9 months later at T3 (16-19 months after the loss). Among other things, results showed that all four cognitive variables and the avoidance variable were strongly associated with concurrent and prospective symptom levels, even when the influence of relevant background/loss-related variables was controlled. In addition, independent of initial symptom levels, most of the cognitive variables predicted later CG and depression. The avoidance variable only predicted additional variance in depression at T3 beyond T1 symptom levels. Findings indicate that negative cognitions are important in emotional problems after bereavement and that the role of avoidance in the development of these problems needs further scrutiny.     

Who's afraid of the Wolfe couple: the interlocking traumatic scene

Fulfilling intimate relationships require a constant emotional and psychological struggle to disentangle strangleholds created by the interpenetration of unresolved complexes stemming from previous disappointing relational experiences. These complexes may manifest as an encrypted pattern of engagement that each partner brings to the marriage, like a 'malignant dowry'. The dowry box, once opened, releases its nefarious contents to create an extremely complex and entangled drama I call the 'interlocking traumatic scene'. Partners unconsciously entrap each other to play a part in such a scene with double (sometimes multiple) roles for each antagonist. The imaginal space between the two characters can be seen as a projection screen, upon which are superimposed two separate shadow plays, one on each side of the screen. A third play, which is a co-created product of these two individual traumatic scenes, can also be observed. Three plays are performed simultaneously. The defensive systems that the two individuals bring to the equation dovetail together, but the actual interlocking mechanism itself deadlocks in such a way that it seems to have its own malignant presence, a 'malevolent third' (after Ogden 1994). I outline therapeutic interventions using the metaphor of the therapist as 'anti-director' and I introduce my concept of the conjoint selected fact (after Bion 1963 after Poincaré 1952).