THE IMPACT OF UNRESOLVED GRIEF ON STUDENTS IN TERTIARY INSTITUTIONS

Marine Cunningham

Guidance Counsellor, The MICO Teachers' College

Grief is a natural part of life. It is not only experienced through bereavement but also in times of other signifi­cant losses. Grief feelings are normal and vary from individual to individual. These feelings include waves of sadness, anger, guilt, confusion, restlessness, insom­nia, loss of appetite and lack of energy. These are phases of grief that do not necessarily happen in any particular order and may come and go unpredictably. The process takes time, often more than we think, and it is hard work.

Although all persons who experience loss of a loved one go through these phases, they arc not all aware that these feelings are normal and that they are supposed to do active grief work. As a result they may try to be strong by suppressing the feelings as they experience them. For instance, many feel it is a sign of weakness, failure or lack of faith. They often find it difficult to face up to grief, thinking that there can only be bad times and not understanding that there can be pleasant moments, times of relief and moments of recollection of the good times in the missed relationship.

The grief reaction can be physical, emotional, cognitive or behavioral. The bereaved however, quite often ex­perience denial and function in a state of numbness, and in the case of death of a loved one, as they become in­volved in the activities that precede the burial. After visitors and other relatives and friends have come and gone and the funeral is over, the bereaved are forced to face and deal with the reality of the loss. Grieving helps to bring closure to the relationships that have ended with the death. Many persons do not go through the mourning process. This causes them to live in a state denial of their death.

Mourning is an introspective process that helps us to deal with our grief. If mourning is repressed then we cannot effectively deal with the grief. By repressing the feelings we delay the process. The fear of the emotional and physical responses of grief often does not allow the feel­ings that this is normal. Since we all want to feel normal, there is therefore the tendency to pretend to be strong. As far as is possible there may be an avoidance of all the tasks of mourning except for the funeral.

William Warden suggests that ‘There is the need to accept the loss, to experience the pain of grief, readjust to life without the deceased and reinvest in the future”. It is at this point that a number of my clients have had their most difficult experiences. When death occurred they were often very young and adults did not allow them to identity with the death. Many thought that if they did not think about the loss it would be easier for them to cope. There were those who were angry with persons who died and had to get help to understand that it was alright to feel that way and that these emotions were a normal stage of their grief. Some said they thought they were coping well until they came to College and began to miss home. This Ioss of closeness with those who meant much to them and who gave them support highlighted the feeling of emptiness associated with their grief.

Robert came to my office in a state of panic saying he felt as if he is going to die. He said his heart was palpitating and he was dizzy. I asked what had happened to him. His response was that he had experienced something trau­matic. 1 asked him to tell me about it. He then told me

doctors that there would not be an autopsy, when he was called to the morgue to identify her body he entered the morgue and saw his wife's body on the table. Her skull was open and her brain was on the table beside the body. Obviously this was a shocking experience and he had not been able to get over it. He did not ask any question as to why they had not kept their word.

As I worked with him through the stages of his grief I discovered also that he had been experiencing depression because he was missing his daughter whom he had left with his grandmother. He was depressed also because he did not know why he had been having these episodes for such a long period. Dr Aubrey Pottinger suggests in “After the storm there is calm”, that when the last image of the deceased is that of a body lying peacefully in a state of rest it helps to facilitate adjustments. He adds that when the image is gruesome and unpleasant, processing the loss appears to be more traumatic. This was the case with my client, and as he was having difficulty adjusting to the loss.

While the experience of grief among tertiary level stu­dents is not unlike any other, I have found grief work par­ticularly challenging among this group for several reasons.

•  These students are more often than not separated from their family and relatives and are especially susceptible to the states of depression brought on by the feeling of loneliness as they are separated from those from whom they would normally ex­pect support.

•  The college community can normally be a very competitive environment prone to insensitive harassment and isolation of the more vulnerable and driven by the overwhelming urge to prove oneself. It is an environment in which the strong are respected and others often ignored.

•  This is even more evident among the first year students having to cope with the perceived dehu­manization and humiliation of orientation exer­cises, but sometimes even the feelings of self worth are called into question and the students carry unnecessary negative in their careers.

•  The college environment is a performance oriented one and quickly isolate the non-performer. It is in this isolation that many grieving students feel the pain of inadequacy and helplessness. Grief prompts a kind of distraction which is hard to understand and harder to overcome.

•  The grieving experience can often be misconstrued as illness by those who are uninformed, and psychological and emotional problems result.

It is critical to bring the student at this level to not only understand and work through his or her own grief, but to prepare him or her to help others through theirs. Understanding the processes must not be for therapeu­tic purposes only but must have the didactic element in it

Under normal circumstances, the helping processes are assisted by the opportunities for contact with the sig­nificant others who share the clients experience. In the context of the college this is often impossible and al­most always not practical for reasons of the limitations of the resources of the institution. Ideally, the student would hope to benefit from the best intervention strate­gies. In reality he/she must settle for treatment that is less than ideal. These are some of the challenges of the practices in the context of the tertiary institution

In the case previously described more sessions were requires than normally would have been necessary if the treatment had been taking place in a setting outside of the limitations of the college.

Elaine, who was mourning the death of her guardian, was referred by her lecturer because her academic per­formance had deteriorated beyond expectation. Al­though she claimed to be coping it seemed to me that she was not. She after my intervention, I realized that she was experiencing a great deal of anger about the death. It turned out that her anger came from not being able to reciprocate some of the kindness shown to her by the deceased, and she bemoaned the fact that she was not even allowed to see the body at the morgue. Worden suggests it is virtually impossible to lose someone to whom you had been deeply attached to without experi­encing some level of pain. This client had intellectually accepted the death but could not yet deal with the reality of it.

The challenge of this situation was to help the student find the intrinsic motivation to replace what was obvi­ously the extrinsic motivation to succeed in order to be able to do something for her guardian. Grief can affect performance, and Elaine had to be helped to understand the nature of her unresolved grief and how she was being affected by it.

There are other issues that are critical to the helping proc­esses within the institution. One has to do with the in­ability of many lecturers to identify some manifestation of grief among students. Another has to do with the un­willingness of some to empathise and help them work through the emotional, psychological and even the physi­cal effects of the experience. Unfortunately, in a society where death has become a commonplace and grieving is an ongoing experience even lecturers themselves struggle with the vicissitudes of these life changing realities.

Quoting from “After the Storm... There is the Calm”, the words of Cohn Murray Parkes, “The pain of grief is as much a part of life as the joy of love; it is the price we pay for love, it is the cost of commitment” (Murray Parkes 1974) Grieving is not arbitrary; active grief work must he encouraged. This task of resolution is often the most difficult to accomplish because it means letting go of the past and moving on with life and new relationships. Some factors that contribute to the difficulty are the cause of death, the age at the time of death, the relationship that existed and the emotional ties. “Often people who get stuck at this point later realize that in some way, their life stopped at the moment of loss.” Unresolved grief can lead to serious physical and psychological problems that can make life unbearable.” Students need help to grieve, to deal with old or recent loss. Staff also need that help.

“He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can coin-fort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from Him…” 2 Corinthians 1:4

References

Khubler-Ross MD, Elizabeth On Death and Dying.

1979, McMillan Publishers Co. Inc.

New York

Smith, Carol R. Social Work with the Dying and

Bereaved 1993, Practical Social Work Series Editor Jo Campling BASW