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Copyright of European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay argues that "The lamentacion of a Gentilwoman vpon the death of her late deceased frend William Gruffith Gent." in The Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578), attributed to Isabella Whitney, is a witty reimagining of one of the most popular Renaissance literary genres: the epitaph. The poet's grief revolves around the personal consequences of her secret lover's death, handling stock phrases and situational irony to strangely moving effect. While the poem's first-person speaker invokes the epitaph only to repudiate it, the three quatrains framing the text (written in the third person and therefore generally attributed to the volume's editor Thomas Proctor), pins down the mourning presence with the epitaphic "here." This paper suggests single authorship of the doubled text by showing how the poem posits personal lament as the site of interment located by the spatial demonstrative "here," to fashion a poetics of closure in which the voice of the languishing female poet becomes, through linguistic and textual splitting, a living epitaph for the dead beloved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The death of a loved one can create a tear in the fabric of meaning. Grieving involves remaking meaning. In therapy, events can be emplotted into stories, which can return some sense of coherence to the bereaved. In this paper, I present a way of narrating loss through a narrative therapy approach of retelling. This involved writing found poems, known as rescued speech poems, from the conversations of people who had lost a loved partner. The found poetry sought to bring an order to grieving and to polish the beauty of key moments following loss. For one participant, the found poetry amplified a narrative of the biography of the loved one. For another, the poems added beauty to a memory of her deceased partner. Thus, rescued speech poems—judiciously selected from speech, and sensitively arranged on the page—can provide another way to facilitate vibrant meaning-making of life after loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The core notion of Kelly's self-characterization procedure, although rarely commented on by subsequent writers, is that of a "protected spot" wherein the client can write about themselves freely. In this article, I shall explore self-characterization, not just by the "client", but for the "client" – the person informing himself or herself through the self-characterization procedure. Here, I consider the use of poetry as the means by which a grieving person construes grief and its relationship to the self. Poetry is a means of self-characterization that provides concrete evidence of the role of the "protected spot". Examples are drawn from informal private "journal" poems and their subsequent transformation into formal public verse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grief scholars have concurred that continuing bonds with the deceased represent normal adaptive behaviour in the face of loss, and numerous researchers have stressed the therapeutic benefits of writing through trauma; however, few have interrogated the potential therapeutic effects specific to elegy writing, which offers robust opportunities to express and transfigure grief through imagery and recollection. This research reveals the role of elegy writing in acknowledging and nurturing ongoing bonds with lost others. Drawing on critical debates surrounding the grief process, it examines case studies derived from adult writing workshops using poems by students working through loss to uncover ways elegy writing can assuage even difficult feelings like guilt and resentment, which often complicate the grieving process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chronic illness diagnoses frequently cause the shattering of personal assumptions about the self and the world, resulting in an experience of alienation and fragmentation of identity. Multiple studies on the effects of expressive writing have demonstrated physical, emotional, and psychological health benefits, yet little is known about how it might offer benefit in response to a chronic illness diagnosis. Combining the transformation-through-writing model with the dual process model for non-death loss and grief, I take an autoethnographic approach to explore how creative writing about Fibromyalgia (FM) allowed me to progress from a first story/loss orientation to a second story/restoration orientation as part of a dialogical process of self-reconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]