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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 paper is an inquiry into the poetics of mourning and faith-based intervention in maladaptive grieving processes in Ethiopia. The paper discusses the ways that loss is signified and analyzes the meanings of ethnocultural and psychospiritual practices employed to deal with maladaptive grief processes and their psychological and emotional after-effects. Hermeneutics provided the methodological framework and informed the analysis. The thesis of the paper is that the poetics of mourning and faith-based social interventions are interactionally based meaning making processes. The paper indicates the limitations of the study and their implications for further inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains the healing benefits, the “sweet unexpected” of the title, which results from using poetry to engage trauma, including traumatic grief. The benefits of poetry are presented alongside a discussion of a 22-year-old nonprofit called The Pongo Poetry Project. The sweet unexpected includes the ease with which trauma survivors engage their trauma narrative, the critical insights that emerge in poetry, the beneficial social context of sharing poetry, and the healing benefits of poetry for writers, care providers, and readers alike. The paper concludes by providing resources that can help people use poetry in their own work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

In this article, I analyze the experience and consequences of grief among the Ayoreo from the Paraguayan Chaco through the study of mourning songs. As a methodological proposal, I suggest that the study of verbal art in conjunction with an ethnography of everyday domestic life can provide clues to understanding the experience of grief and its relation to expected behavior. This study shows that grief among the Ayoreo can be socially disruptive if not dealt with properly, as songs depict grieving Ayoreo as opposite to healthy people in terms of sociability and expected role fulfillment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on bi-annual International Context of Death, Dying and Disposal Conference was held at the University of Bath, England in September 2019. Topics inlcude writing is recognized as a useful learning exercise across many disciplines, attending to some of the many aspects of the self habitually blanketed during waking lives, and the little public worth and gathers very little value in the world.

This evocative autoethnography reflects the author's grief following the death of a professor on her doctoral committee. She weaves poetic inquiry "to capture the contextual and psychological worlds of both poet and subject." Autoethnography can "capture, probe, and render understandable the problematic experience," and convey therapeutic stories as we write to make sense of ourselves and purge our burdens. Overall, autoethnography grounds the author with a deeper understanding about the personal and cultural influences of grief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing creatively, expressively, and reflectively to aid the grieving process is founded on the idea that in order to survive and thrive after loss, personal meaning must be made of what has been suffered. The individualisation and secularisation of society has put the onus of meaning making on the individual while an abiding reservation about speaking openly about death in Western culture complicates this task. In this article we examine how metaphors are used to make sense of loss and its ensuing emotions and how they help the writer move from a ‘first’ (i.e. anguish, pain) to a ‘second’ story (i.e. healing). We argue also that evoking the beloved through writing is part of healthy grieving. We conclude that nudging, thread and crystalising metaphors as well as ‘poetic conversations’ - that help locate and position oneself in relation to the loss - together make constructing new life-giving (i.e. second) stories possible. The safety and privacy of writing is also key in making space for the voice of the bereaved. We note that grieving individuals ‘write about’ and ‘write to’ and thus evoke the person who has died. In this paradoxical way the bereaved face the reality of death by retaining the loved one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narrative of martyrdom of Hosayn the third Shi-ite Imam, has been closely associated with the cathartic expression of grief for generations of Iranians, but in the last three or so decades the image has taken on a symbolism of national resistance against internal oppression and external aggression. The classical maqtalnāmeh, the literature that chronicles the details of deaths of martyrs, is now resurrected in new poetic outpourings known as the Poetry of Sacred Defence. This poetry celebrates the religious fighter who for the sake of a greater ideal is prepared to knowingly go to his death and emulate the actions of Imam Hosayn, that exemplar symbol of virtue and courage. This article will look at the genesis of the Poetry of Sacred Defence and explore the development of the poetry of one of its early practitioners, Qeysar Aminpur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]