Pastoral Care in Loss for Child and Family Studies- myassignmenthelp

Question: Discuss about thePastoral Care in Loss for Child and Family Studies. Answer: Losing the closed one is a matter of pain and stress. While speaking about losing a human being we enter the other side of the human experience. The loss of losing a human cannot be measured. This is sometimes called grief and sometimes it is called the spiritual loss. The aspect that is important in this case is to find a way how to survive without the person is no more in this world. There are few systems that have been introduced in order to overcome the loss. These are called the systems, stages, tasks, strategies to survive and overcome the grief of the losing the person. The systems are the ways to understand the intensity of the love towards the near and the dear ones. It is important to understand the nature of the grief. It is not only difficult to reduce the experience of loss to a system, it is impossible and some would say it is futile. The human loss and the grief that can accompany it is irreducible, as are the human beings to whom it belongs. The issue that have been t aken in this situation is the issue of losing an infant suddenly. It is not just the loss nut it is the grief that surrounds the family members of the infant, the siblings of the infant and the relatives of the infant. There were many incidents were the infants died suddenly due to some accident or due to some illness. For example, there was an incident were an infant whose age was 5 years died of thalassemia. There was another incident where an infant whose age was just 4 years old and he died of road accident while he was crossing the street. The death of the infant in such case was not a planned one and at the same time it was an unexpected one. The grief and loss are such situations that cannot be defined in the biological context. Sometimes they cannot be treated therapeutically. It has been said that there are many situations in which the therapy and the counseling is futile and it does not work. The loss and grief are known to be the normal elements of human life. The loss of a human being changes the future story and it changes the future scenario. The loss of a relationship creates a gap in the future life. The loss can be defined as the existential loss. This represents the existential an xiety. It is the loss of concrete decision (Ezzy. 2000). The death of a child of any age is a difficult, painful experience. It has been observed that the greatest pain in this case can be experienced by the parents. The sudden death of their child is experienced by them. The individuals who suffer from the loss of their child have enough capabilities to overcome the same with their own will power without being broken. They have the capability to emerge from the worst experience they go through. It turns out to be the most painful experience for the parents. The death of a child can be termed as the death of the dreams of the parents. When a child is born the parents start to see many dreams related to the child and the life of the parents. All the dreams of the parents are shattered when a child dies all of a sudden (Hawthorne et al. 2016). It takes the family to some amount of trauma. Few consequences of the sudden death of an infant, are bereavement, mourning, grief and complicated grief. Bereavement is a broader term that incorporates the entire experience of the family members and friends in the anticipation, death and subsequent adjustment to living following the death of a loved one (McKenna et al. 2016). The term includes the expressions of grief and the changes in the living conditions of the individual due to the grief of losing the child and the change in the relationships and the circumstances. The other shade of bereavement is known as the complicated grief. It is the symptom of distress or trauma due to the separation caused because of the sudden death. There are different types of situation that the parents go through in this case. The parents sometimes goes through the intrusive thoughts about the deceased (Hefti et al. 2016). The parents keeps on searching for the deceased child. The parents finds themselves in utmost loneliness and is unable to accept the gap that is created due to the absence of the child. It led to significant functional impairment. The parents find it difficult in believing the f act that there child is no more alive in the world. Sometimes it is found that the parents feel that there is life is empty or it is meaningless without their child. This results in numbness and the future is found to be futile. The emotional responsiveness is absent among the parents in this case (Christiansen amd Dorte 2017). The process of conceiving, growing up a child and giving birth to the child is an obvious process and it is done by all the living beings. There are many psychological, social meaning of this process. The loss of the infant puts a question to their social role. They feel their existence is threatened while they lose their child. The bond of a child with their family members is not only strong but they are an integral part of the identity of the parents. The loss of the infant results in affecting the mental as well as the physical stability of the parents. There are other feelings that are attached to this, like the feelings of despair, sadness, feeling lonely most of the time, in many cases it leads to commit suicide. These are the mental sickness that the parents go through, the physical symptoms that the parents go through are insomnia, loss of appetite, and they are unable to concentrate in anything. They experience obsessive thinking. They sometimes experience the extreme feelin gs of vulnerability, anxiety, panic and hyper-vigilance. This results to extreme sadness and despair (Finns et al. 2018). Sometimes few parents experience extreme pressure of losing their child and they express it through anger or frustration. They produce actions like irritation and annoyance. The things that make them such are the dreams that they found were shattered. With the birth of a child a mother takes birth and also a father takes birth. With that they spin many dreams related to the child. The unexpected death of a child takes away all the dreams from the parents. There are three central themes that centers around the experience of the parents that include; the loss of sense of personal capability and power, the loss of a part of the self and the loss of a valued other person whose unique characteristics were attached to the system of the family. The parents sometimes feel that they were unable to protect the child as a result they had to lose their child. The role of the parents seems to be threatened after they lose their own child. The grief remains constant throughout the year. The intensity of the grief might differ but the grief remains the same. It gets different with the passing years (Blood, Cybele and Joanne Cacciatore. 2014). The idea of the sudden or the catastrophic death is painful. It leaves the family emotionally broken and the family feels that their existence has no worth. When an illness of child is long, arduous and when is filled with chronic crisis the parents develop an unusual coping skills in order to sustain themselves and their family over a longer period of time. They gets worn down and they gets depleted emotionally and they face certain financial loss for the incident. The interventions provide practical and emotional support, skills, trainings and rest from the crisis that the parents go through due to the loss of their child suddenly. The death can be categorized under the catastrophic events. There are many such catastrophic events such as the bombing that occurred in the city of Oklahoma. The attack in the World Trade center is another example of the same. They had broad media coverage and they were so pathetic and sudden that they had huge consequences that is evident in the presen t times. Many parents lost their child in that and even many children lost their parents due to this attack. This is the catastrophic effect in the lives of the parents of the child (charmaz, kathy. 1983). The parents who are bereaved due to the sudden loss of their child have reported lot of positive as well as lot of negative impact of the death of their child. The loss of a child affects the parents the most. It sometimes strengthens the relationship with the family members and the friends. It has been found in many situations that due to the major loss of the child the parents has been supported by their relatives and friends who earlier did not keep any relation with them. On the other hand the relationships even end due to the sudden death of the child. There has many instances where the marital relationship between the couples were affected due to the loss of their child. The couples blame each other for the death of their child. The worst situation occurred when the couples decided to give divorce to each other for this reason. There are certain common problem that is noticed among the couples. The conflict and anger showed by the couples towards each other for losing their chi ld. The couples finds this as the most suitable way of dealing with the pain (Zetumer et al. 2015). The couples feel distressed after losing their child and they find no meaning in living together without their child. The breakdown in communication such as avoidance of all the discussion of the death or misunderstandings about the incident is actually associated with the material distress. There is a difference between the way of expressing the grief of the woman and the grief of the men. The women expresses her grief in a more emotional manner and the men usually try to control their emotions and they do not express those (Albuquerque et al. 2016). The men cope with the distress alone. They try to find the solution of the problem and they try to engage themselves in work or in solution-focused activities. There are situations when the parents of the child have incongruent ways of expressing their grief. The intensity of expressing the grief of a woman is different to that of a man. The grief of a woman stays for a longer period of time. In this case it is justified. The pain of a mother cannot be replaced. The intensity of the pain of a mother is more than the pain of a father. The mother carries the child in her womb for nine months and it therefore more attached to the child. The mother remains more close to the child and therefore the loss of the child affects the mother the most. The physical intimacy between the couples also decreases which adds up to the tension to the relationship between the couples. The lower levels of intimacy is the most common consequence seen in this case. The pain not only remains restricted to the couples but it also throws a huge impact on the siblings. There was a case where the child of a family die in an accident and she had an elder sister. With the death of the girl child, the sibling suffered from a shock. She was much attached to her sister and the sudden death of her sister was a shock for her (Lichtenthal et al. 2015). It took many days for her to be normal. She was supported by her parents to forget the grief. The studies have shown that the surviving siblings may have feelings of isolation and they feel that they are withdrawn from the society and they lost the most important support from their lives. They face the same situation at their homes. The child feels uncomfortable to interact to interact with her peers. They often experience nightmares, they feel anxious and they often experience problems in sleeping. They themselves go through the trauma of losing their sibling. They go through the post-traumatic stress sympto ms (Hudson and Rumbold 2003). There are incidents where the death of the infants was due to the miscarriage, the death of the new born baby or because of any illness. There has been many researchers conducted on the consequence of the death of the infant but no research can match or define that the feelings that the individuals go through while losing the closed one. The trauma that the parents go through cannot be measured through any research or it cannot be cured by any kind of counselling or any kind of medicine. There are many factors that are usually attached to this. The religious factor is the most striking one. It is believed that the persons who dies due to sudden incident usually does not attain salvation. This is another pain for the parents who have strong religious faith. The parents try to find their child in their belongings like the toys, the clothes, the other belongings that were once used by the child. It has been seen in many cases where the parents try to communicate with their child through some religious ceremonies. They want the soles of their child to attain salvation. Some try to have another child to fulfill the loss of their child and intend to fill the gap that has been created with the death of the child. It sometimes tend the parents usually the mother to commit suicide. The woman are considered to be more on the emotional side and therefore their grief can be observed more prominently than the grief of the males. In the remote places and the families who are illiterate usually blame the mother for the loss of the child. They held mother irresponsible for the death of their infants. The only suggestion in this situation is that the parents and the persons attached to the infant must have the courage to face the situation. The person going through the pain can help himself or herself in order to overcome the pain. The pain is because of the absence that is created due to the death of the child. A person can overcome this only with the support of the friends, t he family and self-courage. References Albuquerque, Sara, Marco Pereira, and Isabel Narciso. 2016 "Couples relationship after the death of a child: A systematic review."Journal of Child and Family Studies25, no. 1: 30-53. 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