Living with Loss: From Grief to Wellbeing

Living with loss: From grief to wellbeing offers the latest research on adapting to and making sense of bereavement and non-death losses. It evaluates the effectiveness of a range of therapeutic approaches, including various therapeutic writing methods, that facilitate the integration of loss.

Living with loss, whether through death or other causes, is one of the most challenging experiences we face. The COVID-19 pandemic had intensified the impact of these losses and increased the need for professional support and constructive therapeutic approaches. This book offers perspectives on resilience, the need for presence in bereavement, and the assessment of functional impairment following COVID-19 losses. It examines the realities of bereaved students in higher education, presents and explains compassion-focused grief therapy and meaning-focused narrative construction, and evaluates the therapeutic process of grief recovery. This volume also includes a participatory research study into the effectiveness of writing through loss and is aimed at clinicians, grief counselors, multi-disciplinary researchers, lecturers and practitioners of Writing-for-wellbeing, and will also be of value for those grieving a loved one or facing a non-death loss.

The chapters in this book were originally published as two special issues in British Journal of Guidance and Counselling.

Katrin Den Elzen is Research Associate at Curtin University, Perth, Australia and a Writing-for-wellbeing lecturer for graduate students in expressive art therapies, Murdoch University. She has written a grief memoir and works as a grief counselor and Writing-for-wellbeing facilitator. Her most recent publication is Writing-for-wellbeing: theory, research and practice with Routledge.

Robert A. Neimeyer directs the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition, actively practices as a trainer, and consultant, and has published over 600 articles and 35 books, most on grieving as a meaning-making process. His most recent books are New Techniques of Grief Therapy (2021, Routledge) and The Handbook of Grief Therapies (2023).

Reinekke Lengelle is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Athabasca University, Canada and a researcher at The Hague University, The Netherlands. Her book Writing the Self in Bereavement: A Story of Love, Spousal Loss, and Resilience won the Best Book Award for Ethnography in 2021 and the Qualitative Inquiry Book Award in 2022.