Coping With Loss

Coping with loss can be difficult, but this book provides many different ways to cope. The book starts with a critical overview of theories of bereavement, and then goes into more depth about the different impacts of different types of loss, the impact of different coping strategies on recovery, the impact of social supports and religion, and the special cases of children and of people who seem to grow and change for the better after a loss. The book also has a Voices in which bereaved people describe their various attempts to cope in their own words. This book is insightful and informative, and would be helpful for anyone who is coping with loss.

Coping With Loss describes the many ways in which people cope with the death of someone they love. Most earlier books on bereavement have fallen into two categories: distillations of the clinical experience of individual therapists or collections of chapters reporting the results of empirical studies. Each category is valuable but has tended to serve a narrow group of readers--practitioners with particular theoretical orientations or researchers in quest of the latest findings. Coauthored by a leading research psychologist and an experienced therapist who specializes in bereavement education and intervention, this book is different. The authors weave together the strands of theory, research, and clinical wisdom into a seamless and readable narrative. While they discuss previous work, they also present new data, never before published, from one of the largest studies of bereaved people ever conducted, the Bereavement Coping Project. Unlike most studies to date, which focused on only one type of bereaved group (usually widows or widowers), the Bereavement Coping Project examined the experiences of several different groups during the first l8 months after the death. The groups included those who had lost a spouse, a parent, an adult sibling, or a child; and those who had lost their significant other to cancer or cardiovascular disease on one hand as opposed to the stigmatized disease of AIDS on the other. The book begins with a critical overview of theories of bereavement; succeeding chapters explore in depth the impact of specific types of loss, the impact of particular coping strategies on recovery; the impact of social supports and religion, and the special cases of children and of people who seem to grow and change for the better after a loss. A final chapter considers implications for intervention with bereaved people. Each chapter is richly illuminated with real-life examples throughout and ends with a section called Voices in which bereaved people describe their various attempts to cope in their own words. Insightful and informative.