Understanding the challenges of losing military comrades, friends or family.
The Grief Process: Understanding the stages of grieving and the impact of bereavement on individuals and families.
Types of Loss: Understanding the various types of loss that individuals may experience (e.g. death, divorce, separation) and how they may differ.
Cultural Perspectives: Grief and loss can be experienced differently across cultures and it is important to understand these differences in order to provide culturally sensitive support.
Coping Mechanisms: Learning about the various coping mechanisms that individuals may use to deal with their grief and how to support these efforts.
Trauma: Understanding the impact of trauma on grief and loss and how to support individuals who have experienced trauma.
Resilience: Understanding the concept of resilience and how it can be fostered in individuals experiencing grief and loss.
Spiritual and Religious Perspectives: Grief and loss can have a significant impact on an individual's spiritual beliefs and it is important to understand these beliefs in order to provide holistic support.
Family Dynamics: Understanding how grief and loss can impact family dynamics and how to support families through the grieving process.
Supporting Children and Adolescents: Understanding how grief and loss impact children and adolescents and how to provide specialized support to this population.
Self-Care: Understanding the importance of self-care for individuals who are supporting those experiencing grief and loss.
Anticipatory Grief: This type of grief occurs when someone knows ahead of time that they will lose someone they care about. It can happen when a person is diagnosed with a terminal illness or when someone is deployed.
Complicated Grief: This is grief that lasts much longer than usual and can be more intense. It includes symptoms such as depression, anxiety, numbness, and difficulty in returning to normal routines.
Collective Grief: It is grief that occurs on a large scale, affecting an entire community or nation. Examples could be the death of a well-known public figure like a president, natural disasters, or mass shootings.
Disenfranchised Grief: This type of grief occurs when a person is unable to openly express their grief, perhaps because the death was not recognized or accepted by society, or because they are ashamed to admit their feelings.
Inhibited Grief: Inhibtited grief occurs when individuals are unable to fully mourn their loss because they are overwhelmed or distracted by other concerns (e.g. job, family, other personal responsibilities).
Secondary Grief: This is when a person is grieving over the loss of someone else, such as a family member of a fellow service member.
Sudden or Traumatic Grief: Sudden or traumatic grief is the type of grief that comes with an unexpected death, such as an accident or a sudden illness.
Chronic Grief: This type of grief involves long-term adaptation to a loss that does not necessarily decline over time.
Delayed Grief: This type of grief involves not grieving after the loss for some period of time.
Ambiguous Loss: This is grief that occurs when someone is physically missing yet not gone, like a missing in action military service member.
Silent Grief: Silent grief is a grief that people experience without disclosing it to others.
No Grief: With this type of grief, individuals do not experience the loss of someone they were close to but should be grieving.
Cumulative Grief: With this type of grief, individuals experience the cumulative effects of multiple loss experiences over time, which include burnout, compassion fatigue, or vicarious trauma.
Chronic Sorrow: It is an ongoing, long-term sense of sadness and loss over a lasting or chronic problem, such as with chronic illness or disability.