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  • Designing Grief Rituals Revised

    Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Death Studies on 11/08/2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/07481187.2016.1188868

    Accepted author manuscript, 474 KB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Designing personal grief rituals: an analysis of symbolic objects and actions

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>11/2016
<mark>Journal</mark>Death Studies
Issue number9
Volume40
Number of pages12
Pages (from-to)558-569
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date11/08/16
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Personal grief rituals are beneficial in dealing with complicated grief, but challenging to design, as they require symbolic objects and actions meeting clients’ emotional needs. We report interviews with ten therapists with expertise in both grief therapy and grief rituals. Findings indicate three types of rituals supporting honoring, letting go, and self transformation, with the latter being particularly complex. Outcome also point to a taxonomy of ritual objects for framing and remembering ritual experience, and for capturing and processing grief. Besides symbolic possessions, we identified other types of ritual objects including transformational and future-oriented ones. Symbolic actions include creative craft of ritual objects, respectful handling, disposal and symbolic play. We conclude with theoretical implications of these findings, and a reflection on their value for tailored, creative co-design of grief rituals. In particular, we identified several implications for designing grief rituals which include accounting for the client’s need, selecting (or creating) the most appropriate objects and actions from the identified types, integrating principles of both grief and art/drama therapy, exploring clients’ affinity for the ancient elements as medium of disposal in letting go rituals, and the value of technology for recording and reflecting on ritual experience.

Bibliographic note

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Death Studies on 11/08/2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/07481187.2016.1188868