Thanatology

At-Need Counseling

A death has occurred and the funeral director is advising the family from the time the death occurs until the final disposition including selection of services and merchandise during the arrangement conference.

Ambiguous Response

A disconfirming response with more than one meaning, leaving the other party unsure of the responder's position.

Ceremony

A formal or symbolic act or observance.

Communication

A general term for the exchange of information, feelings, thoughts, and acts between two or more people, including both verbal and nonverbal aspects of this interchange.

Crisis

A highly emotional temporary state in which an individual's feelings of anxiety grief, confusion or pain impair his or her ability to act.

Death Anxiety

A learned emotional response to death-related phenomenon which is characterized by extreme apprehension.

Client-Centered (Non-Directive; Rogerian; Person-Centered) Counseling

A phrase coined by Carl Rogers to refer to that type of counseling where one comes actively and voluntarily to gain help on a problem, but without any notion of surrendering his own responsibility for the situations; a non-directive method of counseling which stresses the inherent worth of the client and the natural capacity for growth and health.

Euphemism

A pleasant term substituted for a more direct, less pleasant term.

Griefwork (Lindemann)

A process occurring with losses aimed at loosening the attachment to that which has been lost for appropriate reinvestment.

Humanistic

A school of psychological thought that emphasizes the uniqueness of the individual and the search for self-actualization.

Grief syndrome (Lindemann)

A set of symptoms associated with loss.

Extemporaneous Speech

A speech planned in advance but presented in a direct, conversational manner.

Anxiety

A state of tension, typically characterized by rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath and, other similar ramifications of arousal of the autonomic nervous system; an emotion characterized by a vague fear or premonition that something undesirable is going to happen.

Counseling (Ohlsen)

A therapeutic experience for reasonably healthy persons. Do not confuse this with Psychotherapy which is treatment for emotionally disturbed persons, who seek, or are referred for assistance with pathological problems. A counselor's clients are encouraged to seek assistance before they develop serious neurotic, psychotic, or chacterological disorders.

Empathy

According to Carl Rogers, a counselor's capacity to understand the subjective world of the client and communicating this deep understanding to the client.

Congruence

According to client-centered counseling, the necessary quality of a counselor being in touch with reality and with others perception of oneself.

A.I.D.S.

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome

Counseling (Webster)

Advice, especially that given as a result of consultation.

Consensus

Agreement between group members about a decision

Euthanasia (right to die)

An act or practice of allowing the death of persons suffering from a life-limiting condition.

Grief

An emotion or set of emotions due to a loss that is involved in the work of mourning.

Conflict

An expressed struggle between at least two interdependent parties who perceive incompatible goals, scarce rewards, and interference from the other party in achieving their goals.

Funeral rite

An organized, flexible, purposeful, group centered, time-limited response to death which reflects reverence, dignity, and respect.

Defense Mechanisms

An unconscious, irrational means used by the ego to defend against anxiety.

Ego Defense Mechanisms

An unconscious, irrational menas used bythe ego to defned against anxiety.

Counseling (Jackson)

Any time someone helps someone else with a problem.

Guilt

Blame directed toward one's self based on real or unreal conditions.

Focusing

Centering a client's thinking and feelings on the situation causing a problem and assisting the person in choosing the behavior or adjustment to solve the problem.

Coping

Charactistic ways of responding to stress.

Encoding

Converting information into a form that can be entered into memory.

Directive Counseling

Counselor takes a live speaking role, asking questions, suggesting courses of action, etc.

Emotions

Feelings such as happiness, anger or grief, created by brain patterns accompanied by bodily changes.

Counseling Psychology

From the Latin, "to know;" the study of the origins and consequences of thoughts, memories, beliefs, perceptions, explanations, and other mental processes.

Counseling (Rogers)

Good communication within and between men; or good (free) communication within or between men is always therapeutic.

Complicated (abnormal, unresolved) Grief

Grief extending over a long period of time without resolution.

Chronic Grief

Grief in which the reaction is one that is excessive in duration and never comes to a satisfactory conclusion.

Absent Grief

Grief in which there appears to be no signs of grief in a person following a major bereavement.

Exaggerated Grief (Worden)

Grief responses whereby the loss is so overwhelming, that some psychiatric disorder develops, such as clinical depression. Persons are usually conscious of the relationship of the reaction to the death, but the reaction to the current experience is excessive and disabling.

Grief counseling

Helping people facilitate uncomplicated grief to a healthy completioin of the tasks of grieving within a reasonable time frame.

Hospice

Historically, an inn for travelers, especially one kept by a religious order; also used to indicate an institution designed to treat patients with a life limiting condition.

Faulty Assumption

Incorrect assumptions that lead us to believe that we have heard the message before or that the message is too simple or too complex to understand.

Delayed Grief (Worden)

Inhibited, suppressed or postponed response to a loss.

Crisis Counseling

Interventions for a highly emotional, temporary state in which individuals, overcome by feelings of anxiety, grief, confusion or pain are unable to act in a realistic, normal manner. Intentional responses which help individuals in a crisis situation.

Anomic Grief

Is a term to describe the experience of grief, especially in young bereaved parents, where mourning customs are unclear due to an inappropriate death and the absence of prior bereavement experience; typical in a society that has attempted to minimize the impact of death through medical control of disease and social control of those who deal with the dying and the dead.

Anger

Is blame directed toward another person.

Alarm

Is defined as fear or anxiety caused by the sudden realization of danger created by the impact of the shock.

Affect

Is the feelings and their expression.

Attachment (Bowlby)

It is the tendency in human beings to make strong affectional bounds with others coming from the need for security and safety; attachment occurs in the absence of the reinforcement of drives for food and sex and provides a way to understand the strong emotional reaction that occurs when these bonds are threatened or broken

Empathetic Listening

Listening in which the goal is to help the speaker solve a problem.

Evaluative Listening

Listening in which the goal is to judge the quality of accuracy of speaker's remarks.

Goals

Objectives or adjustments to be achieved.

Environment

Physical location and personal history surrounding the communication.

Alternatives

Providing a choice of services and merchandise available as families make a selection and complete funeral arrangements, formulating different actions in adjusting to a crisis.

Displaced Aggression

Redirecting anger toward a person or object other than the one who caused the anger originally.

Displacement

Redirection of emotion to other targets.

Grief therapy (Worden)

Specialized techniques which are used to help people with complicated grief reactions.

Fear

Strong emotion marked by such reactions as alarm, dread, and disquieting.

Guidance

Support or support system provided to the counselee who is seeking an alternative adjustment to problems.

Anticipatory Grief

Syndrome characterized by the presence of grief in anticipation of death or loss; the actual death comes as a confirmation of knowledge of a life-limiting condition.

Defensive Listening

Taking innocent comments as personal attacks.

Empathy (Wolfelt)

The ability to perceive another's experience and communicate that perception back to the person.

Genuineness (Wolfelt)

The ability to present oneself sincerely.

Bereavement

The act or event of separation or loss that results in the experience of grief.

Credibility

The believability of a speaker or other source of information.

Denial

The defense mechanism by which a person refuses to see things as they are because such facts are threatening to the ego; a defense mechanism, closely related to repression, in which the individual simply denies the existence of the events that have aroused anxiety.

Feedback

The discernible response of the receiver.

Connotation

The emotional associations of a term.

Climate

The emotional tone of a relationship as it is expressed in the messages that the partners send and receive.

Clinical Psychology

The field of psychology which is designed to understand, diagnose and treat abnormal or deviant behavior.

Educational Psychology

The field of psychology which studies education systems, methods of teaching, methods of learning, curricula and other factors that influence the learning process.

Cognitive Psychology

The field of psychology which studies internal mental processes, which include thinking, memory, concept formation, perception, and the processing of information.

Developmental Psychology

The field of psychology which study the way in which behaviors develop and change during a lifespan.

Counselor

The individual providing assistance and guidance.

Counseled

The individual seeking assistance or guidance.

Adaptation

The individual's ability to adjust to the psychological and emotional changes brought on by a stressful event such as the death of a significant other.

Acute Grief

The intense physical and emotional expression of grief occurring as the awareness increases of a loss of someone or something significant.

Agression

The intentional infliction of physical or psychological harm on another.

Homicide

The killing of one human being by another.

Channel

The medium through which a message passes from sender to receiver.

Denotation

The objective, emotion-free meaning of a term.

Emotion

The outward expression or display of mood or feeling states.

Emotional expression

The outward expression or display of mood or feeling states.

Attending (listening)

The process of focusing on certain stimuli from the environment.

Articulation

The process of pronouncing all the necessary parts of a word.

Committal Service

The rite of finality in a funeral service preceding cremation, earth burial, entombment or burial at sea.

Biological Psychology

The school of psychological thought in which all our behaviors can be traced to the biological functions of the brain. Therefore most of our behaviors are caused by the chemicals of our physical body.

Cognitive Approach

The school of psychological thought in which the simplest matters are studied, such as perception of objects, attention, pattern recognition, memory, language, reading and writing.

Behaviorism

The school of psychological thought that views learning as the most important aspect of an organism's development. Behaviorism seeks to objectively measure behavior and the way in which stimulus-response relationships are formed.

Functionalism

The school of psychological thought which proposed that the function, not the structure, of conscious experience should be studied.

Frustration

The state of being prevented from attaining a purpose; thwarted; the blocking of the motive satisfaction by some kind of obstacle.

Alienation

The state of estrangement an individual feels in social settings that are viewed as foreign, unpredictable or unacceptable.

Funeral Service Psychology

The study of human behavior as related to funeral service.

Cognition

The study of the origins and consequences of thoughts, memories, beliefs, perceptions, explanations and other mental processes.

Facilitate

To assist understanding of the circumstances or situations the individual is experiencing, and to assist that person in the selection of an alternative adjustment if necessary.

Discrimination

Treating members of various social groups differently in circumstances where their rights or treatment should be identical.

Dyad

Two units regarded as a pair; for example, husband and wife.

Equivocal

Words that have more than one dictionary meaning.

Attitude

a learned tendency to respond to people, objects, or institutions in a positive or negative way.

Abnormal (complicated, unresolved) grief

grief extending over a long period of time without resolution.

Aftercare (post-funeral counseling)

those appropriate and helpful acts of counseling that come after the funeral