How Do Drug-Death-Bereaved Parents Adjust to Life Without the Deceased? A Qualitative Study.

Kristine B Titlestad,Margaret Stroebe,Kari Dyregrov

doi:10.1177/0030222820923168

Kristine B Titlestad, Margaret Stroebe + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1177/0030222820923168

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Abstract

Knowledge about how bereaved persons grieve can enhance quality in providing the support and potential services that they need. We aimed to identify ways in which drug-death-bereaved Norwegian parents go on with their lives and what inhibits or promotes adaptation during their grieving. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyze 14 semistructured in-depth interviews. We generated three themes: (I) processing grief emotions, (II) proactive coping, and (III) giving and receiving support and assistance. Processing guilt rumination, reflections on blame and a burden of grief emotions characterized grieving early on. Using cognitive strategies and functional-support-giving were found to be the most frequently used strategies. Oscillation between processing stressors and reorientation to the world promoted adjustment to ongoing life. We discuss characteristics of parents who struggle to reorient and outline important implications for policy and practice.

Highlights

Knowledge about how bereaved persons grieve can enhance quality in providing the support and potential services that they need
The former refers to coping processes that focus directly on the stress of the loss itself, including symptoms of grief, loss, and sadness, while the latter includes the processes one uses to cope with the secondary stressors that accompany one’s new status as a bereaved person
The mothers and fathers each told their own story, sharing their individual experience and personal perspective. How they adjusted and adapted to life without the deceased were influenced by both intrapersonal and interpersonal management strategies, as well as by internal and external circumstances. Even though they had adjusted to life in varying degrees and in varying ways, there were three interconnected themes that were identified from the data: (I) processing grief emotions, (II) proactive coping, and (III) giving and receiving support and assistance (Figure 1)

Summary

Introduction

Knowledge about how bereaved persons grieve can enhance quality in providing the support and potential services that they need. The ability to identify grief reactions and to understand ways of coping are important, both for the bereaved and for professionals in the health and welfare services, as such knowledge can be used to enhance the bereaved person’s ability to adjust to life and to improve the services when these are needed (Crunk et al, 2019; Stroebe, Schut, et al, 2017) In this context, we think of coping as processes, strategies, or styles of managing the bereavement and define coping as the “changing thoughts and acts that an individual uses to manage the external or internal demands of stressful situations” Their findings showed that as time goes by, drugdeath-bereaved parents “were able to arrive at a ‘new normal’ and reflect on their own posttraumatic growth (Feigelman et al, 2020, p. 17).” Taken together, the evidence so far suggests special difficulties and special needs among DRDbereaved persons and a need to further explore how they cope and adapt to their loss and changed lives

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