Challenges to Cultural Outsiders from the Culture of Grief Counseling/Therapy

Abstract

Every healer works within a culture of healing. Healing cultures may work well when “clients” understand and accept their place in the healing culture. But a healing culture can create challenges for clients whose cultural background is remote from it. This paper explores how the culture of grief counseling and grief therapy may create difficulties for clients who are cultural outsiders. The paper offers advice to culturally other clients, to help them and all readers to understand the culture of grief professionals and to help to overcome, where possible, problems cultural outsiders may encounter when seeking help from grief professionals.

Keywords:

• culture
• grief
• grief counseling
• grief therapy
• healers

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul C. Rosenblatt

Paul C. Rosenblatt, PhD, is Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. His more than 100 publications on grief include the books: Grief and Mourning in Cross-Cultural Perspective (with R. Patricia Walsh and Douglas A. Jackson); Bitter, Bitter Tears: Nineteenth Century Diaries and Twentieth Century Grief Theories; Parent Grief: Narratives of Loss and Relationship; African American Grief (with Beverly R. Wallace); and The Impact of Racism on African American Families: Literature as Social Science. He is currently researching and writing about love, love letters, and grief phenomena that he thinks have been overlooked in the academic and clinical literatures. He is also writing fiction and creative nonfiction, almost all of which deals with close relationships and/or loss and grief.