TPC-Journal-V5-Issue4

The Professional Counselor /Volume 5, Issue 4 453 Fourth, a statistically significant negative relationship between coping skills and bereavement was reported, suggesting that survivors who believe they have a low ability to cope with their spouses’ death are more likely to experience bereavement. Although it is important for survivors to become familiar with the stress appraisal process, the way they assign meaning to their spouse’s death and their past experience with death also are important in their primary appraisal to the overall coping effort. One model of this process is the transactional model of coping (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). This model of coping implies that a person’s appraisal of his or her interaction with a difficult event naturally evokes a coping response for dealing with the situation. Experiencing a suicide or living in a social environment that hinders, stigmatizes or isolates a person who has experienced a suicidal death may cause demands to exceed his or her resources for dealing with certain situations. Few studies have examined the natural coping efforts used by suicide survivors, or have identified specific problems and needs that survivors experience following the suicide of a significant other (McMenamy et al., 2008). Interventions with suicide survivors have limited effectiveness (Jordan & McMenamy, 2004). Provini et al. (2000) presented four categories of concerns for suicide survivors: concerns related to (a) family relationships, (b) psychiatric symptoms, (c) bereavement and (d) stress. Family-related problems were the most frequently mentioned type of concerns (Provini et al., 2000). Examples of family relationship concerns included inability to maintain parenting roles, inability to maintain family routines, existence of different coping styles within the family, and inability to provide appropriate emotional support to family members. Qualitative comments recorded in the open-ended section of the survey supported this study finding. For example, one participant stated, “I often feel distracted, forgetful, irritable, disoriented, or confused. I try to remember how I got over a death in the past, sometimes it helps and sometimes it does not.” Another participant stated, “I know I need to start to form new relationships or attachments in my life but my mind [is] telling me ‘there must be some mistake,’ or ‘this can’t be true.’ ” Regarding bereavement, one participant wrote, “Grief is perhaps the most painful companion to death.” Addressing coping, one participant stated, “I must also adjust to working or returning to work after the death. I know things can’t go back to the way they were before, very difficult and painful to deal with and I better adjust to life.” These statements support the need to further explore the relationship between one’s ability to cope with the suicide of a spouse and one’s ability to experience and acknowledge feelings and move forward with everyday life activities (e.g., employment, childcare, financial obligations). Ability to cope impacts a person’s bereavement process; the ways and ability to cope vary with the individual. Stigma and amount of perceived social support have been correlated with ability to cope (Bandura, 1997). It is important to understand the individual impacts that stigma, social support, primary appraisal, secondary appraisal and coping have on bereavement. However, it is equally important to examine the relationships of these variables within the context of a model in order to establish future interventions for bereavement within the context of a suicide. Fifth, results indicated that the model is statistically significant in predicting bereavement outcomes and provides considerable support for using the Lazarus model as a means of understanding the relationship between stress and bereavement when placed into the equation in a particular order: CBI = TSD + PSAM + SSAM + CSES + MSPSS + STOSASS. This study suggests that the proposed model, using LCMS and assessment of stress, identifies the constructs associated with bereavement among women whose military spouses completed suicide. Future research could further explore the assessment of primary and secondary appraisal processes,