Grief and Resiliency
- Recognize the causes, signs, stages, and types of grief.
- Explain the CHW's role in grief processing and outline specific supportive strategies.
- Define resilience and detail its significance for both CHWs and their clients.
- Name some factors that influence a person's resilience and identify techniques to build it.
Introduction
CHWs often work with patients facing difficulties and barriers that negatively impact health outcomes and quality of life. One big challenge is grief. CHWs can't eliminate grief, but they can recognize it and provide strategies for supporting patients through their grieving process.
This lesson also focuses on resilience — the driving force that keeps people pushing forward in the face of grief and other difficulties.
Grief is the natural response to loss
When we experience grief, we might feel disconnected from "normal life" and struggle to carry out daily activities. Everyone feels grief — but older adults often experience it more frequently as losses accumulate over a lifetime.
Each person experiences grief differently. The intense pain usually lessens over time as the person learns to cope. It can take months or even years — and that's normal.
The Kübler-Ross 5 Stages of Grief
Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross created the most well-known model of grief. Five stages — but remember: they aren't linear.
The Kübler-Ross 5 Stages of Grief
Denial
- ✦Avoidance, confusion, shock, and fear when grief first hits.
- ✦Holding on to a false sense of hope.
Many kinds of loss, many shapes of grief
Loss can come in many forms:
- Loss of identity
- Loss of safety
- Loss of control over parts of life
- Loss of expectations
Types of grief
- Normal (common) grief
- What the Kübler-Ross cycle describes, or something like it. Looks different in everyone — not always a straight line.
- Complicated (chronic) grief
- When symptoms persist much longer than usual. Can look similar to depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress. In the first few months after a loss it's hard to distinguish from normal grief — both produce similar symptoms. With normal grief, symptoms fade over time; with complicated grief, they persist or worsen.
- Anticipated grief
- Feeling sad before a significant loss happens — for example, feeling sad about the upcoming death of a family member who has cancer.
- Ambiguous loss
- When someone or something important is missing, but it's not clear what happened, making closure hard. Happens when someone is physically gone (natural disaster, military deployment) or still present but not the same (brain injury, serious illness, memory problems, addiction).
The CHW's role with grieving clients
CHWs can't solve grief or address its causes. But you can support, listen, and connect people with strategies and resources.
CDC-recommended strategies
CDC strategies for coping with grief
A client lost her spouse eight months ago. She still rarely leaves the house, has stopped activities she used to enjoy, and tells you the sadness feels just as intense as it did at first — if not worse. Which type of grief best describes what she may be experiencing?
Match each Kübler-Ross stage to the description that fits it best.
Resilience
Resilience is the ability to deal with difficult situations. It means handling things well even when bad things happen — serious illness, family or work problems, stressful times. Resilience helps us "bounce back" and keep going.
Resilience doesn't mean you won't feel upset. In fact, to become more resilient, we often must feel emotional pain and work through it. If we didn't have hard times, we wouldn't need resilience.
What contributes to resilience
Studies find one factor above all: being surrounded by people who care about you — family and friends who love and trust you, and make you feel better about yourself.
Other contributors:
- Making realistic plans and following through with them
- Believing in yourself and your abilities
- Being good at solving problems and communicating with others
- Controlling emotions and avoiding impulsive actions
Ways to build resilience
Share these with clients — and apply them to yourself.
Tips for building resilience
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Take care of yourself first
The most important thing: take care of yourself. If you're not managing your own stress and problems, you won't be able to help the people you're working with.
In the event of lost cabin pressure, oxygen masks will drop from the panel above your seat. If traveling with small children, place your own oxygen mask on first and then assist your child.
Which of the following are factors that influence a person's resilience? Select all that apply.
Taking a strengths-based approach
As a CHW, you'll encounter clients struggling to navigate a healthcare system that has many problems — including prejudice and injustice. By taking the time to learn about your clients and helping them be resilient in difficult situations, you can empower them to take charge of their own healthcare and make positive changes.
Think of a time you bounced back from a difficult situation. Which of the resilience factors helped you most — and which could you strengthen?
How might you gently introduce one CDC grief-coping strategy to a client without minimizing their loss?
🌟 Lesson Takeaways
Grief is the natural response to loss — and it shows up in many forms (anticipated, complicated, ambiguous). The Kübler-Ross stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) describe one path, but grief isn't linear. CHWs can't solve grief, but you can support it with presence, routine, honoring rituals, and connections to professional help. Resilience is the other side of the same coin: a learnable set of skills — built on caring relationships, realistic goals, self-confidence, problem-solving, and emotional control — that helps people handle the difficult stuff and keep going. Build it in your clients, and remember to build it in yourself.
Great work! At the end of this module, you'll join a live discussion with your cohort and an instructor to talk through grief, resilience, and how these show up in your own work. We'll see you there.