In the last decade of the twentieth century, a team of experts in the fast-growing field of bereavement support, came together to produce a teaching pack. The writers adopted a bereavement counselling approach to helping, and their ambitious project, entitled Bereavement Counselling: a 60 hour introductory training course, was published by Cruse Bereavement Care and Help the Hospices in 1998.  This was the pack that was used to train me when in 1999 I joined the bereavement support team as a volunteer at Saint Catherine’s Hospice in Scarborough, UK. 18 months later I accepted a professional post in the service as a bereavement counsellor. Within a few years, perhaps due to my background as a teacher and lecturer, I was helping to teach my colleagues, also using Faulkner and Wallbank’s teaching pack. Of course, the knowledge base of bereavement theory does not stand still: On the contrary. Due to the outstanding contribution of Margaret Stroebe’s team at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, worldwide research into bereavement has been brought together in a series of research handbooks (2008; 2001; 1993). In my role as trainer, and with these weighty volumes by my side, I found I was constantly updating the content of our volunteer training, to the point that little remained of the 1998 teaching pack apart from its philosophy of experiential learning, which I have embraced throughout my teaching career. Over the past six years, my colleagues and I have developed a completely new module, moving from the 60 hour training of the original pack to a full module of 150 study hours, including two written assignments which we assess to a University standard. The ideas of Faulkner and Wallbank that do remain in our teaching materials are duly credited and correctly referenced. Our successful students have included counsellors and psychotherapists, social workers, palliative care nurses, health visitors, care home staff, teachers and chaplains. Many of our students go on to work with bereaved people. My book is an extension of these teaching notes. My hope is that trainers worldwide will come to adopt this book, and that counsellors seeking to learn more about this field will add it to their bookshelf.

I anticipate that there are those who will say that the style, content and density of academic referencing I have used, puts this book outside of being an introduction to the topic. I have to say now that I profoundly disagree with any such criticism, on pragmatic grounds alone. As I have said, this book is no more than an expansion of the teaching materials my colleagues and I successfully used in teaching prospective volunteers. Our students come from a range of educational backgrounds, and many of whom go on to become our talented practitioners. I have worked in adult education for over 25 years, in which time I have learnt that highly motivated adults with a breadth of life experiences, are capable of amazing achievements. Expect great things of your students and they will achieve them.

My dream is that this book becomes a course reader wherever in the world bereavement workers are trained. All the royalties for this edition will go to patient care at the hospice from which my experience and inspiration originates.

Supporting People Through Loss and Grief: An Introduction for Counsellors and Other Caring Practitioners, is published by Jessica Kingsley, London and New York, in December 2013.

References

Faulkner, A., & Wallbank, S. (Eds.). (1998). Bereavement Counselling: A 60 hour introductory training course. London: Cruse Bereavement Care & Help the Hospices.

Stroebe, M. S., Stroebe, W., & Hansson, R. O. (1993). Handbook of Bereavement: Theory, Research and Intervention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stroebe, M. S., Hansson, R. O., Stroebe, W. E., & Schut, H. E. (2001). Handbook of bereavement research: Consequences, coping, and care: Washington: American Psychological Association.

Stroebe, M. S., Hanson, R. O., Schut, H., & Stroebe, W. (Eds.). (2008). Handbook of Bereavement Research and Practice: Advances in Theory and Intervention. Washington : American Psychological Association.