Appreciating Differences - Jack Falt - Ottawa area, Ontario, Canada

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Book Review by Jack Falt, INFJ

Tiagliaferre, Lewis & Gary L. Harbaugh, Recover from Loss: A Personalized Guide to the Grieving Process, Gainesville, FL: CAPT, 2001, 1990, ISBN 0-935652-56-6, 226 pp


While you’ve going through the grieving process over the loss of a loved one, you wonder if you’ll ever feel whole again. Harbaugh combines William Worden’s model of adaption to loss and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s quadrants of energy — physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual — and relates them to Jung-Myers theory in a way that should be very helpful to anyone going through a major loss.

Harbaugh is a Luthern pastor, seminary teacher, and trained in disaster response. He wrote God’s Gifted People, a book on basic Jung/Myers theory for use as a study guide for people in the church. Lewis Tiagliaferre is a man, who after the loss of his wife of many years, went through a very difficult time after his wife died. Growing up in a very troubled home, Tiagliaferre was very dependent on his wife for his emotional well-being: and when she died, he had to learn how to cope in ways that he had never really learned before. The text of the book is mainly the voice of Harbaugh with Tiagliaferre expressing the emotions he had as he was going through his various stages of recovery.

William Worden’s model of adaption to loss states that people go through five stages of healing: acknowledge, feel, substitute, detach and reconstruct. Each of these stages must be dealt with at the physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual levels (Kubler-Ross). From Harbaugh’s Jung-Myers perspective the four levels relate very closely with the four mental functions: physical-sensing, intellectual-thinking, emotional-feeling, and spiritual-intuiting. Depending on the dynamics of an individual’s type, the person tends to follow a pattern of moving through dominant, auxiliary, tertiary and inferior function of each stage before he or she can move on to the next stage. Since Tiagliaferre’s type was ISTJ, his pattern would then be: dominant-sensing, thinking-auxiliary, feeling-tertiary and intuiting-inferior. So five of the chapters are written following Tiagliaferre’s pattern. While Harbaugh thinks that people tend to go through these stages in a more or less orderly fashion, it is not a rigid system. Depending on life circumstances, the order may vary.

There are chapters on each of the five stages of recovery with specific sections devoted to each of the four functions. Depending on the your type dynamics, you are invited to read each chapter in your own sequence. To make the reading more personal, you are invited to substitute a ______ with the name of a loved one. I used my wife’s name, and even though she is in good health, it helped me understand what I might go through if I was faced with her loss.

I think this is a very valuable book. I am not sure how receptive someone going through a loss would actually be inclined to read it. Although the book is written as if speaking directly to someone grieving, how many would be in the frame of mind to read it on their own? I can see it being of tremendous help to those who are counselling grieving individuals. It also would be helpful to concerned friends to help them understand the stages their grieving friends are going through.

This book would be helpful to those who are caring for loved one with a terminal illness. Although the actual feeling of loss would not be lessened, when the time came it may help those who are grieving to realize that they are going through normal and natural stages as they returned to a more well-balanced life style.

This also would make an excellent study book for a group in bereavement or those counselling the bereaved. Although this book was written by a clergyman from a specific Christian denomination, the wording is not denominational and is very liberal and not likely to be an issue for those studying the text. People in the grief process might be more willing to read and discuss the book within a group where it would be a more of an objective study, becoming more personal as the group felt the need to do so. It is a book well worth reading.

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