Grief counseling and spiritual counseling in the grieving process

With this study, it is aimed to observe the stages of the process and provide psychological support during the grieving process through counseling with children and adults who have lost a loved one In addition, spiritual counseling techniques were used in this study in order to contribute to the developing field of spiritual counseling in our country. Among the people who applied to NGOs, have lost a relative and needed counseling, 10 people with a maximum of 1 year of duration passed since their loss were included into this study in the order of request (including 5 adults and 5 children). In this study, a mixed method model was adopted, and a "Two-Dimensional Grief Scale" was applied to adults before the interview, the "Beier Sentence Completion Test" was applied to children over 8 years old, and the "Children's Communication About Death Form" was applied to their families. For children under the age of 8, only the "Children's Communications Regarding Death Form" applied to their parents and the information regarding the child obtained from the parents was included in the study. The process was completed as a result of at least 12 sessions of in-depth interviews with each client. Many therapy techniques were used in the grief counseling process and the selected techniques were determined according to the needs of the client. Certain parts of the documents of the counselling process were cross-sectionally excerpted and included in the study. How spiritual counseling techniques are applied is shared through the cases. The counselling process was carried out in children through plays, pictures and activities. In the counseling process, how children perceive death is presented by evaluating them according to their age and developmental characteristics. When the studies on children in our country are examined, there are studies on how children comprehend and make sense of death, and while expressing death how the child understands and verbalises the concepts of religion and God. However, no study has been found in Turkey on how to apply spiritual counseling to children and its limitations. In this study, studies conducted in other countries on spiritual counseling for children are presented, and the application and limitations of spiritual counseling to children on important issues such as death and mourning are emphasized.