Unravelling the Unknown: A Therapeutic Dialogue between Hospice Counselors and Carers of People with Dementia

Abstract

An Alzheimer's society turned to their local Hospice with a request to widen their Loss and Grief Group Counselling Services to Carers of People with Dementia. Based on a series of 8-week group sessions, two counsellors present in this article what they have come to understand as core issues in the caring and grieving process of these dementia carers. This is intertwined with a rationale for their counselling interventions which are geared toward reactivating people's creative and spiritual sense of being. They suggest that engaging with carers from a holistic approach is logical, necessary, and effective if one wants to restore and support the carers' wholesomeness which is under constant attack by an illness that presents with cognitive, relational, and emotional fragmentation.