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Lessons are for students who are working and interested in social work.

Mourning process.

This theory can be used in the lesson "Shocking Life Events".

The mourning process usually takes place in successive phases. Of course, these can intermingle and/or be skipped. Their duration can also vary greatly.

Phase 1: The first phase often consists of: disbelief, bewilderment and denial. You do not realize what has happened. You can even go into 'shock'.

Phase 2: When the loss permeates, it brings about all kinds of emotions, such as sadness, fear and anger. You feel insecure, unsafe and confused.

Phase 3: Processing happens gradually. Feelings of denial and re-experience, sadness and dullness alternate. Physically, you may experience a lack of appetite and sleep, and a feeling of exhaustion. You are also a bit more introverted. You’re annoyed by others who you think ‘have it easy'. After a while a certain resignation develops.

Phase 4: The phase of recovery begins. You pick yourself up, start organizing your life again. The memories of the deceased are now less painful.

Origins
Mourning is a healthy response to loss. It is a way to overcome a shock and adapt to a changed situation. Mourning becomes a problem when it hinders you instead of helping you to move on. For example, all you feel is anger, not sadness. There is no development in the process. Or you postpone the mourning until the moment that another event calls up the process in all its intensity. In these kinds of situations there can be symptoms that resemble depression, such as having difficulty sleeping and concentrating, not being interested in the outside world and being tired or irritable.

Mourning by age stages:

- Children up to 3 years of age

Very small children up to about 3 years of age have no real sense of death.
They do not yet know the difference between living and non-living things. However, they are afraid of being separated from those who surround them with love and warmth. They feel what loss is and suffer from it as well. The little ones still deal with death in a very natural way. Adults are sometimes frightened by this because they miss that naturalness. There is no fear of the dead yet.

- Children from 3 to 6 years old

Children from 3 to 6 years know the difference between life and death. They use the word 'Death' in their conversations and their game: "You're dead, you have to stay down!" However, they do not yet know exactly what being dead means. For them 'Death' is something temporary, a kind of sleep in which the dead person can no longer see or move. They begin to realize that death and grief are related, but do not yet feel any fear of death.
Children of this age often think that life and death alternate.
It seems that they find it the most normal thing in the world that a loved one has died. For example, a four-year-old may ask a day after the funeral when the deceased will return, only to be deeply shocked when it turns out that the person in question will never return. Children of this age show great interest in the physical and biological aspects of death: "Can't he walk anymore?", "Can he still hear something when I say something?". They continue to ask questions, sometimes to annoyance: "Isn't he getting dirty in the ground?", "Isn't he hungry in the grave?"

- Children from 6 to 9 years old

In children between the ages of 6 and 9, the realisation begins to dawn that death is irreversible, irrevocable and definitive. However, they do not yet understand what the definitive end exactly means and that makes it very confusing and frightening for them. They also don't realize at first that death is inevitable and happens to everyone. For example, an eight-year-old can ask her father to bury her when she is dead. She doesn't realize yet that her father will die as well (probably even sooner).
The growing realisation that people you love can also die, causes
emotional changes sometimes accompanied by anxiety: "Are you coming back?"
At this age, children become interested in the externalities associated with a death, such as the coffin, funeral, cremation, and cemetery.
They are also interested in what happens after death. As a cause of death, they often give external explanations. When asked why people die, they answer: "Because they are poisoned", "When they have an accident" or "When they fall out of an airplane". An exception are children who have had to deal with death in their environment, they have a more realistic picture of what is happening.
The questions that children in this age often ask adults are sometimes very sober: "Why is Bram wearing glasses, he can't see anything anymore", "Are his glasses burned too"? Children of this age are vulnerable because although they can understand the meaning of death, they are not yet able to deal with all its implications.

- Children from 9 to 12 years old

Children from the upper classes know that animals, people and plants live and that everything that lives, at a certain point, dies. When asked why people die, they mainly mention physical causes: "They get cancer", "Because they are old" or "Because they have a heart attack". A single wise guy will also call nonconcrete causes like: "Everybody has to die", "God calls you" or "The world is getting too small." Children of this age are less dependent on adults. They do not always want to draw attention to their grief. They try to come to terms with it themselves, also in order not to appear childish. But because the feelings have to come out anyway, they sometimes show awkward and rebellious behavior.

- Children of 12 years and older

The inevitability and universality of death penetrate when children reach teenage age. Their intellectual skills are then so advanced that they see death as the inevitable end of life.
However, the personal and emotional distance is still great. It can happen to anyone, except people in their own environment. But that changes drastically when they have to deal with the death of a group member. Young people in particular are deeply affected when death strikes in their immediate environment.
They are at a stage where they question life. They wonder what the meaning of life is: "Why and what are we on earth for? A confrontation with death increases the questions and sometimes the confusion around life and death.

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