Counseling and Loss: Personal Experience and Professional Practice

Running head: COUNSELING
COUNSELING
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

1COUNSELING
People often reflect on past experiences, they look back and remember incidents and life
events. While some experiences are wonderful to remember, some are painful. Along with every
experience, people associate different forms of feelings which may leave certain impact for
lifetime (Schön, 2017). One of the major experiences that tend to live with us forever is personal
loss such as death of someone close and dear. Losing a loved one can be the hardest experience
of our life since as human we are constantly seeking people from whom we can get support
including emotional, financial, and psychological. Moreover, when the loved one is mother or
father, it becomes incredibly impossible to overcome it. Counseling is a profession that may
require putting emotional, relational and professional demands on the members coming for
therapy. Therefore, often it brings challenges for the professional within the mental health care
field. However, it can be both positive and negative depending on the ways one chooses to use
their personal history. In this paper, I will discuss my personal experience of loss, death of my
father, my process through this specific grief and the ways it may affect my professional practice
in future. The paper will also discuss different aspects that shape the experience of loss including
social support, religious or spiritual beliefs and individual and cultural differences.
Nature of loss: I was born in a place growing up witnessing war, discrimination,
disempowerment of minority group. I belonged to Tutsi group, a social class resided in the
African’s Great Lakes region. It is a place where finding burning rubbles and the massacre of my
ethnic group people were common. My parents have always tried their best to protect me. As
parents do, I was extremely loved and cared by my parents. My father would take extreme
measures in order to protect me from getting hurt. Best of human attributes were taught by them
to me every time they were around me such as kindness, respect, love, unity and peace. My
childhood experience and growing up was not great for all the losses I faced and experienced.

2COUNSELING
Among all the losses, I recognize my parents’ death as most tragic experience. Even though I
was only 4 years old, I remember my father was killed. He was killed only due to the fact that he
married my mother. I witnessed my father being shot by the Mai-Mai rebels. My mother was
kidnapped later and she was unable to be relocated. I cannot forget the dreadful incident of my
father’s death. The incident made me realize the significance of feeling safe when seeking
traumatic experience help. The sudden death of my father was certainly traumatic that was
involved with mass violence. Since I was only 4 years old, I could hardly expect a life without
my parents. Every child grieves the death of a significant person in their life, for me it was my
father that have developed significant trauma symptoms in me related to the death of my parent.
Primary loss is a loss that is the actual incident of loss such as death of a close person
(Harvey, 2016). When I think of this incident, I realize the way it was my primary loss and
suddenly followed by many secondary losses. Although I was too small to remember everything,
I fully remember the incident and still scare me, making me feel like I was shot by the Mai-Mai
rebels. After my father death, I lost my mother too and became little orphan girl going through
violence and becoming a homeless teenager with no support. The primary loss was certainly my
father’s death, creating an entire series of secondary losses. I cannot compare the amount of pain
and grief I endured by the two forms of loss. When I experienced death of my father, the grief
was certainly associated with the loss that was excruciating. In the immediate moment it can be
all-consuming or it may take some other forms of emotion. According to models of grief, the
stages off grief followed on by one, although it seems to leave a lasting impact on me. After
weeks and months the loss becomes more profound leading to the sense of losing almost
everything. The overwhelming sense of the losing everything is the secondary loss I felt after my