Cultural Bereavement: The Use of Visual Journaling in Times of Complex Grief
Deniz Naji, ATPQ, DWHEAT
Montreal, QC
Deniz is a professional member of the Quebec Art Therapy Association working systemically with children and their families in school settings and with both minors and adults in private practice. As a member of the Iranian diaspora, she works through an anti-oppressive and trauma-informed lens to enhance resiliency and promote recovery, understanding that personal experiences of trauma are layered in structural intersectionalities and social inequalities. Her heuristic thesis focused on cultural bereavement—reconstruction of cultural identity and acculturation—during times of complex grief, using the Expressive Therapies Continuum framework. As a result of increasing immigration and forced movement brought on by political, social, and environmental instabilities, Deniz helps migrants who face complex grief, establish meaning-making through the experience of cultural bereavement as they reconnect to their host culture and country.
Not all siblings walk hand in hand, for some are in heaven while others walk on land, photograph, Tehran, Iran, 2021
I explored the process of visual journaling as a means to express cultural bereavement in times of complex grief using Moustakas’ (1990) Heuristic approach. Cultural bereavement, a paramount aspect of the migrant’s experience, is influenced by and mediated through the interplay of the migration process, cultural identity and cultural congruity, along with psychological factors (Bhugra & Becker, 2005). I was a daughter and a sister to a lost father and a brother. I reflected upon the impact that grief was having on my life as a member of Persian diaspora: a settler who was becoming an art therapist on the unceded lands of Tiohtià:ke, the traditional territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka nation. The role of visual journaling and expressive writing described my experiences. I allowed my intuition to run freely by reaching inward for tactic awareness and knowledge. Through self-exploration and traveling to motherland for ritual mourning, I investigated the research question which was compelling to my own experience: it was autobiographical and had a social value (Alleyne, 2016). Although my very being there was indicative of trauma, I was also aware that it may overlap with my emotions to the feeling of loss and cultural mourning, including the natural symptoms and responses of sadness over the deaths of my loved ones and my uprooting from my own culture (Lu, 2007).
I wanted to understand the context from which my inquiry was born. My training as an art therapist was coming to an end and as an intern, I also had the privilege of assisting individuals who were going through a similar period of mourning. After working with culturally bereaved individuals, my original grief-related experiences became more intense so I started making my own art by keeping a visual journal as a means of determining the effects of my personal experience on my countertransference. In my visual journal I recorded my experiences using both imagery and written text. Using a constructivist perspective when journaling, I actively constructed knowledge through engaging in my grief experience, intrinsically reflecting upon it and taking note of every step. Reflective journaling helped me construct new knowledge by keeping track of my progress with a format for thinking through and responding to new experiences and then integrating them into my existing knowledge base.
A primary motivation for documenting the experience of working as a bereaved art therapist was to help others in the field better understand what it's like. Grief had me engulfed and I had to care for myself and find my own answers (Alleyne, 2016). In the beginning of my Heuristic study I would have bodily responses such as strong chest pains, difficulty concentrating, and digestive issues when engaging with perceived stress. Using mind-body awareness I found that I would quickly draw imagery. I focused on the use of the material and while it helped to get into my body, I found it would also allow some release of physical tension—mostly in my neck area. These movements involved stretching, twirling, slow dancing, yoga poses and some bilateral movements like moving side to side to capture these kinesthetic experiences.
Cultural bereavement, identity and balance
Attig (1991) states: “It is misleading and dangerous to mistake grief for the whole of the experience of the bereaved” (p. 398). Many factors come into play when addressing individual ways of grieving including: cultural and social systems, gender, prior losses, relationship to the deceased, how the person died, and attachment styles of the bereaved. People are all unique and may have different reactions to the same lived experiences (Bellet et al., 2018). Everything fell into place at once, once I walked on land, starting to organize my thoughts and the topics as they made sense to me through themes of acculturation and identity reconstruction (Djuraskovic & Arthur, 2010). Keeping a visual journal facilitated this process through identifying the various fragmented parts of my psyche, bringing them into unity and balance by allowing a place for each voice or point of view to be expressed and considered as part of the whole. The distribution of visual weight in my works of art created a visual equilibrium of the elements that caused the total images to appear balanced (Hieb, 2005, p.139). These images were signposts into the depths of myself, my primary images, archetypal images helping to symbolize my personal experience within a larger context of the imagination of humankind… such images required witness (p.87).
Working through ambiguous loss
Neimeyer's Meaning-Reconstruction Model supports the idea that there is no one right way to go about exploring one's sorrow (Lister et al., 2008). Because people normally experience life via stories rather than facts, Neimeyer's methodology uses the narrative approach to contextualize the significance of each person's life story (Gillies & Neimeyer, 2006). Heuristic techniques forced me to mourn amongst my ancestors in my birth country. Heuristic Inquiry is a worthwhile qualitative research endeavor that symbolizes a path taken by the researcher in pursuit of tacit information. It forced me to exercise my imagination, compassion, self-awareness, and introspection, and it gave me a profound insight into the significance and substance of the profound human experience of grief (Douglass & Moustakas, 1985). Heuristic research required me to commit my body and soul to the investigation, and personal exploration of the experience of acculturation and identity reconstruction.