vidual is poorly prepared to deal with loss, friends, relatives, and others are equally ill-prepared to assist in the grieving process. Few people know what to say when talking to a person who has experienced a major loss and most people intellectualize, avoid speaking about death or divorce, and try to artificially "cheer up" the mourning person. The result, according to James and Friedman (1998), is that many grieving individuals attempt what the authors call "Academy award recovery" which simply refers to presenting themselves as fully recovered long before recovery is possible.
Typically, the grieving individual experiences physical as well as emotional fatigue and a loss of what James and Friedman (1998, p. 57) call "aliveness." Being bereft of a significant other presents the mourning individual with a sense of isolation coupled with anger. James and Friedman (1998, p. 50) make reference to the fact that most people fail to address the spiritual aspect of grief: "while it may be possible to find a direct cause-and-effect linkage between intellectual thoughts and the feelings that follow, faith is different. Faith does not require reason. It is spiritual, not emotional or intellectual."
James and Friedman (1998, p. 52) maintain that "society literally teaches us to act recovered." What this does in essence is make it very difficult for the grieving individual to come to terms with grief and a sense of loss. It inhibits the process through which an individual must move in order to fully recover from the loss and all that the loss implies.
After 20 years of hands-on experience in grief counseling, James and Friedman (1998, p. 21) have concluded that: 1) all relationships are unique and all recovery is therefore individual; 2) focusing on the shared intellectual truth (type of loss) does nothing to promote the process of recovery; 3) isolation by type of loss may have short-term value, but does not encourage ...