Externalized Continuing Bond

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Our life in this world is only limited. According to Dr. Edward Stieglitz (1949) “The important thing is not how many years in your life but how much life in your years.” It means that how you live your life in those years and how you make people feel about your presence or your relationship with other people are the things that would matter. As people say, cherish every moment and person in our lives. We should give importance for everything that happens in our life and appreciate those people who share their journey with us before it’s too late. No one knows when and how our journey (life) in this world would come to an end and we did not know what’s coming to us.
What the researchers are trying to say is that death is part of a person’s …show more content…
Externalized Continuing bond expression involves illusions and hallucinations of the deceased. Illusions and hallucinations of the deceased indicate unresolved loss- defined in adult attachment literature. The unresolved loss can be understood in terms of failure in integrating the deceased working model with the reality of the loss. In addition of the externalized continuing bond, the bereaved people’s behavior in keeping room and things owned by the deceased for years or treating someone as the deceased, indicate attempts to deny the reality of the loss and therefore avoid the bereaved from adapting to the new situation (Bowlby, 1980). To support this, Field and his colleagues (1999) found that using the deceased special belongings in excessive way for comfort or failure of distinguishing his or her possessions was predictive of a more elevated and protracted grief course whereas the same was not so for fond memories. The metacognitive failure of the bereave individual to differentiate the representation and reality is the characteristic of maladaptive continuing bond (Field, 2006). Maladaptive continuing bonds associate with insecure attachment, particularly the disorganized attachment style (Field, 2006; Field et al., 2005), this is well founded conceptually but not empirically tested. Here, it was argued that an attempt to maintain or make special use of the deceased’s possessions characterized an externalized type of continuing bond expression where in the attachment system goal to regain physical closeness had not been relinquished. The effort of regaining physical closeness with the deceased are said to be temporarily disorganizing (Main, Goldwyn, & Hesse, 2002). On the other hand, Internalized continuing bond expression uses mental representation of deceased as a secure base to facilitate integration of the loss, using the deceased as an
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