The Importance Of Significant Life Events In Our Life

Significant Life Events is an occurrence impacting on individual circumstances or contingency on their lives. There are different life stages that individuals go through during the development of their life. These development stages start from: childhood, adulthood, middle age, older adult, pregnancy, birth and infancy, and the final stages of life. However, each life stages of human growth and development must do with changes in individuals.

Life events are turning points in individuals lives that impact on the individual’s personal development (Langridge Eleanor,2007). Therefore, some life events will change individuals forever. The impact of life events can be positive and negative. In addition to positive events, an individual’s may be promoted at work, going to college, having new baby, getting pay rise at work, getting married; In such situation a person emotional well-being may be boosted and feel more confidence themselves; whereas, negative life events are loss of a partner, financial problems, death of family members, break down in relationship or marriage, overdose and self-harm and others. In situation like this, individuals become sad because of unexpected situation. However, there can be unpredictable and predictable life changes that may occur in individuals lives such as physical, psychological, emotional, social and environmental well -being that influenced n individuals. These life stages impact on individual’s circumstances which can cause depression and stress; also, the need to adapt and overcome them.

Physical Impact in significant life changes can be on effect on individual’s life, they may experience different life changes in their behavioural pattern such as loss of appetite, weight gain, lack of sleep, headaches, joint pain, chest pain, high blood pressure, heart disease, change in sex drive and other common effects that cause due to stress. Sometimes pregnant women tend to go through emotional breakdown throughout and after their pregnancy such as lack of motivation, sadness, depression, anxiety, restlessness, anger and they become social withdrawal. In such instances, individual’s mood and behaviour changes which does affect themselves, baby and others around them.

Psychological impact affect individuals in any different ways according to life events research, it can be life changes an inherently stressful for individuals. The changes that may affect individuals psychological are relationship problems, anxiety, mood swing and feeling of distress.

Emotional Impact is the changes in individual behaviour, this mostly affected children and young people. As every child reacts to changes in a different way depending on their own personality. When a child or young person go through some transitions in their life; such as abuse, changing of school. There behaviour tend to change as they become quiet, withdrawn and start to become anger and aggressive towards others. However, there are other emotional impacts that put a child under emotional distress such as child or children become clingy because they feel vulnerable, loss of appetite, show moody behaviour, misses school, having nightmares and sleeping problems, self -harm and not having confident in themselves. The stress caused by this situation may lead to mental and physical problems; also, influence on the child emotional, physical and cognitive wellbeing and development.

Throughout our life we do experience some form of grief that caused by situations such as death, this can happen to anyone whether young or old person. There are seven stages of grief but five stages were developed to help individual facing circumstances such as death. Elisabeth Kubler Ross (1969) described five stages of grief and proposed five stage process of dying which referred to as DABDA (Christina Gregory, 2018). They include: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.

Denial: This where an individual’s response to shocking news, as they are in denial and overwhelm by what is going on around them. Individuals may try to overcome the change and loss by asking themselves certain questions such as why did it happen, I can’t believe this is happen and so on. (Kessler, 2018).

Anger: Everyone get angry at some pointed time in their life’s such as get upset with other people for no reason, angry with themselves and expressing their behaviour by shouting and cursing indecent words. This is a common reaction that some individuals go through. Also, this stage helps to understand the loss and changes.

Bargaining: At this stage of grief, individuals may find themselves attempt to bargain in trying to get back what you lost. For examples, hoping you see your children pass the worst before past on, therefore, you want to be given more time see the best from your children.

Depression: This is where people no longer deny their situation and their anger is replaced by sorrow, sadness, and depression as a result of significant life changes. For examples, death of love ones.

Acceptance: At this stage of grief, individuals give their struggle and accept the changes in their life(Kessler,2018). They no longer get angry with the situations, in order they start rebuilding their life.

In the case study, Sue did not come to term with her 10-year-old daughter Jill, she was still in denial, angry with herself, feel depressed and could not accept that her daughter has been dead. Sue is dwelling on guilt prone thoughts such as Why her, she was so young, I’m still Sue has been grieving throughout the one year that she losses her daughter, this has affect her emotional, physiological and social as he could not cope with the stress of her daughter.

Analyse possible group responses to significant life events that occur to one of its members.

According to the (Oxford Dictionary,2018), Response is a reaction ad occurrence of the events to individuals who experience life events in their life. Individual who go through distinctive significant life events such as personal life experience, divorce, neglect, and bereavement which is one of the most important aspects for the bereaved individuals. All these are common response to grief in individuals. There are different responses group that in the support of individuals circumstances such as family, colleague, society and community.

Individuals may sometimes feel grief in his or her own way, especially if they are going through a phase of bereavement; In such instance, individuals can have affected physically psychologically, socially and emotionally. Individuals might feel a sense of sadness, feeling exhausted, confusion, guilt, disbelief, weak, anger, in denial and more. Also, individuals who are grieving might lack of productivity at work, loss of appetite, having trouble sleeping. Individual going through bereavement process, may have a good relationship with the person that died, so it can be difficult for them if they are grieving.

Sometimes it hard for individuals to come to term with their loss. In such situation, individuals need uttermost attention to give them support needed. However, individuals may respond in a negative way towards close friends and family members. Family is social group that are related to each other. Therefore, they must be able to provide a source of social and emotional support for family members and close individuals who is experiencing grief or terminal illness. There are positive responses that family that might be an influence an individual’s such as providing emotional support, advice, financial help, help individuals to develop a positive esteem, help to cope with stress and to give practical support, for examples, help taking care of the house or the children (Abridge Laura, 2008). If the person did not get the right respond from family member; However, it sometimes cause tension, as there is lack of support and attachment to their love ones, feelings of isolation and low esteem.

Friends Responses: Friends are important as they can help in ever situations as family and friends go through grief. Whenever individuals going through bereavement and grief, Friends should be there to help with their emotional needs, social life and practical tasks. However, friends may offer support by listening to individuals, be empathy, give individuals reassurance and encouragement without assuming you know how they feel. This form of support reduce pressure on the bereaved friend and help them to overcome stress. The negative response is that the individual who is experiencing grieving, can have some feelings of depression, suicidal thoughts, rejection, no social support and poor self -esteem in themselves. However, if individuals are not getting the right response; then it can be devasted for the individual (Anon.,2018).

Society responses, regarding professional help, there are organisation that set up to offer help to individuals experiencing life events such as bereavement. These responses group are child helpline, Age UK, Cancer McMillian, The compassionate friends group and bereavement counselling. These group offer support in counselling session to the bereaved individual (Anon., 2018).

In case study, While Jill was visiting the hospital for follow up check-up, all the healthcare professional gets to know her better, therefore, they were to attach to Jill and family. All the health professionals treating Jill were very caring and supportive to Jill and the Parents. Sue Manager offered her compassionate leave for 4 weeks without pay. The manager offers gratitude and empathy to Sue by assuring her if she returns to work, there will be flexible working hours for her.

Analyse the impact for others in the health and social care when an individual experiences significant life events.

In the health and social care organisation, Individuals go through life events in their life which significantly affect other people. The most important people that has been affected is the healthcare professionals who are involved in individual’s life. These professional’s bodies can be care manager, nurses, GP, social worker, care worker, counsellor, pharmacist and others. The death of a person in the care of professionals can be a huge impact, as they get emotional attached and build a relationship with service users who pass away. As professionals, they may often feel difficult to hold the professional boundaries in place. However, nurses, care workers and other professional may have affected emotional, psychological, social and physical because of the death of service users.

Physical Impact: Whenever care workers and nurses care for patients who is terminal ill, they can be affected in so many ways such as going through post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, lose self -esteem, headache and feeling exhausted (Anon., 2018). Healthcare professionals sometimes get very emotionally whenever caring for individuals experience significant life events, they will express themselves in feeling sad, crying, and so on. These grief symptoms will get in the way as it with affect the relationship with family members and colleagues; also, how professionals carry out their work in the workplace. However, Healthcare professional are thought of having professional boundaries with service users.

Disenfranchised Grief is a hidden grief, this is due to lack of social recognition which will affect healthcare professionals. According to Doka (1987), he described disenfranchised Grief as the grief that people undergo when they experience the loss of service users which might resulted in a more complicated grief response. Doko (1987), he suggested that disenfranchised grief is not openly acknowledged, socially proven and publicly observed.

Complicated Grief, keep individuals who experience the death of someone they love, this can be very complex as individuals may felt trapped in their own way, as they feel that they cannot escape feeling of lost, being devasted and alone(Mayo,1998). In such instances, complicated grief goes unresolved. However, this type of grief can affect healthcare professionals; they may feel emotionally in getting close to service users, being distracted when performing on the job, lack of sleep, withdrawal from social interaction and having troubles eating. Healthcare workers face with common emotional effects which is part of the grief process; however, become depressed and sadness (Bridges, 2018).

In the scenarios, When Jill died, one of the nurse who was caring for her, find it very difficult to come to work as the nurse appeared extremely stressed and emotional. The nurse has endured emotional and psychological effects as she was close to Jill. The nurse requires professional support from manager and colleague to be able to handle incident such as death of Jill and to understand role and responsibilities when caring for patients. The nurse need to attend palliative training and counsellor session.