Counselling psychologists’ experience of the death of a terminally ill client: An interpretative phenomenological analysis

Abstract

Counselling psychologists’ experiences of the death of a terminally ill client are substantially under-researched even though they are well positioned to work in this area and previous literature indicates that this might be an important area. The present study has aimed to explore how counselling psychologists make sense of their lived experiences of client death. Two subsidiary aims were to explore what drew counselling psychologists to work with terminally ill clients, and to explore their experiences in terms of personal and professional growth.Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven counselling psychologists who had experienced the death of a terminally ill client. Their accounts were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), a qualitative methodology that attempts to illuminate the lived experience of a phenomenon among a small sample of individuals.Three main superordinate themes emerged from the data: (1) Working within the dying space (working when the client outcome is death); (2) Heightened emotional arousal (the raw emotions of working with the existential crisis of death); and (3) Dynamics between professional and personal identity (conflicting aspects of the two identities).This study suggests that counselling psychologists experienced challenges in the complex dynamics between their personal and professional identities, such as ethical dilemmas about whether to attend a funeral and how to set boundaries. Future research could usefully investigate intrinsic motivation to work in this field to support the recruiting of counselling psychologists to work in this area.