Arielle Ruggeroli

This paper will outline group curriculum designed to work with adults aged 25-45 who have received a diagnosis of prolonged grief disorder (PGD). My goal is to offer a mindfulness and expressive arts-based educational and therapeutic experience to those struggling with prolonged grief in order to ultimately empower them to accept their losses so that they may find meaning and perhaps a changed relationship to their grief on the other side as they arrive in their own timing.

This paper investigates and details various aspects of one of the most recent DSMV- TR diagnostic additions known as prolonged grief disorder (PGD). A distinction between “healthy” grief and “harmful” grief can be useful to those who suffer “abnormally”, especially when functional consequences that increase the risk for physical disease are at play. The comorbidity of this diagnosis with substance use disorders has presented a fascinating and budding field of research within the study of grief addiction.

The following piece belongs to visual artist, Rebecca DiDomenico, with whom I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to collaborate and mirror her own vision as reflected in her artist statement here. Most of the words and ideas are of course her very own; The process of putting this piece together involved sifting through old artist statements of hers in order to gather common threads and themes that have existed and continue to show up in her work today. From these themes, I was able to insert additional and appropriate jargon to create a coherent mental image for the reader of the artist's materials, subject matter, thought processes and beyond.

Additionally, and more importantly I argue, Tlatilco culture acknowledged women as portals to human life. Women were so powerful in this way that the symbols of their fertility, the figurines, were considered divine enough to secure a fruitful harvest of the sacred maize plant every spring. Feminist writer and art historian, Asuncion Lavrin, reminds us that “an interdisciplinary and feminist approach to history can enrich our understanding of the connections that people made, the role that women played, and the meaning of genders in cultures of the past”.

Through intentional compilation of images from a Meso-American codex, symbols of popular culture, an excerpt from a Colonial-era text, and other markings, Enrique Chagoya produces a satirical narrative that draws ties between a Catholic saint, Spanish colonialism, and much of today’s political turmoil regarding nationalism in the America’s in his piece, "The Vision of Saint Francis Assisi".

This female phenomenon employed the body as a vessel for physical portrayal of the spiritual transformation which took place inside the minds, and presumably, the souls of these women.

The question becomes clear that the crux of the conversation lies not within the imperial, gender, sexual, maternal, or alimentary status of Christ, but rather within his status as a humanized God—a corporeal savior who became physically accessible to those who desired nothing more, men and women alike, across the considerable distance of time and geography which encompassed what is ambiguously understood as the Middle Ages. Medieval imagery of Christ’s human body then became the artistic conduit through which spiritual seekers of the time could tangibly interact with their God.