Death Anxiety

This chapter will help counselors and counselor trainees develop the capacity to understand the concept of death anxiety for themselves and for those they serve. Moreover, this chapter will define death anxiety, discuss the history of death anxiety within the helping professions, and provide guidelines for exploring one's own death anxiety and the death anxiety of clients. This chapter will describe terror management theory (TMT) and how the denial of death and death anxiety lies at the heart of human behavior and cultural affiliation. This chapter introduces cultural humility as a foundation for engaging in conversations about death and a model for clinically applying cultural humility is examined. In addition, creative teaching strategies are offered for engaging students in self-reflective learning about death anxiety. Finally, this chapter will provide a foundation to normalize Barbie's question in the blockbuster movie, “Do you guys ever think of death?” (Gerwig, 2023).