You’ve spent years offering support to bereaved people, helping them express their grief, manage waves of disruptive emotion, process the loss, and pursue a changed life and renewed bond with their deceased loved one. But what do you do when they respond to none of these initiatives, and remain mired in an anguishing and life-limiting grief despite your best efforts, and their own genuine suffering?
This Case Study module provides a rare opportunity to witness answers to these questions. Drawing on Bruce Ecker’s coherence therapy, we will first consider several means by which therapists can help clients encounter the root causes of “immunity to change” and witness this empathic stance unfold in recordings of actual therapy sessions with two different clients. Grounding in an unhurried, collaborative, fully experiential approach to the work, the therapist “leads from one step behind,” responding to subtle cues in the client’s own verbal and nonverbal language to gently pursue the tasks of discovery and integration of the emotional truth that sustains the client’s suffering. Several alternative strategies for pursuing this “position work” are demonstrated, each woven seamlessly into the process of therapy.
