Viewed through the lens of meaning-focused grief therapy, adapting to life-altering losses or transitions of any kind entails reaffirming or reconstructing a world of meaning that has been shaken or shattered by traumatic events. However, meaning arises between us as well as within us, particularly in the co-construction of the significance of the loss in couples mourning the death of a child, or accommodating other major non-death losses, as in diagnosis of serious illness, loss of a home, and other family crises.
This module offers a practical approach to working with grieving couples, in which an emotion-focused attention to affect regulation is joined with a constructivist focus on the processing of traumatic loss, and the ongoing revision of the identity of the family and its members. Encompassing individual emotion modulation but also transcending it, we will discuss research on the relational window of tolerance for profound grief, and how couples strive to manage both their partners’ pain and their own during their interaction.
To illustrate these dynamics, we view clinical vignettes of couples navigating these co-regulatory processes, as well as the related concept of grief rhythms. We will then introduce individual work in a couple context to convey how this structural intervention might advance this effort. In addition, we will practice talking about talking to ensure safety in couples’ communication about addressing the traumatically charged topic of the death of their child or other family crises.
