If you have completed Part l of this Core Course, you are acquainted with the distinction between adaptive grieving which moves forward from loss to its integration, sometimes with surprising resilience, and complicated, protracted and life-limiting responses to bereavement, such as Prolonged Grief Disorder. But beyond recognizing these latter struggles or syndromes, how can we get to the root of the meanings of mourning that seem to lock the bereaved into an intense and persistent form of suffering?
This module is designed to address just these questions. Beginning with a discussion of the reality of resistance in grief therapy, we will consider new research that illuminates how the meaning of mourning can contribute to protracted grief and create invisible impediments to substantial and lasting change. We will then consider two key experiential techniques by which clinicians and their clients can discover and ultimately transform hidden “pro-symptom positions” that work against the client’s own positive goals. Each of these—analogical listening and symptom dialogues—will then be illustrated in an actual session of therapy with a bereaved mother to reveal and explore how she holds her grief for her son and is reluctant to allow it to change. Learners will leave better prepared to discern and work with the sources of “stuckness” that many clients confront in the course of grief therapy.
