Adaptive grieving implies integrating the loss into our changed sense of who we are, as well as into the changed story of our lives. In this module we consider two techniques for helping mourners discern the deeper significance of their experience, and in doing so identify the important needs and life lessons implicit in them. First, we will learn to listen between the lines of the stories clients tell themselves and others about the death to grasp more fully the unvoiced meaning of their grief, which often resides at the level of their embodied emotion. Drawing on both video of an actual session with a traumatically bereaved mother and a telehealth demonstration of the method, we will explore the role of metaphor in helping clients reach beyond literal language to symbolize how they carry their grief, and what it can tell them and us about how they now might move toward healing.
We then consider innovations in journaling that prompt clients to name and claim the emotional impact of their losses, and also to step back, make greater sense of what they have been through and perhaps even encounter unsought benefits in it. Alternating between jointly negotiated journaling homework and its seamless integration into subsequent therapy sessions, reflective writing can prompt the self-compassion, insight and action required to reconstruct life out of loss.
