Grieving is a difficult and challenging process. Its nature depends on a number of factors, such as the person’s coping style and personality, as well as the type of loss. However, regardless of the circumstances, losing a loved one can cause great pain and suffering.
Most people learn to manage their grief and adjust to their loss in their own time. Maintaining self-care activities and routines, and having adequate social support available, can be helpful during this time of adjustment. However, for people who experience prolonged or complicated grief reactions, a number of more targeted psychological treatments and strategies can be of great benefit, including:
Navigating difficult thoughts and behaviours
Cognitive-behavioural therapy for complicated grief helps support people with any difficult thoughts and behaviours that may be emerging alongside their experience of grief. Meanwhile, acceptance and commitment therapy can provide people with ways to “be with” their difficult feelings and experiences in a more manageable and less overwhelming way. Therapies such as these can help improve a person’s mood and increase their quality of life as they move through their grief process.
Complicated grief treatment
Complicated grief treatment addresses the symptoms of loss by helping people re-establish relationships and focus on personal life goals.
Improving family relationships
Some psychological treatments focus on strengthening family bonds and developing good communication patterns as this can help prevent people from experiencing significant psychological distress as a result of the loss. Psychologists sometimes refer to this as focused family grief therapy.
Finding meaning
Finding meaning and significance in the loss that a person has experienced can also be helpful. Psychologists may use a range of meaning reconstruction approaches to help achieve this.