Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy, Fifth Edition by J. William Worden PhD ABPP

Author:J. William Worden, PhD, ABPP
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Publishing Company, Inc.
Published: 2018-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

AN EXISTING MODEL OF COMPLICATED MOURNING

While the struggle to define an acceptable diagnosis for the DSM continues, there are people dealing with complicated mourning who need our help and intervention. Incidentally, I prefer the term complicated mourning to the term abnormal grief. It is not the grief that people experience that is abnormal. Their experience of grief is their experience of grief. Remember, “Each person’s grief is like no other person’s grief!” (Allport, 1957, class lecture notes). The difficulty lies in the mourning process. There is something that is impeding the mourning process and not allowing it to move forward toward a good adaptation to the loss. The person has difficulty progressing through the natural healing process (Shear, 2010). The mourning tasks and mourning mediators can give the therapist and patient a clue as to what is going on and provide a framework for effective interventions (Worden, 2017).

There are several ways to outline complicated mourning reactions. I would like to suggest a paradigm that I find useful in my clinical work and one that you may also find useful. This paradigm describes complicated mourning under four headings: (a) chronic grief reactions, (b) delayed grief reactions, (c) exaggerated grief reactions, and (d) masked grief reactions. Let’s examine each one of these individually.

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