Grief counseling

Grief counseling is a form of psychotherapy that aims to help people cope with the physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and cognitive responses to loss.

[5] Grief counseling is commonly recommended for individuals who experience difficulties dealing with a personally significant loss.

Grief counseling facilitates expression of emotion and thought about the loss, including their feeling sad, anxious, angry, lonely, guilty, relieved, isolated, confused etc.

[10] In these situations, more in-depth counseling and psychotherapy would be important in helping the individual recover from the traumatic loss.

[15] At present (as of 2008), a controversy exists in the scholarly literature regarding grief therapy's relative efficacy and the possible harm from it (iatrogenesis).

[16] Others have argued that grief therapy is highly effective for people who suffer from unusually prolonged and complicated responses to bereavement.

[18] In particular, individuals experiencing "relatively normal bereavement reactions" were said to be at risk of a worse outcome (i.e., an abnormally prolonged or difficult grieving process) after receiving grief counseling.

The APS journal article in turn has been criticized in the British Psychological Society's publication the psychologist as lacking scientific rigour.

[23] In 2007, George Bonanno and colleagues published a paper describing a study that supports the incremental validity of complicated grief.

[24] The paper cautions, "the question of how complicated grief symptoms might be organized diagnostically is still very much open to debate."

For example, where an adult is periodically immobilized by unwelcome and intrusive recall of the sudden and violent death[30] of a parent in their childhood.

[31] Personality changes due to the effects of trauma can be the source of intense shame, secondary shocks after the event and of grief for the lost unaltered self, which impacts on family and work.

[32][33] Counseling in these circumstances is designed to maximize safety, trauma processing, and reintegration regardless of the specific treatment approach.