When a client seems to be “frozen” in grief across a period of years or even decades, delicate work with the “back story” of the relationship and complicating dimensions of the continuing bond is often called for. This video case study examines an adult daughter’s ongoing anguish about her mother’s death, to a level that impairs her ability to function as a partner to her husband and mother to her young children. Working toward the goal of a relational realignment that would recruit her deceased mother as a resource rather than liability in bearing her grief, Neimeyer demonstrates the process of co-construction of meaning in a single session that frees the client to grieve more adaptively.
This program begins with a model that orients therapists to the particular focus of grief therapy with bereaved clients, depending on their point of fixation or impasse in processing the loss, as revealed in characteristic symptomatology calling for a specific class of intervention. Learners will then join Neimeyer in a close process analysis of the session, pausing every few minutes to connect the dots between the client’s presentation, the therapist’s intention, and the choreography of meaning-making that arises from their response to one another. Learners will leave the session with a more holistic sense of the integration of the roles of metaphor, visualization, body work and chair work in freeing clients from protracted and preoccupying grief, allowing them to re-enter their family system with less complicated bonds to both the living and the dead.
