Grief is one of those universal life experiences from which a person never really recovers but learns to cope with and grow through. When we lose people we love, the world is permanently changed. This is the price we pay as humans for the richness that our loved ones bring to our lives. Although it is never completely resolved, under-resolved grief can hang us up and can be associated with other problems, like depression or anxiety. And so helping people to work through their grief is often an important part of therapy.
The process is different for everyone, but the strategy is pretty simple. When we get stuck in grief it is almost always because we have unfinished business with the person we have lost. Psychotherapy is one of the few places where it is possible to work these types of situations out, to find the missing feelings that need to be expressed, to find the missing parts of ourselves that are tied up in the lost relationship, or to find some more flexible perspectives from which to view the world and ourselves in relation to our losses.
