Emotion-Focused Therapy for Prolonged Grief: A Clinical Approach

Abstract

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The primary objective of this article is to present a conceptualization of grief complications and its therapeutic approach from an Emotion-Focused Therapy perspective. Prolonged Grief Disorder affects a significant amount of individuals who experience psychological, social, or physical difficulties. Although interventions based on cognitive-behavioural models have demonstrated efficacy, they are not effective for all bereaved individuals (Wittouck et al., 2011), highlighting the need for alternative therapeutic approaches. EFT offers a conceptualization of grief complications, grounded in the description of the emotional processes’ characteristic of prolonged grief, including problematic self-treatments, and core emotional pain. Its main therapeutic goal is to transform painful primary emotional experiences linked to the loss of the other and to the relationship with the other when they were alive —such as fear (e.g., not being able to function without the other)—through accessing adaptive primary emotions—mainly connection and the adaptive grieving of loss. The paper offers a description of emotion-focused therapeutic work with prolonged grief accounting for possible complications in experiencing adaptive emotions, the type of relationship with the deceased, and the nature of the grief complications, etc.