Being You or being Me: That is the question. The evolution of grief after the death of a mother

Abstract

In the present article we present in detail the type of interventions utilized by an expert grief therapist who operates from a meaning-oriented narrative position. To do so, we offer a careful description of the case, session by session, focusing attention on those moments in which the therapist intervenes with the application of a specific narrative technique. We further illustrate and analyze the use of these techniques and their contribution to the alleviation of the client’s grief, across several transcribed excerpts of client/therapist discourse. Both the description of the case and the concrete exposition of the techniques utilized permits the reader to understand in more detail the contribution of narrative strategies to the process of integration of a loss that takes place in 6 sessions with a veteran therapist animated by a meaning-making, narrative perspective.