Clinical Application of the Perspective Shift Technique to Frozen Grief: From Grief Care to Grief Therapy

Grief has long been understood primarily as a domain of care rather than therapy: a natural response to loss that unfolds over time, with the supporter's role being to accompany the process rather than to intervene in it. Even the Continuing Bonds framework (Klass, Silverman, & Nickman, 1996), which significantly advanced grief theory by reconceptualizing recovery as internal relational reorganization rather than detachment, has remained largely descriptive — identifying where bereaved individuals need to arrive without providing a clinical route to that destination. This paper distinguishes between grief care, appropriate for the broad range of bereavement responses that naturally evolve over time, and grief therapy, required when grief becomes frozen: when the relational meaning of the loss consolidates into a fixed narrative — unspoken words, unresolved guilt, the deceased encoded as unreachable or suffering — and neither time nor supportive care produces movement. The Perspective Shift Technique (PST; 人格移動) is proposed as a structured grief therapy method for such cases. Within the rational optimal zone of the Three-Layer Rational Consciousness Zone Theory, PST guides the bereaved client to experientially inhabit the perspective of the deceased from the inside, generating the prediction error that enables relational memory to be updated. Three clinical cases are presented demonstrating that PST can loosen fixed relational understanding and allow the continuing bond with the deceased to be felt in a new form.