Complicated Grief and the Trend Toward Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

Recently, considerable attention has been given to the cognitive processes entailed in mourning. There has been a growing understanding that the death of a loved one forces individuals to restructure and rebuild previously held assumptions about the self and the world. On the basis of this conceptualization of grief as a period of meaning reconstruction, cognitive-behavioral therapy seems a fitting intervention mechanism for treating individuals with complicated grief. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the theory, intervention mechanisms, and research on the application of cognitive-behavioral therapy to grief, in general, and to non-normative grief, in particular.