ABSTRACT
In an important sense, it is not a question of what grief therapy techniques do for a bereaved client; it is the question of what bereaved clients (and therapists) do with the techniques that counts. And so it seems appropriate to open this book with a consideration of the broader relational framework that provides a “container” not only for our client’s grief, but also for the specific procedures we offer to express, explore and ease the experience of loss. My goal in this chapter is therefore to suggest that therapeutic presence provides the “holding environment” for a responsive grief therapy, within which attention to therapeutic process attunes the therapist to that unique juncture where a client’s need meets his or her readiness for a particular intervention in a particular moment of interaction. Nested within these larger and more ample containers like Russian dolls, specific procedures have a potentially powerful place in the overall project of counseling or therapy. Divorced from these larger contexts, however, stand-alone techniques lose much of their potency; they become merely a random concatenation of methods whose relevance to a particular loss remains uncertain, uncoordinated and unconnected to the durable thread of coherence that characterizes effective therapy.
