Healing Pain: Attachment, Loss and Grief

Complicated losses give people psychological wounds. Healing Pain investigates why the process of grief is such a dramatic turning point for those who undergo it, and why they can never remain as they were before. Some people become so strained, depressed or anxious that in one way or another they turn into patients. Others become healthier than before and gradually acquire a freer life by means of the psychological forces that are latent in the healing pain of grief. A bestseller in Scandinavia, Healing Pain is based on ten years of intensive work by the authors with people affected by, or at risk from, pathological grief. It describes in simple terms, with many concrete examples, the therapeutic methods of treatment they have found most effective in helping such people. Feelings of loss, resulting in grief, are triggered in many situations besides the death of a loved one - for example, divorce, loss of health through accident or serious illness such as cancer, or AIDS, or the birth of a handicapped child - and in Healing Pain these situations are discussed and illustrated by individual cases. Grieving all serious losses is very demanding and can be further complicate if the death was sudden, or by suicide, or if the attachment was symbiotic or ambivalent. The treatment method described in Healing Pain can be used and adapted by all professionals who work with grief, helping them identify those threatened by pathological grief and suggesting how they can find out where in the grief process the mourner is stuck. It can also be used to develop an offer of help to people whose welfare is at stake if they do not receive professional assistance. A very moving book, written in plain language, Healing Pain is addressed to everybody who wishes to understand the feelings of grief at a deeper level.