Short-term family therapy and pathological grief resolution with children and adolescents

This paper describes the use of short-term family therapy as a new modality for resolution of pathological grief with young children and adolescents. These families' experience with other modalities of therapy had been disappointing. The unusual cohesiveness of the family was evidenced by resistance to actual or threatened separation. Such activities as entering individual therapy or going to school, camp, boarding school, or residential treatment wer hard to accomplish because of the difficulty with earlier grieving processes and the associated failure of decathexis of the lost person.