Life is Complicated

When someone fails to move normally through the tasks or stages of grief, it is known as complicated grieving. Cook lists five warning signs of complicated grieving. These include avoidance of grief, chronic or prolonged grief, delayed grief caused by previous unresolved loss, inhibited or repressed grief, and psychiatric illness such as clinical depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder (47). In addition, certain conditions indicate a higher risk for complicated grieving. These include a "history of family dysfunction, resulting in a lack of coping skills and/or low self-esteem," inadequate support system, history of multiple losses, psychiatric problems, "psychosomatic illnesses, indicating that the client has a habit of denying intense emotion," a "suffering life script, indicating that the client ... expects continual waves of misfortune in life," drug abuse or addiction, controversial loss, ambiguous losses, problematic relationship with the deceased, and secondary gain by not grieving. (Cook 48)