Goals

Grief Goals 🕊️

Goal 1: Process and Integrate the Loss

Patient Wants:

“I want to be able to process what happened and understand how this loss has affected me.”

Clinical Goal:

Client will increase ability to process and integrate the loss while developing greater understanding of its emotional, cognitive, relational, and behavioral impact.

Clinical Focus:

Support emotional processing, acceptance, meaning-making, and integration of the loss without pathologizing expected grief responses.

Goal 2: Improve Emotional Regulation and Coping

Patient Wants:

“I want to be able to handle the emotions that come with this loss.”

Clinical Goal:

Client will develop and utilize adaptive coping and emotional regulation strategies to manage grief-related distress and maintain daily functioning.

Clinical Focus:

Develop strategies for managing sadness, anger, guilt, anxiety, loneliness, emotional overwhelm, and other grief-related responses.

Goal 3: Rebuild Meaning, Identity, and Daily Life

Patient Wants:

“I want to figure out how to move forward and still feel like myself.”

Clinical Goal:

Client will strengthen sense of identity, meaning, purpose, and engagement in valued areas of life following a significant loss or life transition.

Clinical Focus:

Support adjustment to changes in roles, routines, relationships, identity, and future expectations while maintaining connection to what remains meaningful.

Goal 4: Strengthen Relationships and Support

Patient Wants:

“I want to feel connected to people again and know how to let others support me.”

Clinical Goal:

Client will strengthen healthy social connection and utilize appropriate interpersonal supports while navigating grief-related changes in relationships.

Clinical Focus:

Address isolation, communication, boundaries, support-seeking, relationship changes, and interpersonal needs associated with the loss.

Goal 5: Adapt to the Loss and Support Ongoing Recovery

Patient Wants:

“I want to be able to live my life without feeling like I have to forget what I lost.”

Clinical Goal:

Client will develop an adaptive relationship with the loss that allows continued engagement in life while maintaining meaningful connection to what or who was lost.

Clinical Focus:

Support continued adjustment, future-oriented functioning, values-based living, and integration of the loss into an ongoing sense of self and life narrative.

Grief Goals

• Client will process and adapt to significant loss while developing healthy ways to manage grief-related emotions and distress.
• Patient will increase ability to integrate the loss into their life while maintaining connection to meaningful relationships, roles, activities, and values.
• Client will improve emotional well-being and daily functioning while developing adaptive coping strategies for navigating grief and adjustment.

Clinical Note

Grief treatment goals should be individualized and should not assume that the desired outcome is to “move on” or eliminate grief. Treatment may focus on processing the loss, adapting to change, maintaining meaningful connection, rebuilding functioning, and developing a life that can include grief without being defined by it.