astating trauma whose effects never fully resolve. In part, these differences can be attributed to the individual's level of self-esteem and degree of attachment to the loved one. A person whose entire self was invested in another can find the grief process more difficult than one whose life was balanced prior to the loss. Even normal grief is extremely painful, but as the person proceeds through the stages of grief, the burden of pain and trauma gradually lessens, until one day the griever feels okay again, and then within a time feels normal again; then life goes on.
Some individuals go through a grief process that is pathological, however. Volkan (231) describes the normal grief process as "'nature's exercise' in loss and restitution" but characterizes people whose grief becomes pathological as being "caught in this struggle of loss and restitution without coming to a solution" or as having "achieved restitution which is symptomatic." While normal grief eventually reaches an end, pathological grief does not. A study of normal bereavement by Clayton et al. found that 98% of the bereaved did not seek psychiatric assistance, and of that 98%, improvement began in 81% of them
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