Our grief guides are at war. The established grief industry is under attack. The challengers, who label their work the “New Science of Bereavement,” use empirical studies to demolish the current paradigm’s sacred cows-including the well-known stages, phases, and tasks of grieving. Even the iconic Kübler-Ross is under attack. This challenge could have a significant impact on how we grieve. Each year, about 2.5 million people die in the United States leaving behind 10 million new grievers. According to the empiricists, 8.5 million of these grievers will spontaneously recover from grief: they will not need help. The remaining 1.5 million will experience “complicated” grief, which may require medications prescribed by psychiatrists, not grief counselors. Consequently, there is no need for the thriving grief industry that mushroomed over the last forty years. In essence, the challengers are advocating a do-nothing (or “laissez faire”) approach to grief for most bereavers.

There are two problems with this argument. First, the empirical data is too weak to lead to grand generalizations: grief is just too multi-dimensional and unruly. Second, the empiricists could be right when they claim that today’s counselors do not shorten the grief cycle, but they erroneously conclude that “grief work” is not necessary. Let me explain.

“Stages and phases” describe grief well, but they do not tell us how to perform our grief work or how to move from one stage to the next. Except for Freud, whose impossible prescription was to break all libidinal ties with the deceased, no one is spelling out the details of this grief work. As a result, most counselors take a laissez faire approach when it comes to the actual work of grieving. In this case, the “invisible hand” appears to be the passage of time. Even Worden’s four basic “tasks of mourning” are long-term processes instead of step-by-step tasks. For example, his task “accept the reality of your loss” is certainly not a detailed prescription for grief work. How are we to do it? So, in reality, there is no grief work. Instead, we have a laissez faire approach to grief and therein lies the problem. The challengers simply formalize this approach, which they explicitly espouse for most bereavers.

Because laissez faire does not shorten the grief cycle, it won’t take much of a challenge to demolish the grief industry. If that happens, we will each have to fend for ourselves-an unacceptable outcome. Historically, we’ve always had help with the grieving process. Until recently, most of it was provided by the world’s great religions. Their clergy helped survivors deal with the deep ontological and existential issues that were triggered by death. They offered complete systems of belief that included explanations of death and elaborate descriptions of the afterlife-their antidote for death. To help us grieve effectively, the system of belief must provide absolute certainty, which is hard to achieve in a multi-cultural society with competing religions offering radically different visions of an afterlife. For example, three quarters of Americans believe in heaven but only half believe in hell. Unfortunately, once we start picking and choosing we’re on our own. This lack of certainty may account for the rise of the modern grief industry. The net is that we need grief counselors now more than ever. But we also also need a grief theory that is grounded in grief work. Here’s an example:

After losing my soulmate, Jeri, I read everything I could find on grief theory. I found it lacking. To get over my horrible “grief bursts” (the red-hot pain of young grief) I had to complement grief theory with techniques I improvised on-the-fly. For example, I devised a simple method for getting rid of grief bursts that consisted of three parts: 1) capturing and measuring the daily grief-burst activity, 2) identifying each grief burst and assigning it to a “bucket,” and then 3) dealing with the grief in each bucket. Once I found the source, I could then “zap” the grief burst out of existence. It’s an old trick from my computer software days-just trace the bugs. Once you find the root cause, you fix it and get rid of the bug. I also had to classify and count the bugs. It’s the same with grief bursts. It’s “divide and conquer.”

I was able to improvise a grief-work based solution, while in the midst of the debilitating pain of losing my soulmate. I see no reason for grief theorists not to come up with their own creative prescriptions for measurably reducing grief. If they fail, the empiricists will have won the war; those who grieve will be collateral damage.