Grief counseling involves helping people work through their normal grief in order to achieve a healthy completion of the tasks of mourning within a reasonable time frame. In general, counseling focuses more on solving “normal” problems.
Grief therapy uses specialized techniques to help people with complicated grief reactions, for example when the grief reactions are caused through emotional dependence or ambivalence in the relationship between the deceased and the person who is left behind. Therapy considers the people’s experience and how they process these experiences through their thoughts and emotions. It goes usually deeper than counseling.