EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS
Explanations of Bereavement, Grief, and Trauma:
The Misuse of Both Mental
and Foundational Terms
Bernard Guerin
University of Waikato
Grief and trauma are hurting and disruptive.
Unfortunately, they seem to be more prevalent
in these days of mass refugee migrations arising
from both weapons of mass destruction and the
enormous mass of weapons of smaller destruc-
tion. In many parts of the world, weapons such
as guns are becoming commonplace or normal,
as is their use. More and more people are being
killed suddenly, even if not unexpectedly, by these
easy methods of killing. How this affects those
living around the persons killed needs to be in-
vestigated, especially those close or intimate with
the person killed. Following this, interventions
need to be explored for helping those people
with whatever help they require, although we
should not automatically assume we know what
that help will be.
When looking at what has been written about
grief, bereavement and trauma, there is a large
amount of very abstract language used, most
seemingly aimed at influencing the listener rather
than describing or explaining what events are
happening. The language surrounding the inter-
ventions is also abstract and one doubts that the
efficacy of the interventions has been properly
demonstrated yet. As someone who is interested
in studying how and when people use different
sorts of explanations—the natural history of ex-
plaining—such a plethora of abstract language
use is very revealing. One of the major meta-
phors for grief, bereavement and trauma is that
of catharsis, that “something” needs to be “let
out” or “released” before a treatment is success-
Correspondence to: Bernard Guerin, Department of Psy-
chology, University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton,
New Zealand. E-mail: bguerin@waikato.ac.nz
2001, 2, xx - xx NUMBER 2 (WINTER 2001) 1
ful: the grief needs to be “worked through” or
the trauma “expressed” (Guerin, 2001a).
Through none of this paper am I doubting
that very important, strong and profound events
are happening to those “going through” such
cathartic processes. Someone who has their hus-
band shot and killed with no immediate warning
of danger obviously is going to be involved in
some very unusual (for them) events and have to
make big changes to their life, and surviving such
an event will be an important and profound
marker for the rest of that person’s life. What I
will be dubious about through this paper, how-
ever, are the many explanations and suggestions
for intervention given for what to do when these
sorts of sudden and deadly events happen. I am
looking here only at the language used to talk
about trauma, bereavement and grief, not the
events themselves. My model here is the work
of Arthur Bentley, and in particular, his examina-
tion of the language used in 25 psychologies
(Bentley, 1935).
It might not seem worthwhile spending time
on this, since the interventions are much more
important to develop, but the explanations tend
to dictate what interventions are made for people
in such grief and trauma, and this has caused
problems I believe. For example, there is some
newer evidence that the most common forms
of therapy for trauma victims, primary group
talking based on a catharsis metaphor, might ac-
tually make people worse in some circumstances
(Bracken, 2001; Bracken, Giller & Summerfield,
1995, 1997; Raphael & Wilson, 2000;
Summerfield, 1999; Watters, 2001). Many fire-
1
 2 Bernard Guerin
fighters do not have problems with trauma from
what they see but report becoming more trau-
matized when put through compulsory group
therapy sessions that emphasise that they must
talk about what they saw and did before they
can get “better”. Also, in my own research with
Somali refugees, many have reported that their
main problems, and the source of their depres-
sive symptoms, come from events in their im-
mediate surroundings rather than events that hap-
pened to them during the civil war, while fleeing
or when living in refugee camps. Those events
were profound and have certainly made an im-
pact, but their energies are spent primarily on try-
ing to get family members found and reunited,
and trying to adjust to very new circumstances.
Even if some have recurring images of the death
and injuries they have witnessed, their primary
depressive symptoms are related to immediate
problems rather than old “trauma” ones on the
whole. From the view of professionals, how-
ever, the emphasis is on PTSD and getting a la-
bel attached.
Explanations, Rhetoric, and Respectable
Explanations
My argument is going to be that the theories
and explanations of bereavement, trauma and
grief have all been misplaced as to what needs
explaining and where to look for the substance
of those explanations. Some of the more theo-
retical notions involving “catharsis” have been
dealt with elsewhere in detail, and I will not re-
peat much of that material (Guerin, 2001a).
Dillenburger and Keenan (1994) have also sum-
marized some of the current ideas about be-
reavement and grief but without pointing to the
exact problems with those theories, just dissatis-
faction.
The main thrust of what I will be arguing is
that the theories are either too abstract—and there
are useful rhetorical functions of abstract theo-
ries for authors who use them—or just pick out
one or two “causes” from a context or field and
ignore the contextual conditions that allow those
“causes” to be there and have an effect in the
first place. Some examples from the current theo-
ries have already been given by Dillenburger and
Keenan (1994) and I will make a few comments
on those examples rather than ones from the refu-
gee/war victims literature. As a reminder, I am
not commenting here on the data from these
studies but the language and how the language
encompasses the “explanations” that are put for-
ward.
“…there seems to be a relationship between the cause
of death and the behaviour of the bereaved” (p. 2). State-
ments such as this seem straightforward but are
loaded with ambiguities. First note the hedging
with “seems to be”; hedging allows the avoid-
ance of consequences for what is said (Bavelas,
Black, Chovil & Mullett, 1990; Fraser, 1980;
Hewitt & Stokes, 1975; Holmes, 1990). Second,
notice the ambiguous and abstract use of “rela-
tionship” here, purportedly used in a standard
methodological sense. While in the most abstract
sense we cannot but agree that there “might be”
a relationship between the two, we are not helped
by this usage. It is the same usage as contained in
the fictitious: “There is a strong relationship be-
tween getting married and becoming a bereaved
widow”. True, but not helpful except in so far
as we can influence readers to believe that we are
experts.
“Death in these circumstances can not only lead to
prolonged grief reactions…” (p.2). Once again we
have an ambiguous word, “lead”, which has nei-
ther a direct implication of primary cause nor is
very far from saying, “has a relationship to”.
Clearly also, there need to be a multitude of con-
ditions in place before death, even in the circum-
stances being talked about, leads to prolonged
grief reactions. Singling death out as the main
focus (albeit with “circumstances” thrown in for
good measure) does not encompass what is go-
ing on in such situations. What we realize from
this is that we still need all the details of what is
going on, and broad generalisations about con-
ditions, and that focusing on a few salient fea-
tures does not help us to understand what events
take place. It would even be slightly better to
write, “In these circumstances, a death can not
only lead to prolonged grief reactions…” but
even this can only be useful if “these circum-
stances” are observed in some way and described.
As it stands, it does not really help anyone but
pretends to knowledge.
 Explanations of Bereavement, Grief, and Trauma
The explanatory ambiguities in these literatures
can also be seen in the outline of the effects of
marital quality on bereavement. On the one hand,
some theories suggest that better marriages would
lead to better bereavement outcomes; but on the
other hand, other theories suggest, quite reason-
ably, that those with poorer marital quality would
adjust better after the spouse’s death. This could
be interpreted as an example of scientific excel-
lence, that we can derive opposing theoretical
predictions and then test them and falsify one or
both.
Looking at this from another position, how-
ever, and one I will outline more later on, the
theoretical opposition can be seen as an example
of two lousy theories. Neither theory is close
enough to what events are actually going on to
say anything sensible, and the terms that are used
in both theories are too abstract in any event. The
abstractness belies how far we are from our data.
It is like starting to understand how a television
works by sitting in the lounge room and musing
over whether the television works from gasses in
the air or from something passed up through the
floorboards. These make nice opposing predic-
tions and we can then test them to find out if
one or both are falsifiable. On the other hand,
we could walk over and have a decent look at
the television and what is going on. That is, our
theoretical television studies need to be preceded
by intensive naturalistic studies of televisions and
what makes them work, just as theoretical phys-
ics had many centuries of people observing and
studying close up and intensively how the events
occur. I will come back to this point about in-
tensive studies later, when examining the
behaviour analysis explanation in the same way
as I am doing here for the other ideas and theo-
ries.
With regard to the metaphors and explana-
tions based on theories of “catharsis”, the sum-
mary of previous theories in psychology is re-
plete with examples (Guerin, 2001a). We read
that unhappy marriages “drain energies from the
spouse”, that there must be “grief work”, even
to the point of postulating “anticipatory grief ”,
and that there can be “emotional preparation”.
In all, the general flavour, also criticized by
Dillenburger and Keenan (1994), is one of hav-
3
ing to go “through” a bereavement in which there
are primarily “internal” changes made in response
to an external situation. One of the problems
has been finding ways to conceptualize those “in-
ternal” changes as being external (Guerin, 2001b).
As we will see later, the hard work is still to be
done and social anthropologists are way ahead
of behaviour analysts and psychologists on this.
In summary, the language used when talking
about bereavement, trauma and grief is derived
from common talk about those topics. I have
no problems with common talk but with its
unexamined extrapolation to research. Moreover,
the details of what is naturally occurring in such
events have not been observed and researched
properly. The explanations given then become
the province of the words “can”, “probably”,
“might be”, “seems likely”, “a possible reason
for this”, and “one possibility is that”. Once you
begin analysing the language use of both every-
day and “scientific” explanations, these sorts of
verbal strategies become noticeable (Bentley,
1935).
Self-Reports As Observations
The data reported by Dillenburger and
Keenan (1994) are certainly interesting and sug-
gestive, and are not extraordinarily different from
other data collected within psychology. I have
two main problems with the data, however, but
I would like these to be seen in the broader con-
text of psychological methodology rather than
as unique criticisms of Dillenburger and Keenan
(1994).
The first problem is the use of samples taken
from self-help groups. Sampling from such
groups is certainly biased towards a self-selec-
tion based on criteria of which we have no
knowledge (cf. Davison, Pennebaker &
Dickerson, 2000). It is clear that only some people
will have joined into self-help groups, but we have
no observations to find out what those criteria
might be. Without such observations, we could
easily make contradictory arguments, that they are:
the ones who need help most or do not need
help most; the ones who were most affected or
the ones who were least affected. Without know-
ing the exact biases, I would prefer not to specu-
 4 Bernard Guerin
late, in line with what was written easier about
contradictory hypotheses. We should not make
the common leap into acquiescence that because
we do not know the bias we can pretend it is not
there.
The second problem is that of using self-re-
port measures as a substitute for other measures
that directly observe what is being asked about.
There has been much discussion of self-reports
in the psychology literature, mostly again with
acquiescence to the status quo because the issues
are unresolved. From a behaviour analysis point
of view, however, I argue that self-reports are
certainly real but not necessary true with respect
to what is being talked about. Social contingen-
cies from audiences can shape people to say al-
most anything and without further measures of
those audiences, that is, observations of the talk-
ing in context, we have no way of deciding for
whom the self-reports have been shaped. For
example, talking about how happy your marriage
was prior to your husband’s death has multiple
potential past and present audiences, and has huge
impacts in terms of social consequences (although
we do not know what these are because of a
lack of intensive observations). Talking about
how happy your marriage was is also interesting
in terms of social consequences because there is
little in the way of monitorability; that is, just like
mentalistic language, no one can really check up
on what is said and provide contingency conse-
quences.
We can see these two methodological prob-
lems in two ways. First, they can be seen as a
result of the type of data with which we are deal-
ing. We cannot be in contact with the partici-
pants before and after the death of their spouses
to get baseline data, so we therefore need to just
get self-reports after the event of what happened.
We also have practical problems in recruiting
people for studies such as these so we go to some
available gate-keeping organizations such as self-
help groups. In the normal methodological ways
of psychology, these ways of getting around the
problems are quite common, perhaps even the
norm.
But we can see these problems, not limited to
this study alone of course, in quite another way.
If we have to rely on self-reports and gate-keep-
ing organizations because of the methodological
reasons given then we can alternatively question
whether this is the way we should be researching
this issue at all. We could study trees only by their
leaves and the shadows they make but that would
seem ludicrous; better surely to make naturalistic
observations and interact informally with trees
(poking, prodding, twisting, growing) than re-
strict ourselves. Likewise, if we have found our-
selves in a position in which we have to put up
with limitations (selective samples and self-re-
ports) in order to answer the research questions
we have posed, I suggest another strategy is to
go back to the drawing board and rethink the
questions we are asking, and critically examine
the actual basis for our logic in coming up with
those questions.
The questions I more and more ask myself
are these: how far away from the participants
am I, and how much time do I spend with my
participants? My main source of inspiration for
this comes from the social anthropologists and
their work in social behaviours, but one can also
see that a big difference between Darwin and his
predecessors was the amount of time and close-
ness he put into studying what he was trying to
talk about (de Beer, 1963; George, 1982). Per-
haps we need to spend more time with our par-
ticipants before testing abstract theories.
To give an example, if we wished to look at
(abstract) ideas about beliefs in witchcraft and
community structure, and we wished to stay put
in our cities, then we could obtain questionnaires
to measure both these factors and send them to
colleagues in Africa to give out. To be sure, this
would then result no doubt in the same prob-
lems of self-reported answers and some sort of
selection bias as to how our colleagues in far off
places gave out those questionnaires. In psychol-
ogy, we have learned to accept (acquiesce to)
those biases without realizing how they arise from
the abstract theorizing itself.
The alternative strategy is to give up the very
abstract theories that allow us to pose questions
that (we imagine) can be answered in this way,
and embrace our subject matter more closely. The
point I have learned from Darwin and from so-
cial anthropologists is that we need to spend more
time with our participants, look at the details, in-
 Explanations of Bereavement, Grief, and Trauma
teract with the details, and talk in less abstract
terms (see my comments at the start). In terms
of the witchcraft example, Evans-Pritchard
spend some years working with communities
before he felt close enough to the material to
present descriptions and details (Evans-Pritchard,
1937). He, too, on the basis of this material, de-
bunked almost all theories of religion and witch-
craft as too abstract to be of any use except
propagating further theories and academic ca-
reers (Guerin, 1998; Evans-Prichard, 1965).
The upshot is that compared to social anthro-
pologists, psychologists spend very little time with
their subject matter. Part of this might be a situ-
ational laziness due to the acceptance of our work
in psychology journals without concrete details
and time investment, and part might be due to
an unacknowledged (false) assumption that be-
cause we are dealing with people we can sec-
ond-guess the factors involved. It is also, I be-
lieve, partly due to the acquiescence to abstract
theorizing in psychology. As illustrated at the start
of this paper, abstract talk can be hedged and
anything made out of it. Such conversational
strategies are fine in real life but not for research.
Abstract ideas are so hedgable that we can bend
any abstract data collection to fit, even with inbuilt
methodological problems.
Notice that when I mention spending more
time with participants, this can also help us with
what I have suggested is the real problem with
self-report data. It is not that self-reports merely
substitute for observing “real” behaviour: much
of our “real” behaviour is totally about talking
and self-reports (Guerin, 1997a) and in this way,
observing and taping conversations and self-re-
ports is observing real behaviour—the talking is
the real action. What more intensive studies need,
however, is to observe the natural consequences
for such talking, not the correspondence to “true”
or “real” actions (Guerin, 1997b). What we need
more detailed observations of are the audiences
and the audience consequences of talking in dif-
ferent ways; that is the major problem with self-
reports I have argued, not a lack of correspon-
dence to the “truth”. Self-reports are not just a
poor substitute for “real” measures, they are real
and important events in themselves and need to
5
be studied in the context of settings, behaviours
and consequences (Guerin, 1997a).
Extinction and Reinforcement as
Explanations
Unfortunately, on this basis, I do not think
that the explanation in terms of extinction helps
us either (Dillenburger & Keenan, 1994). There
are two main problems I see here: extinction
under complex contingencies does not necessar-
ily function anything like it does under simple
contingencies; and second, that if we do not
observe and determine the reinforcers and pun-
ishers in any situation first, then appealing to
behavioural terms such as reinforcement, shap-
ing, extinction, or reinforcement schedules is use-
less and no better or worse than appealing to
mentalistic terms and pseudo-explanations.
Multiple contingencies and extinction. My argument
here is that whereas the extinction procedures are
concrete and material in terms of pigeon peck-
ing and rats pushing bars, in terms of the wid-
ows of political violence we have no idea what
the procedures mean. They are therefore ab-
stract and obscurist. In order to even begin do-
ing a behaviour analysis of such situations, we
need to be thinking in terms of multiple contin-
gencies rather than any sort of simple contingency.
The problem is that extinction under a Matching
Law approach is very different to under a simple
contingency. The life of Mrs Smith with Mr
Smith is not like a simple reinforcement proce-
dure such that when Mr Smith dies, Mrs Smith
loses a single reinforcer and goes into a period
of extinction burst followed by lack of activity.
Even a simple concurrent schedule would not
show an extinction burst but a rapid increase in
activity on the other key if one key were stopped
or its rate of reinforcement decreased. So one
would only expect extinction bursts and decrease
in activity if Mrs Smith had never done anything
in her life apart from activities reinforced directly
by Mr Smith.
Now I am not suggesting that we substitute a
Matching Law explanation for bereavement and
grief, but rather, following the last section of this
paper, to rethink radically the entire
conceptualization of the research questions and
 6 Bernard Guerin
methodologies. My researching suggests that
most human activities are not maintained by any
sort of simple reinforcement or punishment, but
rely heavily upon shaping with generalized social
contingencies which have very different proper-
ties to any sort of simple schedule (Guerin, 1994,
1997a, 2001a, b). For example, satiation under
generalized contingencies simply does not work
in the way found for simple or singular contin-
gencies. I am suggesting the same thing for ex-
tinction and spontaneous recovery; I do not know
how exactly they do function in complex contin-
gencies but it is very unlikely they will show the
same properties as found for simple or singular
contingencies. So extinction and spontaneous
recovery are simply out of place in explaining
events such as bereavement.
Observing extinction and reinforcement. The points
just made are part and parcel of the second prob-
lem: that we simply do not know what reinforces
or punishes behaviour in everyday life. All I am
sure about is that they are nothing like the simple
reinforcers and punishers studied in the experi-
mental analysis of behaviour at present. They
figure large in the talk of behaviour analysts, how-
ever, and usually go well beyond the situations
used in the experimental analysis of behaviour.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, saying that
people follow religious practices because they are
reinforced, as was written by a well-known
behaviour analyst, is no better or worse than say-
ing that they are based on innate needs or urges
(Guerin, 1998). We do not have the details in any
of these cases so none is better or worse.
Consider this criticism by Dillenburger and
Keenan of traditional theories of psychology:
“…concrete observations are transformed into abstract
entities which are then reified and used to explain behaviour”
(p. 6). My argument is that in the context of
bereavement and grief, and social life in general,
what is observed is also abstracted and reified
when behaviour analysts typically talk about and
“explain” events in terms of reinforcement, pun-
ishment and extinction. Until we know the rein-
forcers, we cannot use extinction from stopping
those reinforcers as any sort of explanation. It
sounds like we are basing what is said upon solid
scientific facts presented in JEAB, but JEAB ex-
planations identify experimentally the reinforcers
before talking about extinction procedures. For
example, it is taken for granted that self-reports
of a happier marriage is a substitute measure of
greater rates of mutual reinforcement between
the spouses, but this is not at all clear: “Widows
who reported happiness in their marriage, i.e.,
who had enjoyed high levels of mutual reinforce-
ment” (p. 9). We must remember that what is
“reported” has a number of audiences and that
high levels of reinforcement does not indicate
happiness, nor does the reverse. It is too easy to
slip into these sorts of acquiescing explanations,
and the authors are not alone in this.
This is why I do not think the extinction ex-
planation is of much use, despite it being ex-
tremely interesting. We do not know what has
been extinguished nor what reinforcement has
been stopped and the authors are being led into
an explanation that merely resembles EAB. As
mentioned earlier in the paper, this theoretical
outline of the extinction hypothesis becomes full
of cans, mays, mights and “these findings are useful in
understanding…”
The link can also now be seen to earlier parts
of this paper: that in order to find out, as good
behaviour analysts should do first, what the rein-
forcers and punishers are in the situation, we need
to change radically the methods that we use.
Behaviour analysis and psychology more gener-
ally need to embrace the more intensive research
methods used elsewhere in the social sciences
(Guerin, 2001a, b). This is not the way they view
themselves, but it is a change I believe is neces-
sary. My knowledge of behaviour analysts would
suggest that what they have been envisaging is a
sort of rough extrapolation of the JEAB meth-
ods into everyday life to produce a science of
everyday social behaviour ( (following Skinner,
1953, no doubt). But just because those meth-
ods and explanations have worked well in the
experimental analysis of behaviour in JEAB does
not guarantee success or usefulness in the study
of everyday life.
The experimental analysis of behaviour and
social behaviour
Where does this leave the study of everyday
social behaviour? I do not have all the answers
 Explanations of Bereavement, Grief, and Trauma
but am convinced about several strategies. I have
argued elsewhere (Guerin, 2002) that we need to
begin thinking about the JEAB-type studies of
the experimental analysis of behaviour (EAB) as
the basis or foundation for human behaviour but
realize that there is no guarantee that the proper-
ties found, or terms used, will be the same when
we study gross human behaviour. One can think
of this in this way: molecular physics is to car-
pentry as the EAB is to the study of gross hu-
man social behaviour. Molecules have proper-
ties, such as consisting mostly of empty space
and revolving fast, but it is no use to consider
these properties when doing carpentry. Think-
ing about your wood as mostly empty space and
as moving very, very fast only leads to giddiness
and ennui for a carpenter. Occasionally, molecu-
lar physics does help a carpenter, perhaps by in-
venting a new and unobvious type of wood-
glue, but on the whole it does not help in every-
day carpentry.
Instead of study molecular physics fulltime,
carpenters could better spend their time work-
ing intensively and closely with wood: experiment-
ing, cutting, interacting and prodding wood. I
am suggesting that social scientists, like carpen-
ters, are also well-advised to spend a lot of time
with their raw materials before trying to pull out
the important and unimportant variables to look
at in research. And carpenters certainly will not
get their best ideas studying molecular physics.
We also do not have to start this from scratch;
methodologies for intensive studies with human
participants are well-developed in other social
sciences and behaviour analysts and psychologists
would be foolish to ignore them. We would
also be foolish to ignore the detailed data of so-
cial anthropologists on social behaviour, and not
treat it superficially as behaviour analysts have.
What this means is that the main results that
have come from 65 years of EAB are not wasted
or incorrect, just because we cannot use them or
their main properties in studying everyday hu-
man behaviour. I am not arguing that the EAB
is false or misguided. What I am arguing is that
the relationships between events involving hu-
mans are certainly built from foundations that
involve the main terms of the EAB, but that we
should not expect to be able to use those terms
7
in explaining everyday human behaviour. That
to me would be like expecting to explain why
someone crosses a road in terms of synapses
because we happen to know that there are syn-
apses in the person’s brain. Having synapses cer-
tainly forms part of the foundations for some-
one running across a road, but we should not
expect an explanation purely in those terms.
Muscles also form a foundational context for
running across a road but do not need to figure
in an explanation or description.
This is why I am dubious about “explaining”
bereavement in terms borrowed from the EAB:
extinction, spontaneous recovery and resistance
to extinction. There is a plausible form to the
explanations, but I am sure I could also make a
plausible explanation connecting synapses with
road-crossing.
I am suggesting instead that we learn to let go
of the main EAB terms, embrace methodolo-
gies that have led other social scientists to an enor-
mous bank of useful details about everyday hu-
man behaviour, invent new terms that relate closer
to the properties of everyday life that we ob-
serve in detail, and above all, spend much more
time with our subject matter—people—before
we think about explaining what we have found.
Most of these point were actually been made by
Skinner (, 1950, 1985), but he and his followers
(Skinner, 1953, 1957) forgot to apply the points
to themselves when they branched out in the realm
of everyday life.
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