The most useful frame for what happens in healthy long-term grief is not resolution or recovery but integration — the process of making loss part of the self rather than a foreign body lodged in it. Integration does not mean the loss no longer hurts; it means the hurt has found a place within a life that is still being lived. This domain examines what integration involves, how it is supported, and what distinguishes it from the suppression that can look like it from the outside.
Each step builds on the last.