Describes brief, focused therapy with a traumatized 12-yr-old girl whose symptoms in response to her mother’s suicide served to stabilize & fixate the bereaved family so that the loss of the mother could be avoided & denied. Interventions were developed to allow the family to start grieving normally. Within a systems framework based on integrating cathexis material with the racket system, the approaches included transactional analysis, gestalt, behavioural techniques & bereavement counselling.