Cogniti ve Therapy and Research, Vol. 23, No. 6, 1999, pp. 605-624 Verbal-Autonomic Dissociation and Adaptation to Midlife Conjugal Loss: A Follow-Up at 25 Months George A. Bonanno, 1,4 Hansjorg Znoj, 2 Hoorie I. Siddique, 1 and Mardi J. Horowitz 3 Indi viduals who fail to ``work through’’ the emotional signi®cance of a loss have traditionally been assumed to suffer increased grief. Bonanno et al. (1995) tested this assumption by operationally de®ning emotional avoidance as a verbal-autonomic response dissociation, or the reduced experience of negati ve emotion coupled with relati vely high levels of autonomic responsivity. In contrast to the traditional assump- tion, indi viduals who at 6 months had shown verbal-autonomic dissociation had the mildest grief course through 14 months. Verbal-autonomic dissociation was linked to initially high levels of somatic symptoms, but to low somatic symptoms at 14 months. In the current in vestigation, we collected follow-up data on the same partici- pants through 25 months postloss and assessed additional health-related variables. Verbal-autonomic dissociation was again linked to the mildest grief course with no evidence of delayed grief. This predicti ve relationship remained signi®cant e ven when initial levels of grief were controlled. Further, no e vidence was found for enduring or delayed health dif®culties in association with verbal-autonomic dissociation. Impli- cations for future bereavement research are discussed. KEY WORDS: dissociation; loss; grief; bereavement. The death of a spouse ranks among the most stressful events a person might endure (Holmes & Rahe, 1967). It has been widely assumed that successful recovery from conjugal loss requires a period of ``grief work’’Ða prolonged review and expression of the emotional meanings of the loss (W. Stroebe & Stroebe, 1991). This assumption was evident both in early psychological theories of bereavement, which espoused the deinvestment in the lost person through a process of emotional catharsis (Freud, 1917/1957; Lindemann, 1944), and also in more recent theories, 1 Department of Psychology, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC. 2 Department of Psychology, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland. 3 Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, San Franciso, California. 4 Correspondence should be addressed to George A. Bonanno, Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, Box 218, 525 West 120th Street, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027; e-mail: gab38@columbia.edu 605 0147-5916/99/1200-0605$1 6.00/0 Ó 1999 Plenum Publishing Corporation