This training is intended for professionals who are seeking creative and imaginative skill development in their bereavement interventions with suicide loss survivors. As no artistic talent is presumed on the part of the client or therapist, this course will be helpful for a broad range of mental health professionals, pastoral counselors and nurses, as well as expressive arts therapists.
This didactic, experiential workshop introduces collage as a medium for reassembling life after suicide loss. Collage is a therapy of the imagination, and of particular value in helping people transform and re-envision their lives. Visual artworks are created from a variety of art materials with a focus on magazine words, images and ephemera, which are cut, altered, arranged and attached to paper or cardboard. The unspeakable, fragmented elements of trauma arising from the suicide and its associated non-death losses are grounded in the experience of selecting, sorting, tearing, snipping, placing, taping and gluing imagery together.The transformation of bits and pieces into new forms is empowering and freeing, and allows for new embodied discoveries.
Art therapy based theory and practices are woven together with grief and bereavement theory. Evidence suggests that the difficult work of meaning reconstruction is a central part of the healing process for suicide loss survivors, who experience a shattering of their assumptive world. The essential elements of the creative process, deconstruction and reconstruction in service to healing, lend themselves to Neimeyer’s model of Meaning Reconstruction, with an exploration of the event story, back story and personal story as well as the clinical tenets of bracing, facing and pacing. Worden’s Task Model of Bereavement and Rynearson’s Restorative Retelling Model are further explored through traumatic loss case studies that include collage images created over a 20-year period by the presenting faculty in response to the suicide of her seventeen-year-old daughter.
Collage is a creative act of inquiry, a means to intertwined and layered knowledge. Constructing images promotes ways of knowing, shaping and storying grief and its impact on our assumptive world, so the experience does not remain senseless, silenced, unseen, immovable or untouchable. Learners will create their own collages in response to a death or non-death in their lives and explore an internal landscape non-verbally as a way to piece together personal or professional experiences of loss. We will leave with an experience of collage as a springboard to verbal inquiry, the place where abstract ideas come to life and yield sudden insights.
