You’ve moved your therapy online, but have you sacrificed the depth and nuance of in-person practice, substituting psychoeducation, simple support and advice for the deeper, more emotion-focused work that grieving clients commonly require? In this module, we explore the surprising benefits of online therapy for supporting evocative experiential interventions in grief therapy and demonstrate their use in video recordings of specific creative techniques. Beginning with a conceptualization of grieving as a process of reaffirming or reconstructing a world of meaning that has been challenged by loss, we emphasize the practice of presence as the essential precondition to “going deep,” whether we encounter our clients in our offices or on a screen. Working with both the choreography and staging of online therapy and the cultivation of mindfulness on the part of both therapist and client, we will consider how to construct a holding environment or secure base for accessing, symbolizing, voicing and transforming emotionally resonant meanings of mourning that foster felt shifts in how clients hold their grief, and how their grief holds them.
At a time when humanity is swimming in a sea of loss, whether arising from bereavement or the collateral damage to once secure roles and resources resulting from the pandemic, developing deeper competencies in working with grief is essential to therapists of all theoretical orientations. This module is designed to offer practical guidelines and to model interventions that support this goal.
