When a client seems to be “frozen” in grief across a period of years or even decades, delicate work with the “back story” of the relationship and complicating dimensions of the continuing bond is often called for.  This video case study examines an adult daughter’s ongoing anguish about her mother’s death, to a level that impairs her ability to function as a partner to her husband and mother to her young children.  Working toward the goal of a relational realignment that would recruit her deceased mother as a resource rather than liability in bearing her grief, Neimeyer demonstrates the process of co-construction of meaning in a single session that frees the client to grieve more adaptively.

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This program begins with a model that orients therapists to the particular focus of grief therapy with bereaved clients, depending on their point of fixation or impasse in processing the loss, as revealed in characteristic symptomatology calling for a specific class of intervention.  Learners will then join Neimeyer in a close process analysis of the session, pausing every few minutes to connect the dots between the client’s presentation, the therapist’s intention, and the choreography of meaning-making that arises from their response to one another.  Learners will leave the session with a more holistic sense of the integration of the roles of metaphor, visualization, body work and chair work in freeing clients from protracted and preoccupying grief, allowing them to re-enter their family system with less complicated bonds to both the living and the dead.

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LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Analyze factors that contribute to prolonged grief disorder in an actual case of grief therapy;

• Discuss the role of imagery and the language of gesture in vividly conjuring and working with embodied grief;

• Witness the use of externalization and chair work in deconstructing earlier “solutions” that have become problems; and 

• Observe the effect of individual therapy on the family system.

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Note:  Completion of this program and return of the Responsive Journal satisfies 1 credit for Case Studies required for Certification in Grief Therapy as Meaning Reconstruction or Certification in Family-Focused Grief Therapy.

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PROGRAM CONTENT

This program contains the following video segments:

1. Finding the Focus:  The Tripartite Model of Meaning Reconstruction (47 mins)

2. On Metaphors and Mourning:  Recruiting Figurative Language of Loss (43 mins)

3. Moving to Depth:  Externalizing the Grief (42 mins)

4. Renegotiating Attachment:  Re-engaging Mother (47 mins)

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COURSE PACK CONTAINS...

• PDF of all slides included in the presentation;

• Instructions for Analogical Listening and Externalizing Conversations; and

• Guidelines for implementation of Chair Work procedures for facilitating imaginal dialogues and attachment realignment with the deceased; and​

• The Responsive Journal that, upon completion and return, confers 1 credit of Case Studies leading to Certification in Grief Therapy as Meaning Reconstruction or Certification in Family-Focused Grief Therapy.