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.

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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.

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LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• List four guidelines for effective use of technology to enhance personalism in telehealth;

• Identify distinct advantages of online therapy with special relevance to the bereaved;

• Distinguish between states of therapeutic presence and absence, on the part of both client and therapist; and

• Describe procedures for Analogical Listening to the somatic felt sense of a client’s grief, in a way that promotes its articulation and evolution.

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Note:  Completion of this program (total 3-hour activity, including approximately 2-hour recorded webinar and 1-hour reflection) and return of the Responsive Journal satisfies 1 credit for Practicum Session required for Certification in Grief Therapy as Meaning Reconstruction or Certification in Grief Therapy for Non-Death Losses.

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PROGRAM CONTENT

This program contains the following video segments:

1. Technical Tips for An Existential Encounter (31 mins)

2. The Surprising Intimacy of Telehealth World (32 mins)

3. Presence, Process and Procedure (40 mins)

4. An Invitation to Depth: Analogical Listening (45 mins)

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COURSE PACK CONTAINS...

• PDF of all slides included in the presentation;

• Clinician’s Toolbox with technical tips for increasing client engagement and addressing therapeutic goals;

• Detailed instructions for the use of Analogical Listening to access somatic and emotional processing of loss; and​

• The Responsive Journal that, upon completion and return, confers 1 credit of Practicum Session leading to Certification in Grief Therapy as Meaning Reconstruction or Certification in Grief Therapy for Non-Death Losses.