Children’s Grief: Retelling the Death Story As An Active Agent

Traditional theories of childhood grief have largely relied on stage-based developmental frameworks, often linking children’s understanding of death to age-related cognitive capacities.  Such approaches may imply that children grieve in predictable, normative ways, thereby overlooking the child’s individuality, relational context, and lived experience.  This module challenges these assumptions by introducing a Transactional Developmental Model of […]

Aging, Ageism, and Care: Exploring the Needs of Families and Elders

We are living in a time when people are living longer, but they are also living longer with complex health issues, care needs, and greater dependence on the health care system and families.  While the increase in longevity is something that allows for elders to be a part of the lives of several generations that […]

Navigating Ambiguous Loss and the Maze of Dementia

The impact of dementia is being felt worldwide at this time, with the number of individuals being diagnosed with some form of this debilitating condition expected to continue to rise exponentially over the next generation.  While the focus tends to be on those who are directly affected, dementia care has a profound impact on families, […]

Widow’s Fire: Embodied Grief & Longing after Sexual Loss

Young widows, who are typically defined as being 50 years old or younger, confront many unique complexities that warrant attention.  Much of the clinical literature about widowhood is derived from older widows; it does not fully capture the experiences of young widows, who usually face an untimely and traumatic loss.  In this module, we will […]

Titrating Trauma, Rescuing Relationship: Clinical Strategies for Addressing Tragic Death

When a significant person dies by suicide, homicide, overdose or fatal accident, mourners often need more than the informal support systems in their lives can provide, calling for specialist intervention.  And yet many professionals struggle to meet the daunting challenges that such violent and unnatural deaths pose, not only to the survivors but also to […]

Writing for Wellbeing

Grief is widely recognised as one of the most challenging and emotionally painful experiences we may face. Such an intense experience calls for a wide and varied range of methods that allow therapists, counselors, psychologists and social workers to support the individual needs of their clients. This module introduces Writing for Wellbeing (WFW) as one […]

Re-composing the Self & System: Composition Work in the Wake of Loss

As the bereaved struggle to find new meaning and re-construct their lives following loss, they can benefit from exploring how this major life transition shifted or shattered their personal and relational identity, and from projecting a new configuration of a changed self in a similarly reconfigured family and social system. This module introduces Composition Work, a […]

Writing Through Bereavement

Although retelling the “event story” of the death in an atmosphere of responsive witnessing represents a core component of Meaning Reconstruction, it is only one of a great variety of narrative procedures that can be used by grief therapists.  In this workshop we explore the possible role of a sample of creative techniques in which […]

Transcending Taboos: Rewriting the Self in Grief

While sadness is readily sanctioned in bereavement, other less comfortable emotions such as anger, regret, relief, guilt, joy, and desire are frequently considered taboos by those facing loss.  Because research shows that a much larger pallet of feelings is common in those who are grieving, this module uses writing techniques to enlarge the space for […]

Online But in Depth

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 […]