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 […]

Constructing Relational Resilience

How do couples support each other when they are both simultaneously grieving the loss of a child?  Grief can create either connection or isolation in couple relationships, as parents cope with the gravity of their own tragedy while also bearing witness to their partner’s suffering and pain.  A research-based systemic perspective on bereaved couples’ coregulatory […]

Transformed by Loss: Art Therapy Self-Portraits & the Redefined Self

This module, rooted in art therapy theory and Neimeyer’s Meaning Reconstruction theory, introduces the use of self-portraiture with grieving clients.  After a significant loss, the grievers often experience an altered sense of self and the world, and need to reconstruct a cohesive life narrative that is inclusive of their pre-loss and post-loss identities.  The creation […]

On the Edge

Major loss, especially of key attachment figures in our lives, can shatter a world of meaning anchored in that relationship, and leave survivors struggling to make sense of the loss and their lives in its aftermath.  When such losses occur violently and traumatically, they can further undermine core constructs of predictability, benevolence, and control, greatly […]

Impact of Suicide

The loss of a loved one to suicide can be devastating, and healing sometimes requires the support of a skilled mental health clinician.  In this two-module series, a grief therapist who specializes in working with suicide loss survivors and a mother who lost her young adult son to suicide will together describe their journey through […]

Holding onto Grief

You’ve spent years offering support to bereaved people, helping them express their grief, manage waves of disruptive emotion, process the loss, and pursue a changed life and renewed bond with their deceased loved one.  But what do you do when they respond to none of these initiatives, and remain mired in an anguishing and life-limiting […]

Dialogue With a Bereaved Mother

This haunting, compassionate, and healing dialogue highlights the art making process, products, and mystical experiences of a bereaved mother whose journey is understood and guided by the tenants of meaning reconstruction, restorative retelling, and attachment informed grief therapy.  Learners are invited into the inner workings of art therapy and a creative process with Lynne.  She […]

Circles of Care

Facing the end of a life is full of losses. Professional care providers have a responsibility to guide families facing end of life, but often feel ill equipped for this intimate and demanding role. Together, we will explore how to utilize relevant grief related concepts, such as anticipatory grief, chronic sorrow, non-finite loss, the Dual […]

Captured in Box of Pain

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 […]