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 […]

Adult Sibling Loss: Navigating Disenfranchisement & Supporting Back Story Exploration

The loss of an adult sibling is a deeply personal and often overlooked grief experience, leaving many adult surviving siblings feeling disenfranchised in their mourning. The first half of this module will explore the unique nature of adult sibling loss and how the back story and shared narrative of this special relationship is impacted by […]

Personal Grief Rituals

Loss, grief and mourning are ubiquitous human experiences that pervade the work of therapists, psychiatrists, counselors, and social workers alike.  Helping those who have experienced a significant loss can be challenging and confusing, largely because there is no single intervention that is well-suited for all individuals.  In what ways can we tailor our interventions to […]

Writing the Creative Self in Grief

Based on her own two-year journey of writing the self after the death of her spouse, researcher and writing-the-self professor Reinekke Lengelle invites participants to develop a stronger ‘internal dialogue’ as a part of their resilience.  This course demonstrates that losing a loved one (or going through a non-death loss) is not only a matter […]

Trauma, Loss & Doll Making

Dolls have a universal and timeless appeal.  Ancient civilizations created them to ward off illness, promote fertility, and ensure abundant crops.  Dolls have been infused with the wishes, fears, and hopes of their makers, and have served as powerful talismans of transformation.  Learners will discover the clinical benefits of doll making through case studies that […]

Suicide & Unfinished Business with the Deceased: Assessment & Intervention

The loss of a significant person to suicide or overdose is more than a traumatic life event.  It also poses a profound challenge for survivors in establishing a sustainable continuing bond to the deceased, characteristically leaving many questions unanswered, much that is unsaid, and multiple longstanding concerns unresolved.  This module focuses on the burden of […]

The Relational Window of Tolerance: Systemic Assessment of Bereaved Couples

The Relational Window of Tolerance describes how couples negotiate individual and relational coping when grieving the loss of a child.  Depending on the individual coping styles of each partner, couples may enter imbalanced, dual-fragile, or coregulatory relational states throughout their grieving process.  Each of these relational states, identified and exemplified in recent research, helps the couple to […]