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 effective and powerful research-based method to empower clients to integrate and transform their grief. The bereaved and also many people facing living losses frequently experience a fragmentation of the self, often perceived as a radical change of the self. Integration of loss requires not only the expression of grief and meaning-making, but also the rebuilding of identity.
Learners are invited to learn a specific method: Compositionwork WFW, which is derived from the narrative psychology modality of Compositionwork. It utilizes stones and other natural objects as symbolic representations of different aspects of the self, or so-called I-positions. Clients are drawn to this metaphorical representation, which opens new and often unexpected insights into their identity and offers a gentle way of navigating painful emotions and distressing losses. Compositionwork draws on the Dialogical Self Theory (DST) and is inspired by the philosophy of traditional Japanese gardens. It functions on both the verbal and nonverbal levels. The fundamental principle underpinning DST is a conceptualization of the self as multi-voiced and dialogical. Compositionwork WFW fosters internal and external dialogues for identity development.
Through a combination of discussing the writing of personal grief memoirs, Writing for Wellbeing research, introducing Compositionwork and DST, the experiential Writing for Wellbeing exercise and case illustrations, learners will explore the effectiveness of writing and the metaphorical representation of various identities through natural objects. This module will provide learners with a specific tool, Compositionwork WFW, to support the expression and integration of grief, emotion regulation, meaning making and in particular identity rebuilding for the bereaved and for people experiencing living losses.
