Types of Grief & Their Implications for Treatment
- Explain historical and current relevant theories and models describing the physical and psychosocial effect of loss, grief, and mourning on the individual and family system.
- Compare factors that influence normal and complicated reactions to dying and grief.
- Disenfranchised grief
- Persistent Prolonged Grief Disorder
- Traumatic Bereavement
- Prolonged Grief Disorder
- Common trajectories for grief
- Recognize Prolonged Grief Disorder
- Risk factors for Prolonged Grief Disorder
- Treatment Interventions
- Types of Loss & Their Impact on Grieving
- Parental loss
- Child loss
- Widowhood
- Non-death losses
Grief & the Family: Guide Families Through Healthy Grieving
- Differentiate potential loss events occurring throughout the lifespan, including non-death situations, and complicated bereavement.
- Identify theories and models of individual, couple, and family resilience.
- Family systems theory: Family influences on individual grief
- Variables that complicate family adaptation
- Strategies to guide family adaptation to loss
- Develop respect for different grieving styles
- The role of gender norms
- Developmental considerations & milestones related to loss reactions for:
- Children
- Adolescents
- Early adulthood
- Middle adulthood
- Later adulthood
Multicultural Considerations for Grief Treatment
- Analyze the ethnic, gender, and cultural factors that affect responses to loss-related situations.
- Increase awareness of one’s own beliefs, assumptions, and biases and how they may influence the establishment and maintenance of therapeutic relationships with culturally diverse clients.
- Cultural factors affecting expression of grief
- Impact on mourning practices
- Culture’s impact on death anxiety & meaning of life
- Determine where the identity emphasis lies
- Cultural values regarding emotional expression and disclosure
- The impact of society on grief
Assessment: Intake Considerations for Grieving Clients
- Articulate how to plan and implement appropriate assessments, interventions, and strategies.
- Perform a clinical assessment to inform the clinician’s choice of best treatment interventions for the reduction of symptoms.
- Current conceptualization models
- Factors impacting the grief experience
- Assess for depression and suicide ideation
- Differentiate between depression, grief & PTSD
- Persistent Prolonged Grief Disorder
- Take home assessment tools
Grief Treatment: Interventions & Strategies to Improve Clinical Outcomes
- Analyze the efficacy of various treatment interventions for complicated grief to improve clinical outcomes.
- Utilize clinical strategies to assist grieving clients in the move from fight/flight or freeze to social engagement in sessions.
- Utilize the co-regulating pathways of the social engagement system in session as an approach to managing symptoms of complicated grief.
- Assist clients with expressing their pain
- Integrate a new inner image of the deceased
- Client self-assessment strategies for coping
- Foster client relaxation skills
- Let the client lead: Starting point, story & stopping point
- Cultivate acceptance
- Elicit emotional availability in clients
- Give clients “permission” to not share stories
- Develop healthy grief rituals
- Target guilt due to stopping grief rituals
- Build a bridge between memories, current behaviors & underlying values
- Help clients accept the finality of the death
- Navigate the treatment of multiple losses
- “Family coat of arms” activity
Professional Issues: Ethical Considerations for Working with Grieving Clients, Their Families & the Terminally Ill
- Scrutinize the ethical and legal issues in end-of-life decisions, such as suffering, dying and choice, and their clinical implications.
- Examine one’s own cognitive, affective, behavioral, and valuational reaction to death and dying and bereavement as it relates to professional practice with client’s experiencing grief and loss.
- Ethical dilemmas that confront the terminally ill
- Ethical principles of end-of-life decisions
- The clinician’s role in addressing psychological suffering & needs of the terminally ill
- Impact of cause of death on social isolation
- Identify the core values and principles of professional ethical behavior
- Boundaries of professional competence

