Grief and Loss Across Developmental and Life Stages
- Distinctions between adult and youth responses to loss
- Common grief reactions and coping mechanisms
- Factors for assessing and counseling kids and teens at schools
- The elderly – working with multiple losses, fewer supports and/or physical health issues
- Ethics with minors, families, and the terminally ill
Implications for Counseling and Treatment
- Normal grief and acute reactions
- Complicated or prolonged grief
- Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder
- Ambiguous grief in the face of changes in the living
- Chronic grief
- Traumatic grief following sudden or violent loss
- Anticipatory and disenfranchised grief
- Delayed, inhibited, abbreviated other types of commonly overlooked grief
- Impact on adult caregivers and siblings
- Family adaptation to loss
- Changing the family narrative
- Intergenerational effect of grief and trauma
Assessment of Grieving Clients:
Uncover Trauma, Depression, Substance Use, Suicidal Ideation, and More
- Intakes and gathering information
- Two assessment measures for gathering grief responses
- Assessment for depression, PTSD, trauma, substance use, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and violence
- Differential diagnosis between uncomplicated and complicated grief
- Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder
- Differential using the DSM-5™ and upcoming DSM5-TR
- Uncomplicated grief treatment planning
- Grief counseling vs. grief therapy
- Specific objectives based on the client’s grieving process
- Complicated Grief Therapy
- Narrative Reconstruction Therapy for complicated grief
- Integrative Cognitive Behavioral Treatment for complicated grief
- Specific objectives for complicated grief
- Narrative and somatic techniques
- Expressive arts techniques – music, writing, art, and more
- Interventions for regret, forgiveness, shame, and guilt
- Continued bonds and therapeutic bereavement rituals
- Nature-based therapy
- Systematic desensitization and flooding to reduce avoidance
- EMDR for complicated grief and traumatic loss
How to Effectively Work with Clients Who’ve Experienced “Living Losses”
- End of relationship
- Chronic illness and terminal illness
- Deployment, job and/or retirement
- Infertility, independence, and identity
- Safety, meaning, and purpose
- Spirituality and religion
- Potential futures
- Defining resiliency and post-traumatic growth
- Employing a client’s strengths
- Considerations to foster growth with traumatic and suicide loss
How to Successfully Structure and Facilitate Grief Support or Treatment Groups
- Differences between psychoeducational and therapeutic groups
- Open vs. closed groups
- Homogeneous vs. heterogeneous groups
- Peer vs. clinician led
- Participant screening and keys to effective facilitation
- Cultural competency vs. culturally and difference intentioned/aware practice
- Disenfranchised grief
- How culture impacts mourning, rituals, expectation, and continued bonds
- Working with spiritual and religious differences between clinician and client
- Boundaries of professional competence and when to refer out
- Research and treatment risks
- Compassion fatigue
- Self-care as an ethical imperative