Techniques of Grief Therapy: Creative Practices for Counseling the Bereaved
Robert Neimeyer, Ph.D.
All orders include the entire presentation with handouts and a CE test.
Streaming videos and audio downloads will be available immediately after checkout
Mailed CD and DVD formats include the printed handouts and CE test in an attractive portfolio
Description
Dr. Neimeyer will discuss and demonstrate several methods for helping clients integrate the reality of the loss into the ongoing story of their lives, while also reconstructing their continuing bond to their loved one
Objectives
Participants will be able to describe:
- Differences between therapeutic “presence” and “absence” in the process of therapy
- Empirical risk factors associated with complicated grief reactions
- Restorative retelling and situational revisiting procedures
- Differences between forms of directed journaling that foster self-immersion and self-distancing
- Insecure attachments that complicate adaptation to the death
- Differences between healthy and unhealthy features of continuing bonds with the deceased
- Invisible loyalties to the loved one
- Techniques for consolidating a constructive bond with the deceased
Topics
The Power of Presence Orienting to Client Needs and Resources
- the power of presence as a fundamental dimension of the therapeutic “holding environment”
- Assessing needs, particularly when clients struggle with complicated and prolonged grief
Restorative Retelling: Mastering the Narrative of Death
- Fostering a safe relational container for a healing “retelling” of the loss experience
Analogical Listening
Exploring Sensed Meanings of Grief
- the unvoiced meaning of client grief stories
Chapters of Our Lives: Rewriting Stories of Loss
- helping clients integrate the event story of the death into the larger narrative of their lives
Continuing Bonds - Tracking Through Bereavement
- grieving as a process of reconstructing
- various impediments to revisiting and reorganizing the “back story” with the deceased
Remembering Conversations - Reintroducing the Deceased
- techniques that can help move such work forward
- methods for re-introducing the deceased into the social and psychological world of the bereaved
Encountering Resistance: Working with Pro-Symptom Positions
- fostering a sustaining sense of connection and alliance with the loved one in embracing a changed future
Enacting Emotion: Reopening Dialogues with the Dead