How do you think about change when mortality is front and center? How do you see your role as a helper in this context? What ideas do you hold about “appropriate” or “problematic grief?” How attentive are you to dominant cultural beliefs and stories about grief that complicate or isolate the bereaved? Do you speak to the ways that intersectionality and institutional practices shape grief and dying, much less create significant obstacles to care and treatment? What about the often unrecognized burdens on family caregivers? How do you stay present, hold your seat, as a fellow mortal working with the dying, grieving, and those who love them?Death impacts the work of mental health and other helping professionals in many ways. Clients receive a life limiting diagnosis; their grief persists “long” after a partner dies; they struggle with hard choices regarding aging parents; someone in their life dies unexpectedly or traumatically; a disease process moves more quickly than anticipated; they are a care provider for a loved one who is ill or dying; complicated relationships challenge the processes of dying and grieving. Although death and grief can initiate the beginning of therapy, change its direction or become its focus, very few of us have specialized in-depth training about grief and the end-of-life space. Some of us work in medical and other settings where attending to death, dying, and grieving is our primary role. And still, the journey for the provider is as complicated as it can be for those we help. This workshop will educate professionals on contemporary models of grief and on clinical approaches to the terminally ill and dying. We will pay special attention to intersectionality or the social and cultural factors that both individualize experiences of grief and dying and can create more harm in the form of prejudicial or biased clinical interventions. The focus will be on the “patient” as well as on the commonly unseen people who care for them day to day and who live in the aftermath of profound loss. Through integrating theories of the neurobiology of grief, mindfulness practices and current clinical theories and models, helping professionals will develop new insights and practices for supporting those in grief and the end-of-life space. These existential and inevitable events occur in the lives of therapists as well. We will explore the impact on helping professionals, with special attention to the self of the therapist. This will include attention to beliefs, feelings, behaviors, biases, and blind spots in the context of our cultural and historical relational experiences, social locations, and emotional reactions to clients that can affect our work. The effect of moral injury on helpers and clients will be explored. Ideas and practices related to presence and its complexity in the moment-to-moment processes of this work are central to our presentations. A minimum of two hours of this workshop will be relevant to anti-discriminatory and anti-racist practice. A minimum of two hours of the workshop will address ethical issues in the context of work with death and greiving.

Hosted by Therapy Training Boston live online for 6 CEs. To learn more and register click here