As Thomas Attig might phrase it, grieving entails relearning the self and relearning the world, because both are challenged and changed, sometimes profoundly, by the unwelcome transitions we encounter when one world ends, and another begins.  This adage holds whether the existential change we confront is associated with bereavement due to the death of a significant person or due to a non-death loss, as through serious but non-fatal illness, trauma, divorce or relational betrayal, loss of career or more.  In each case, we may lose crucial relationships that anchor our sense of who we are, lose parts of ourselves sustained by the deceased, suffer deactivation of life-defining roles or positions, or when the loss is stigmatizing, as through the suicide or drug overdose of a loved one, struggle with social avoidance, shame or ostracism.  In all of these ways radical changes in our lives commonly invite and often require us to revisit and revise core aspects of our identity and construct a new self in their wake. 

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This 2-day workshop addresses these themes as expressed in video recordings of clients dealing with significant and sometimes staggering loss and offers a generous toolbox of creative techniques for working with them in grief therapy.  We begin by presenting various windows through which clients can explore subtle but substantial alterations in their identity arising from unwelcome transition, and then move toward procedures by which people can start to reconstruct their lives as they grow through grief.

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LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Use the Self-Portraits to examine the grieving self

• Apply the Virtual Dream Stories to generate fresh self-understandings

• Implement the Chapters of Our Lives to process life transitions

• Use the Transition Cycle to reflect on the evolving sense of self across life transitions

• Construct a Tree of Identity as a representation of an evolving self across a major life transition

• Conduct a Future Self Interview to foster self-compassion balanced with self-reconstruction

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GRIEF COUNSELLING TOPICS COVERED

• Assessing clients’ needs through the Tripartite Model of Meaning Reconstruction

• Using art-assisted methods as visual representations of the grieving self 

• Reflection of the self-narrative changed by loss through imaginary narratives

• Facilitation of rewriting the self-narrative using autobiography

• An attachment-oriented framework for scaffolding self-change

• Processing the seasons of changes through creative symbolic expression

• Using an internalized-other interview to envision a future self