Conventional support groups or therapy groups for grieving clients can be rather predictable affairs:  A group of grievers gather to share their stories of loss, express their relevant emotions, normalize their pain and receive social support, sometimes with the facilitation of a professional therapist.  While useful, this generic format does not appeal to all mourners, and encounters some common challenges in terms of uneven participation, dominance of the group by its neediest or most vocal members, inconsistent attendance, potential re-traumatization by the stories of others and dispiriting rumination about shared grief at the expense of fostering change.  None of these disadvantages are inherent to the group format, however, as all can be avoided, mitigated or resolved by creative innovations in the format and focus of the support groups or grief therapy groups. 

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This workshop is designed for all professionals and volunteers who facilitate groups for the bereaved or those dealing with significant non-death losses, as of health, an intimate relationship, or career.  Day 1 begins by sketching a meaning-focused approach to group work, and illustrates in detail a multi-session format with phases that help participants safely process and integrate their stories of loss and their associated emotions, access and address lingering unfinished business in the back stories of their relationships with the deceased, and envision necessary changes in their personal stories of who they are in the wake of unwelcome change.  We then introduce and practice one highly engaging reflective exercise incorporated in this format for exploring transitions in group members’ stories of loss and sharing the resulting insights with fellow participants.

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Day 2 then invites participants to give visual and verbal form to their own experiences of loss while preserving as much confidentiality about its content as they wish, and does so in ways that combine these individual experiences into a joint product that fosters both appreciation of difference and recognition of commonalities that transcend any single individual.  Finally, we conclude with systematic instruction in reflecting team methodology, a group practice involving multiple observers offering pluralistic feedback on an individual or family therapy session in the presence of the clients and therapist, who are then free to engage or utilize those parts of the feedback that move or speak to them.  Taken together, the two days of training offer in-depth exposure to and practice of a generous toolbox of creative techniques for enlivening group approaches to grief therapy and bereavement support, while resolving many of its conventional challenges.

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LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Describe common process challenges in grief groups and their corresponding solutions

• Conceptualize group processes and practices using the Tripartite Model of Meaning Reconstruction

• Implement creative narrative and arts-assisted methods in a group context to safely express and explore individual experiences of loss and promote their transformation through small- and whole-group processes

• Demonstrate use of divergent but appreciative feedback to consolidate therapeutic progress and catalyse further change

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GRIEF COUNSELLING TOPICS COVERED

• Common problems in grief groups and how to avoid or address them

• Meaning focused therapy through the complementary lenses of attachment, trauma and resilience and its implementation in the Meaning In Loss Group structure

• Promoting artful grieving through personal and interpersonal creativity utilizing the My LOG Book in Grief Journey and When Grief Finds Expression techniques

• Conducting Reflecting Teams to support grieving clients while also challenging them to grow through grief