Presented by Robert Neimeyer, PhD & Carolyn Ng, PsyD, MMSAC, RegCLR

10:00 am – 5:30 pm

When the death is tragic and untimely, as when a significant person dies by suicide, overdose, or fatal accident, grief can be particularly complicated by a gamut of challenging emotions, ranging from horror and helplessness to anger and incomprehension. In such cases, grief therapy needs to adopt a carefully tailored approach that recognizes the role of trauma in impeding the mourner’s integration of the loss. In this full-day workshop, we will begin by considering how we can quickly assess our clients’ needs in terms of the Tripartite Model of Meaning Reconstruction in bereavement, featuring obstacles to revisiting the event story of the death, reaffirming the back story of the relationship with the deceased, and revising the personal story of the mourner’s own sense of identity in the shadow of loss. We will then discuss the power of presence as a fundamental dimension of the therapeutic “holding environment” that makes deep work possible with highly vulnerable and traumatized survivors. This will provide a context for studying how to facilitate a healing “re-telling” of the loss experience under conditions of emotional regulation, deliberation and sense-making regarding the dying narrative. Drawing on clinical videos of clients contending with losses through both sudden natural death and suicide, we will learn to listen between the lines of the stories clients tell themselves and others about the death and how we can help them integrate the narrative of the loss into their lives with less reactivity and greater meaning. Subsequently,
we will introduce techniques for helping mourners discern the deeper significance of their experience and identify the important needs and life lessons implicit in them by listening to the unvoiced meaning of their grief, which often resides at the level of their embodied emotion. Drawing on a telehealth demonstration of Analogical Listening, we will explore the role of metaphor in helping clients reach beyond literal language to symbolize how they carry their grief somatically, and what it can tell them and us about how they now might move toward healing. We then consider arts-assisted methods that build on this somatic exploration and prompt clients to visually symbolize the living impact of their losses. Externalizing them in this way can help survivors to step back, make greater sense of what they have been through and discern a way forward. Alternating between visualizing and voicing the felt sense of their grief
can help clients find the self-compassion, insight and action required to reconstruct life out of their loss.

Learning Objectives:

• Distinguish between therapeutic “presence” and “absence” in the process of therapy;

• Implement Restorative Retelling procedures for mastering the event story of the loss;

• Identify markers for the use of narrative retelling of an event story of loss, and guidelines for avoiding re-traumatization;

• Summarize guidelines for Analogical Listening as a form of embodied dialogue to help clients make greater sense of their emotions and themselves;

• Describe how a non-literal, figurative form of inquiry into the felt sense of loss can help clients symbolize their implicit embodied meanings; and

• Experiment with visual arts to externalize the inner landscape of loss, permitting further dialogue with it to discover unanticipated steps toward healing.