Getting Grief Working: An Integrative Person-Centred Approach to Counselling for Grief and Loss
Our understanding of the grieving process and the needs of bereaved and traumatised person has advanced significantly in recent years. We now see grief as a natural condition, a human reaction to loss; that can generally be expected to abate over time and frequently leads to psychological growth. The role of grief counselling is to unblock or accelerate this natural healing process to get grief working, particularly if this process is moving more slowly than expected or if the reaction to a loss is severe or protracted.
Current models tell us that when grief is working, our clients zigzag flexibly between loss and restoration coping, negotiate tasks of mourning, maintaining continuing bonds, integrating their loss, finding meaning, constructing new life narratives, and if traumatically bereaved, both integrating trauma and accommodating loss. Clinical interventions designed to facilitate these and other client outcomes and change processes range from comprehensive multifaceted treatment programs to dozens of individual techniques widely practiced today.
This workshop presents a rationale for an integrative person-centred approach as the foundation for these grief counselling interventions and their general efficacy. In the work of Carl Rogers, and its extensions in the theory and practice of experiential focusing, emotion-focused therapy, motivational interviewing, and mindfulness-based approaches, we find both common factors and specific techniques that are finely attuned to the needs of bereaved persons which activate and that support emotional processing and regulation, schema change, and client motivation.
In this highly interactive day together we will practice skills and view brief vignettes from sessions by Carl Rogers, Jeanne Watson, Sandra Paivio, and Dale Larson. We will explore the challenges that person-centred care with grieving, seriously ill, and traumatized clients presents for helping professionals. How can we be emotionally involved helpers without suffering from burnout and compassion fatigue? How can we be the compassionate guides who can assist clients to live with hope in a world in which loss is inescapable?
At the conclusion of the workshop participants will be able to:
- List ways an integrative person-centred approach matches the needs of bereaved clients.
- Describe and identify components of effective imaginal dialogue and client-frame-of-reference interventions in grief counselling
- Identify trans diagnostic mechanisms and coping processes targeted by major grief and trauma treatment models
- Identify different kinds of emotional involvement as a therapist, and their implications for therapist and client
- Identify main distinguishing features of burnout, compassion fatigue, and moral distress
- List strategies for effective personal stress management and self-care.
Presenter:
Dale G. Larson, Ph.D. (U. C. Berkeley) is a Professor of Counseling Psychology at Santa Clara University, where he directs the graduate Health Psychology Program. A national leader in end-of-life research, theory, and training, he co-directed a national mental health skills training program for hospice workers and was Senior Editor and a contributing author for Finding Our Way: Living with Dying in America, a national newspaper series which reached seven million Americans.
Dale Larson is a Fulbright Scholar, a Fellow in the American Psychological Association, a clinician, and author of the award-winning book, The Helper's Journey: Working With People Facing Grief, Loss, and Life-Threatening Illness. He publishes widely on grief and grief counseling, end-of-life issues, self-concealment, professional stress and stress management, and counselling skills, and worked directly with Gene Gendlin and Carl Rogers.
Dr. Larson’s ability to translate theory and research into effective clinical practice makes him a popular speaker at national and international conferences. He recently gave keynote addresses for the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Care Medicine and for the Australian Psychological Society Counselling Psychology Conference in Melbourne. In 2016 Dr. Larson was honoured with the Death Educator Award by the Association for Death Education and Counseling.