Grief Treatment: Current Evidence Based Approaches to Care Across the Lifespan

CPD

Handouts

Faculty

Alissa Drescher, LPC, FT, GC-C, MA Related seminars and products

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Alissa Drescher, LPC, FT, GC-C, MA, is a highly sought after speaker addressing topics related to grief and mourning, and is known for her creative, interactive, and story-telling presentation style. She began working in the field of bereavement services in 2006, offering encouragement to grieving parents. Alissa’s passion for supporting people through the grief process led to counseling both grieving children and adults in individual and group settings.

At the Tristesse Grief Center in Tulsa, OK, she served as senior program director, overseeing a variety of programming including the Healing Hearts Camp, Oklahoma’s first overnight camp for grieving children and teens (now Camp Erin Tulsa). Alissa was an adjunct professor at Southern Nazarene University teaching several undergraduate counseling courses including Death, Grief and Loss. After relocating to Tennessee, Alissa became the founder/executive director of the Grief Center of Middle Tennessee, whose mission is to help children, teens, and adults cope with loss and change.

Alissa is a Fellow in Thanatology: Death, Dying & Bereavement and holds a Master of Arts in Marriage and Family Therapy with a focus in Play Therapy. She is also a member of the Association of Death Education and Counseling and the National Alliance for Grieving Children.

 

Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Alissa Drescher has an employment relationship with Alive Hospice. She receives a speaking honorarium and recording royalties from PESI, Inc. She has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Alissa Drescher is a member of the Association for Death Education and Counseling, the American Counseling Association, and the National Alliance for Grieving Children.

Objectives

1. Evaluate current models of grief theory that go beyond the five stages and the treatment implications of each model.
2. Distinguish the unique experience created by different types of loss in relation to assessment and treatment planning.
3. Assess a client’s understanding of death and response to grief from a developmental perspective across the lifespan.
4. Determine how grief impacts the family system (individually and together), and how to better equip them to support each other in grief.
5. Appraise current and cutting-edge modalities used to treat typical and complicated grief in the clinical setting.
6. Integrate specific creative counseling interventions that engage the individual, couple or family in the process of grief.

Outline

Grief Theory Beyond Kübler-Ross

• Tasks of Mourning
• Dual Process Model of Coping
• Continuing Bonds Theory
• Grief and Attachment Theory
• Potential criteria for “Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder”
• Two creative interventions articulating these theories

Circumstances of Bereavement

• Implications of Specific losses
  • Pre-loss factors
  • Relationship influence
  • Type of and proximity to death
  • Disenfranchised losses
  • Living losses

Grief Counseling Strategies Across the Lifespan

• Childhood and adolescence
  • The occurrence of grief
  • Developmental understanding of death
  • Grief responses and adaptation to loss
  • Six creative age appropriate interventions
• Young and middle adulthood
  • Grief circumstances
  • Life stages and individual needs
  • Assessments and interventions
  • Family Systems
    • The family narrative
    • Use the Internal Family Systems Approach
  • Six creative interventions appropriate for middle adulthood
• Older adulthood
  • Type of loss
  • Grief responses and perception of death
  • Treatment strategies based on developmental needs
  • Six creative interventions specific for older adults

Grief Treatment – Current Evidence-Based Approach to Care

• Typical Trajectory Griever
  • Limitations to grief counselling/assessing effectiveness
  • Assessment tools
  • Expressive arts
  • Companioning model
  • Therapeutic presence
  • Narrative therapy
  • Creating space for suffering
  • Limitations of the client-centred approach
• Complicated Griever
  • Assessment tools
  • CBT
  • Complicated Grief Treatment Model
  • Grief and trauma intervention
  • Meaning reconstruction
• Ethical Considerations
  • Socio-cultural context
  • Gender bias
  • Pitfalls in treating the family system
  • Grief in the digital universe
  • Spirituality and grief
  • Personal death anxiety
  • Countertransference
  • The wounded healer
  • Occupational stress
  • The grieving therapist
  • Self-care

Target Audience

• Counselors
• Social Workers
• Psychologists
• Case Managers
• Marriage & Family Therapists
• Nurses
• Chaplains/Clergy
• Nursing Home Administrators
• Other Mental Health Professionals