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

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 counseling/assessing effectiveness
  • Assessment tools
  • Expressive arts
  • Companioning model
  • Therapeutic presence
  • Narrative therapy
  • Creating space for suffering
  • Limitations of the client-centered 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