Help clients integrate loss in ways that make space for profound transformation with this best-selling course.

Volume 1: A Meaning-Based Model
Move beyond outdated notions and methods or simply “waiting for time to heal,” and learn the basics of using meaning reconstruction to work confidently, compassionately and effectively with clients who have been overwhelmed by loss.

You’ll learn:

• The three areas in which clients can get stuck in the grieving process
• Techniques for assessing client needs and readiness, and tailoring interventions accordingly
• How to identify and attend to secondary losses that can accompany a death
• Exercises for creating a safe space for traumatic tales and emotional regulation
• Common risk factors that can complicate and prolong grief
• How to unravel the complex tangle of emotions that fall under the label of “grief”

Volume 2: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Loss
Join Neimeyer in a session with Guy, who’s struggling with eerie similarities between the deaths of his two children. Over the course of a complete 1-hour session, enriched with commentaries and discussions, you’ll discover multifaceted techniques for giving the bereaved agency over their stories of loss, so they become the narrators rather than victims of the stories.

You’ll learn:

• Common indicators that a client is struggling with this aspect of loss
• How to provide a non-anxious space for clients to tell dark tales of traumatic loss
• Restorative Retelling Techniques for working at both the content and process levels
• Tools to give to clients so that they retain agency over their death-event stories
• Tips for using verbal and nonverbal cues to attend to client needs and readiness
• How traumatic deaths create resistance in the retelling amongst family members

Volume 3: Realigning Relationships with the Deceased
Watch Neimeyer’s sessions with three clients all struggling with their grief. Though the circumstances are dissimilar — the natural death of a spouse after 56 years of marriage, the fetal and perinatal deaths of two triplets, and the untimely death of a parent 24 years prior — in all cases their grief has been complicated by their relationships with the deceased. Explore methods for helping clients establish bonds with their loved ones that can survive their physical absence.

You’ll learn:

• Techniques for resolving regret, anger and other unfinished business
• How to use imaginal dialogue to promote self-discovery and re-establish attachment
• Why avoidant coping complicates grief and what to do instead to find resolution
• Somatic and visualization exercises to access relationships with the deceased
• Techniques for safely exploring grief without becoming overwhelmed by it
• How to use limbic language, metaphors, and linking objects to deepen bonds with lost loved ones

Volume 4: Re-Inventing the Self After Loss
Neimeyer and his colleague Carolyn Ng work with clients who have had their foundations shaken by their respective losses, and yet are beginning to emerge from their grief with new possibilities in their lives. Find out how to nurture transformation after loss by watering the seeds of growth with attention, consolidating them in limbic language, and supporting feasible next steps in hoped for directions.

You’ll learn:

• Common ways in which identity can be challenged and changed by loss
• Cues that clients are struggling with issues of identity
• How to determine when clients are ready to explore post-trauma meaning-making
• Principles parents can use to help inform their disclosure of traumatic death to children
• Creative arts techniques for heightening and consolidating client awareness of growth
• Tools for identifying and supporting revision in client narratives of self and relationships

Robert A. Neimeyer, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Psychology, University of Memphis, and maintains an active consulting and coaching practice. He also directs the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition which provides online and onsite training internationally in grief therapy. Since completing his doctoral training at the University of Nebraska in 1982, he has conducted extensive research on the topics of death, grief, loss, and suicide intervention. He has received numerous awards for his scholarly and clinical contributions. Most recently, he has been granted Lifetime Achievement Awards from both the Association for Death Education and Counseling and the International Network for Personal Meaning.

Neimeyer has published 35 books, including New Techniques of Grief Therapy: Bereavement and Beyond and The Handbook of Grief Therapies, the latter with Edith Steffen and Jane Milman. The author of over 600 articles and book chapters, he is currently working to advance a more adequate theory of grieving as a meaning-making process, both in his published work and through his frequent professional workshops for national and international audiences. Please visit the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition website to learn more about live online training, pre-recorded online training and on-site training opportunities.

Carolyn Ng, PsyD, FT, MMSAC, RegCLR, maintains a private practice, Anchorage for Loss and Transition, for training, supervision and therapy in Singapore, while also serving as an Associate Director of the Portland Institute. Previously she served as Principal Counselor with the Children’s Cancer Foundation in Singapore, specializing in cancer-related palliative care and bereavement counselling. She is a master clinical member and approved supervisor with the Singapore Association for Counselling (SAC) and a Fellow in Thanatology with the Association of Death Education and Counselling (ADEC), USA, as well as a consultant to a cancer support and bereavement ministry in Sydney, Australia. She is certified in Solution-Focused Brief Therapy and Narrative Therapy and holds an MA in Pastoral Ministry from Trinity Theological Seminary in the USA. She is also a trained end-of-life doula and advanced care planning facilitator.

General Disclosure

This Disclosure Statement has been designed to meet accreditation standards; Psychotherapy.net does its best to mitigate potential conflicts of interest and eliminate bias in all areas of content. Experts are compensated for their contributions to our training videos; while some of them have published works, the purchase of additional materials are not required for any Psychotherapy.net training. Each experts’ specific disclosures can be found in their biography.

Psychotherapy.net offers trainings for cost but has no financial or other relationships to disclose.

Therapist Disclosure

Robert A. Neimeyer and Carolyn Ng was compensated for their contribution to this course. None of their books or additional offerings are required for this course. Should such materials be referenced, it is only as additional resources.

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Additionally, there is no commercial support for this activity. None of the planners or any employee at Psychotherapy.net who has worked on this educational activity has relevant financial relationship(s) to disclose with ineligible companies.

• Describe Neimeyer’s theoretical approach to working clinically with grieving clients
• Integrate elements of Neimeyer’s approach into your case conceptualizations
• Plan treatment for grieving clients using some of Neimeyer’s clinical techniques
• Discuss the therapeutic importance of addressing the “event story” comprising the client’s loss
• Integrate the model of restorative re-telling into your case conceptualizations with grieving clients
• Plan treatment that will help clients re-tell their loss story without re-traumatizing them
• Discuss the important role of the client’s backstory in their grieving
• Integrate the details of the client’s form of bereavement into your case conceptualizations
• Plan treatment that incorporates several creative/expressive activities
• Describe Neimeyer’s third area of fixation, the self, and its clinical significance in grief therapy
• Develop case-conceptualizations that integrate the client’s search for an expanded self-narrative
• Build treatment plans that incorporate Neimeyer’s creative/expressive techniques for identity reconstruction