Full Course Description

Megan Devine’s Grief Care Professional Certificate Program

This unique training is grounded in the teachings of one of the world's most recognized authorities on grief…

…so you can support clients using the same non-pathologizing approaches that have made her one of the most respected and recognized names in the field…Megan Devine!

She is the celebrated author of the bestselling It’s Ok that You’re Not OK, translated into over 17 languages. Not only that, Megan has more than 20 years of clinical experience with pioneering work expanding the definition of grief beyond pathology-based, reductive models – and creating a way for clients to heal that’s holistic, humanizing, and effective.

In this course, you will learn:
•   How to identify normal, healthy, typical grief
•   How to utilize non-pathologizing clinical interventions
•   Trauma-informed grief care approaches
•   How to work with the grief of racism, misogyny, bigotry, and hate
•   Ways to live with your losses while holding space for others
•   How to improve support for clients after non-death losses
•   How to bring a humanized view of grief to your workplaces, communities, and beyond!
•   Tools for specific scenarios including grief following gun violence, natural disasters, baby loss, overdose, suicide, and more

And so much more!

Enroll now to become a grief expert!

Program Information

Objectives

Analyze how historical trends to pathologize grief disproportionally affect women and lead to over diagnosis over bereavement-related disorders and clinical depression when compared to men.
Evaluate yourself for beliefs, blindspots, and internalized biases about grief that can negatively impact your ability to differentiate “normal grief” from unhealthy grief processes in clients.
Apply a non-pathologizing approach to grief work to avoid over-diagnoses, over-medication, and shame in clients.
Develop psychoeducational approaches to normalize the grief process by providing clients with an understanding of the range of physical, relational, emotional, and cognitive impacts of grief.
Differentiate normal “uncomplicated” grief from more complicated manifestations in order to make decisions about whether or not to intervene clinically.
Use inclusive and supportive approaches with clients that allow you to account for and appropriately respond to the ways culture, class, gender, and internalized messaging impacts their expressions of grief.
Develop human-centered objectives to ensure effective and non-pathologizing clinical grief work.
Utilize grief-informed interventions to provide support to grieving clients and treatment when appropriate.
Understand the limits and applications of creative responses to grief (including art therapy, sand tray, and other imaginative interventions).
Assess why typical or mainstream interventions are often contraindicated in traumatic loss.
Determine the clinical implications of previous trauma on clients who’ve experienced new losses.
Use clinical tools to address anxiety and other hallmarks of traumatic or atypical loss.
Evaluate the ways internalized pathology-based ideas around grief impact the quality of support clients experience.
Assess clients’ interpersonal strengths, relationships and stressors to help them find ways to create better support systems.
Develop an initial catalog of script responses grieving clients can use to help them manage common communication barriers and conflicts.
Analyze complications to the grief and mourning processes that can occur as members of historically marginalized communities navigate systems-based injustices.
Evaluate the impacts of inequalities in race, gender, sexual orientation, and age on counseling, treatment and support practices for grief and loss.
Develop methods of inquiring about and addressing racial, cultural, economic and social issues with grieving clients.
Analyze the clinical concerns of working with clients facing the emotional and relational impacts of sensationalized losses.
Create treatment plans that include survivor communities to activate social support to buffer the effects of negative social attitudes faced by survivors of violent, stigmatized and atypical losses.
Utilize interventions that treat survivors social and emotional withdrawal and create the possibility for meaning-making.
Investigate the ethical aspects and potential positive and negative clinical impacts of self-disclosure.
Develop an action plan for managing the impact of emotional overwhelm and repetition as a clinician.
Determine personal and professional boundaries that help the clinician navigate personal and professional losses.
Differentiate the features and corresponding clinical impacts of grief that occurs in non-death losses from grief that occurs in death-related losses.
Develop a case conceptualization that accounts for the impacts of everyday stressors and non-death losses.
Apply interventions for grief support in non-death loss scenarios.
Analyze the challenges inherent in a paradigm shift away from a pathologizing models of grief currently prevalent in clinical and medical practice.
Differentiate between honoring different approaches to grief and hostility to human-centered approaches.
Develop an action plan to educate and support clients, your workplace and wider professional circles of influence on a human-centered approach to grief.

Outline

Module 1: Implications of Treating Grief Like a Disease or Personal Failing

Historical approaches to grief and why they matter today
How gendered ideas of grief create cascading problems (for everyone)
Why it’s more important to know what you believe about grief than it is to have an overstocked “grief toolbox”

Module 2: Megan Devine’s Grief Care Professional Certificate Program: How to Identify Normal, Healthy Typical Grief

Consumer-generated grief experiences: what people tell us when they’re allowed to tell the truth
What do you support and what do you fix? Understanding the difference between pain and suffering
Cognitive, relational, and physical aspects of grief
Why clients might believe they’re “doing it wrong”

Module 3: Grief Interventions: Building a Toolbox for Effective and Non-Pathologizing Clinical Work

What clients have to say about therapy: what they need, what they wish their clinicians knew, and what really makes a difference
The right tools at the right moment: knowing when to offer a solution and when to offer support
Developing your own collection of tools (for yourself and your clients)
How to use creative therapies and interventions strategically and effectively

Module 4: Trauma-Informed Grief Care: Support and Treatment for Clients Who’ve Experienced Traumatic Losses

The differences between “trauma” and “traumatic loss” and why semantics matter
Anxiety, PTSD, and changes in worldview: what tools actually help
What exactly is “trauma informed care” as it relates to grief?
Special topics in loss, part one: domestic violence, military veterans, accidental deaths involving typical daily activities (e.g. vehicle-pedestrian deaths)

Module 5: Communication Skills, Verbal Boundaries, and Scripting: Managing Interpersonal Challenges Inside Grief

Friction points for grieving people (especially in the first weeks and months)
Why people are so bad at giving the support they most want to give
Boundaries and negotiations - helping clients decide which relationships are worth the effort, and which need impenetrable boundaries
How to help clients find true community, and why it’s the only thing that really helps

Module 6: Megan Devine’s Grief Care Professional Certificate Program: Racism, Misogyny, Bigotry, and Hate: Grief and Social Justice

Racism and grief: a wholly inadequate overview
Understanding the systems at play in each loss, whether directly or indirectly
All grief work is political when policies create grief
Who gets to grieve? Economic and social/family responsibilities and the expression of grief
The bigger picture: how changing the ways we understand grief make lasting social change for everyone

Module 7: Special Populations in Grief: Gun Violence, Natural Disaster, Baby Loss, Suicide, Overdose and More

What are “atypical” losses, and how do they differ from everyday grief?
Stigmatized and sensationalized losses: grieving in the public (and unkind) eye
Helping clients navigate the impact of “random chance” losses
The intersection of bias and belief in working with stigmatized or misunderstood losses

Module 8: Grief on the Job: Setting Boundaries, Managing Your Personal Grief and Holding Space for Others

Repeated exposure to loss: dealing with overwhelm, repetition, and frustration
Creating and maintaining boundaries on the job and because of the job
Systemic failure and the limits of infrastructure: doing emotional work within systems that don’t allow for clinicians’ human needs
Friction with the outside world: finding support with people who don’t get it
The ethics of self-disclosure

Module 9: Non-Death Losses: How the Grief We Don’t Call Grief Applies to Every Client

Grief beyond death: recognizing grief unrelated to death
Moral distress, chronic illness, everyday stressors and more
Changing the culture: how all clinical issues are grief issues
Clinical responses to non-death losses, interactions and experiences

Module 10: Moving a Humanized Approach to Grief Work into the World: Culture Change in Your Workplace, Community and Beyond

Encountering hostility: resistance to change at work and in the world
Why all providers are practitioners of social change
Tools and tactics for dealing with resistance (or hostility)
Creating a grief-inclusive workplace culture
The change we see coming

Target Audience

Counselors
Social Workers
Marriage & Family Therapists
Addictions Counselors
Psychologists
Psychiatrists
Nurses
Students in these disciplines

Full Course Description

Program Information

LIVE Q&A and Discussion Call

LIVE Q&A and Discussion Call

LIVE Q&A and Discussion Call

LIVE Q&A and Discussion Call