Transforming somatic grief in one's personal life and professional world
Degriefing®: Integrative Grief Therapy promotes skillful care for clients and maximum wellbeing for counselors. Learning about the nature of grief, how to normalize its complex effects, and demonstrating ways to transform it with integrative therapies, is a key focus of this comprehensive didactic and experiential staff training. Grief is the body mind's response to any and all types of loss. The staff is in contact with and vulnerable to vicarious loss. “The body has a mind, and the mind has a body.” Personal issues of loss are re-stimulated and exacerbated by daily exposure to the shared emotional pool of grief that exists within the professional setting; now globally. Addiction counselors and many health care professionals holding space for clients are physically affected by “somatic resonance”: defined as experiencing the contagion of another’s pain in both our body and mind. All too often this leads to empathy fatigue and burnout. This training provides a comprehensive study in, and pragmatic tools to efficiently work with our own grief as well as that of our clients.