About Our Trainings
The Center for Loss and Life Transition is known for providing quality bereavement care training. Thousands of caregivers have participated in the past 30 years. If you want to learn practical ways to “companion” people in grief from Dr. Alan Wolfelt, one of North America’s most respected bereavement educators and clinicians, these learning opportunities are for you.
Who Attends
Our seminars are designed to meet the needs of people from a variety of backgrounds, including hospice staff and volunteers, mental healthcare providers, social workers, clergy, school personnel, funeral directors, nurses and physicians, students and other interested professionals, as well as lay people.
What You Will Learn
Through our seminars, you will
- Become more familiar with the grief process.
- Enhance your ability to relate effectively to the grieving person or family.
- Develop new skills to cope with personal feelings related to death and grief.
- Receive resource materials to facilitate continued learning.
- Fine-tune skills in the helping relationship.
- Expand your knowledge of the current discipline developments.
- Heighten your awareness of resources in the areas of death, dying, grief, and bereavement.
Where are Seminars Held?
Fort Collins, Colorado
Our Fort Collins, Colorado courses are held at the Hilton Fort Collins. The recently renovated, full service Hilton features 255-rooms, a fitness center, an indoor pool and hot tub, a full bar, restaurant and cafe. We’re pleased to offer our guests free parking and high-speed internet. Reservations may be made by calling (970) 482-2626. Our group rate is $137/night for 2023 and $149/night for 2024 (plus applicable taxes). The room block is limited and reservations must be made at least three weeks prior to attendance, so please call early. Denver International Airport (DEN) is the closest major airport to Fort Collins, which lies about 90 minutes north of the airport. Most participants choose to use ground shuttle service between the airport and the hotel. The best shuttle option is Groome. Another option is to rent a car for your stay.
Scottsdale, Arizona
Our Scottsdale, Arizona courses are held at the Hyatt House Scottsdale/Old Town. This beautiful facility is located in vibrant Old Town Scottsdale and features some of the region’s best restaurants and shopping within a 5 minute walk. The hotel offers a heated pool and jacuzzi, an outdoor courtyard with BBQ grills and seating, and a full-service bar and restaurant. The hotel also offers complimentary breakfast, free high-speed internet access, and complimentary parking. The Center for Loss has guaranteed a special room rate at this winter resort location of $134/night for 2023 and $169/night for 2024(plus applicable taxes). The room block is limited and must be made at least six weeks prior to attendance, so reserve your room early. Reservations may be made by calling the Hyatt House Scottsdale/Old Town at 1-888-591-1234. Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (PHX) is the nearest airport for the Scottsdale trainings. It is about a 20 minute drive between the airport and the hotel. Ride share options are the most convenient option for getting to the hotel. Another option is to rent a car for your stay.
Training Schedule
Our training seminars are each three-and-a-half days long. You will meet the other participants in the designated room at the hotel, where training begins each day at 8:00am. Breakfast will be served from 7:00-8:00am, and lunch will be from 12:00-1:00pm. On Monday through Wednesday, class will end by 4:00pm. On Thursday, the course graduation will wrap up at 12:00pm. Many people leave for the airport at that time; therefore, lunch is not provided on Thursday. Participants who are not present at the completion of the course will not receive their course certificate. As such, we suggest a return flight out of Denver International Airport no earlier than 4:00pm or Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport no earlier than 3:00pm, and additional time is recommended for international departures.
Companioning Philosophy
Dr. Wolfelt believes in “companioning” the bereaved, in contrast to the medical model, which is based on “treating patients.” The word “companion,” when broken down into its original Latin roots, means com for “with” and pan for “bread.” Someone you would share a meal with. A friend. An equal. His training seminars are based on this philosophy. Please use discernment in determining if the Center for Loss trainings are a good match for your learning style and philosophy of caregiving.
Dr. Wolfelt’s Tenets of Companioning the Bereaved
Companioning is about...
- Being present to another person’s pain; it is not about taking away the pain.
- Going to the wilderness of the soul with another human being; it is not about thinking you are responsible for finding the way out.
- Honoring the spirit; it is not about focusing on the intellect.
- Listening with the heart; it is not about analyzing with the head.
- Bearing witness to the struggles of others; it is not about judging or directing these struggles.
- Walking alongside; it is not about leading.
- Discovering the gifts of sacred silence; it is not about filling up every moment with words.
- Being still; it is not about frantic movement forward.
- Respecting disorder and confusion; it is not about imposing order and logic.
- Learning from others; it is not about teaching them.
- Compassionate curiosity; it is not about expertise.
2023 - 2024 Seminars
Comprehensive Bereavement Skills Training
Comprehensive Bereavement Skills Training
$995.00
This course is a suggested foundational course for all other Center for Loss courses. However, we realize that for certain caregivers, taking just one or two of our specialty courses (such as Helping Children and Adolescents Cope with Grief) without first completing Comprehensive Bereavement Skills Training may make the most sense. Please e-mail or call us if you would like to discuss your unique needs.
Whether you are new to the experience of caring for those in grief or are a veteran bereavement caregiver, we invite you to participate in this popular seminar.
Comprehensive Bereavement Skills Training explores a wide range of topics related to bereavement caregiving, including:
- Exploring North America’s modern understanding of grief and loss
- Introduction to the tenets of “companioning” versus treating
- Understanding attachment and love influences on grief
- Misconceptions surrounding grief and loss
- Unique influences on grief: the whys of the journey
- Exploring the six central needs of mourning and the companioning helping role
- Encouraging self-compassion in mourners
- Application of content to support groups
- Exploring reconciliation versus resolution
- Acknowledging the transformative nature of grief.
Dr. Wolfelt’s bereavement caregiving philosophy is based on what he has termed “companioning”. All of the practical topics covered in this course will be viewed through the companioning lens, and the companioning tenets will be introduced and explored.
Graduates of this comprehensive seminar will return home with a multitude of newly refined skills and abilities. This is a very popular seminar, so early application is a must!
Participants will receive a copy of Companioning the Bereaved: A Soulful Guide for Caregivers.
***The November 13-16, 2023 course is now closed to online registration. To be added to the waitlist, please email info@centerforloss.com.***
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Grief Companioning Skills Training
Grief Companioning Skills Training
$995.00
While Comprehensive Bereavement Skills Training provides you with a large dose of the “body of knowledge” surrounding grief care, this training teaches you specific skills you need to help the griever engage in the active work of mourning. Dr. Wolfelt models and then gives you the opportunity to practice what he calls, “foundational grief counseling skills.”
This learning experience is a must for those wishing to “companion” people in their unique life and death journeys. It will teach caregivers how to effectively follow the lead of the “true expert,” the mourner.
The content of this seminar is appropriate both for novices and for experienced caregivers looking to update their helping skills.
Specific skills you will learn include: :
- Subcomponents of active listening
- Clarifying and perception checking
- Two forms of leading
- Appropriate use of questioning
- Empathetic responsiveness
- Supportive confrontation
- Transitioning and summarizing
Graduates of this seminar will be able to integrate and practice the companioning model of grief care using their new helping skills.
Participants will receive a copy of Counseling Skills for Companioning the Mourner: The Fundamentals of Effective Grief Counseling and The Handbook for Companioning the Mourner.
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Suicide Grief: Companioning the Mourner
Suicide Grief: Companioning the Mourner
This training will enhance your ability to “companion” people impacted by the death of someone to suicide. Suicide is death by just another name, yet it has many special features that demand our knowledge and skills as compassionate caregivers.
Suicide spans the width and breadth of our population, crossing cultures and touching lives from young to old. As one observer noted, “There are volumes written on the subject of suicide, but none are more comprehensive and healing than the messages of Dr. Wolfelt.”
Topics include:
- Guidelines for facilitating suicide grief support groups
- The language of suicide
- Misconceptions
- Special features of suicide grief
- Dimensions of grief response and the caregiver helping role
- Application of Dr. Wolfelt’s six needs of mourning
- Exploring the transformative nature of suicide grief
Participants will receive a copy of Understanding Your Suicide Grief, The Understanding Your Suicide Grief Journal, and The Understanding Your Suicide Grief Support Group Guide.
***The October 16-19, 2023 course is now closed to online registration. To be added to the waitlist, please email info@centerforloss.com.***
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Support Group Facilitator Training
Support Group Facilitator Training
$995.00
Enthusiasm for bereavement support group counseling has burgeoned in recent years. And while training opportunities that advance our understanding of the bereavement process have become more available recently, less work has been done on the support group models of care. This seminar helps fill this gap.
Topics covered will include:
- Support group leadership skills
- Barriers to effectiveness in support group counseling
- Detailed guidelines for operational practices (such as size of group, length, and frequency of sessions)
- Development of ground rules
- Distinguishing open-ended from closed-ended groups
- Elements of pre-screening group members
- Intervening with disruptive group members
- Publicizing your group
Participants will receive a copy of Understanding Your Grief, The Understanding Your Grief Journal, and The Understanding Your Grief Support Group Guide.
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Understanding and Responding to Complicated Mourning
Understanding and Responding to Complicated Mourning
$995.00
Complicated mourning is normal grief that has become stuck or made more complex by various circumstances, including traumatized or marginalized loss, personality or mental health issues, grief overload, and other factors.
Dr. Wolfelt will teach you his model for identifying, understanding, and companioning mourners through their challenging grief journeys. This is an essential training for those wanting to learn specific ways to identify and assist people with the natural complications of grief and mourning. While there is a tendency for some to want to “treat” complicated grief, Dr. Wolfelt will advocate for the compassionate use of a companioning approach to caregiving that has been effectively used at his Center for Loss for many years. If this appeals to you, please make plans now to come join us.
Together we’ll explore important topics such as:
- The history of modern psychology’s understanding of complicated grief
- Understanding the origins of complicated grief
- Complicated grief influences and risk factors
- Identifying complicated grief — symptoms and strategies
- Depression in grief — what’s normal? What’s clinical depression?
- Understanding unmourned or carried grief
- Assessment model for complicated mourning
- Learning about unembarked grief, impasse grief, off-trail grief, and encamped grief
- Companioning people experiencing complicated grief
- Facilitating grievers’ therapeutic work on Dr. Wolfelt’s six needs of mourning
Those who would like to are encouraged to bring a case presentation to assist seminar participants in the learning process.
Participants will receive a copy of When Grief is Complicated and the When Grief is Complicated Educational Supplement
***The December 4-7, 2023 course is now closed to online registration. To be added to the waitlist, please email info@centerforloss.com***
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Helping Children & Adolescents Cope with Grief
Helping Children and Adolescents Cope with Grief
This seminar takes a comprehensive look at a variety of subtopics related to child and adolescent mourning. Come join us and learn from one of North America’s leading grief educators about:
- The major factors influencing the child’s response to loss
- Dimensions of childhood grief and helping roles
- Six central reconciliation needs of childhood mourning
- Tools and techniques used in counseling bereaved children
- Potential inhibitors in the child’s capacity to mourn
- Guidelines for facilitating bereaved child and adolescent support groups
- Special consideration for the adolescent mourner
- Identifying the “detached child”
- Referral criteria and recommended reading lists
Participants will receive a copy of Companioning the Grieving Child: A Soulful Guide for Caregivers.
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Companioning Bereaved Parents Training
Companioning Bereaved Parents
$995.00
This seminar will enhance your capacity to artfully “companion” bereaved parents. When a child dies, it’s as if a deep hole implodes inside the parent. It’s as if the hole penetrates them and leaves them gasping for air. As Nicholas Wolterstoff wrote so honestly in Lament for a Son, “It’s hard to keep one’s footing.” This training will help you provide some “footing” to grieving parents.
Topics will include:
- Understanding attachment influences on the parent-child bond
- Unique influences on parental grief: the whys of the journey
- The special features of miscarriage, stillbirth, infant death, and teen death
- The special features of the death of an adult child
- Application of the tenets of “companioning” as you support bereaved parents
- How to apply Dr. Wolfelt’s six central needs of mourning in the healing process
- Guidelines for facilitating support groups for bereaved parents
- Understanding and respecting the transformative nature of parental grief
Participants will receive a copy of Healing a Parent’s Grieving Heart: 100 Practical Ideas After Your Child Dies and The Handbook for Companioning the Mourner.
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Becoming an Effective Grief Educator
Becoming an Effective Grief Educator
This training will inspire you to develop your public speaking skills surrounding death, grief, and mourning. You are invited to either select content for your presentation from Dr. Wolfelt’s “Ten Touchstones” from his bestseller, Understanding Your Grief, or select a loss-related topic you are passivate about. You will be coached through a variety of sub-topics such as:
· Pillars of Wisdom Surrounding Teaching Adults
· Six Keys When Developing Your Presentations
· What Motivates Adults to Learn From the Speaker
· Pillars of Wisdom for Effective Public Speaking
· Bodily Aspects of Public Speaking
· Securing Potential Sponsors for Your Public Speaking
· Creating an Action Plan: Marketing Your Speaking Engagements
Whether you would like to teach others in your organization about grief and loss, do public speaking in your community, or simply feel more confident passing along information to clients, colleagues, or friends, this workshop will both inspire and prepare you to be an effective grief advocate wherever you go.
Please be aware that this is a participant-focused training where you will be required to make a presentation to your colleagues. This will be done in a supportive atmosphere and you will receive feedback on your public speaking from both your classmates and Dr. Wolfelt.
You will be provided a copy of Understanding Your Grief, in advance and asked to come prepared to make your presentation. We suggest you register soon, as this training often fills quickly and goes to a waiting list.
***The September 18-21, 2023 course in Fort Collins, CO is now closed to online registration. Please email info@centerforloss.com to be added to the waitlist***
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Exploring the Spiritual Dimensions of Death, Grief, and Mourning
Exploring the Spiritual Dimensions of Death, Grief, and Mourning Training
$995.00
Bereavement naturally results in the “dark night of the soul,” writes Dr. Wolfelt. A central need of those in grief is to rejuvenate the spirit, to discover a reason to get one’s feet out of bed in the morning. Dr. Wolfelt will explore
- The importance of “companioning” vs. “treating” the bereaved
- Definitions of spirituality and faith
- Themes of spiritual importance to the bereaved
- Helping the bereaved reconstruct meaning and purpose in life
- A spiritual assessment tool
- Pain and suffering in the context of loss and grief
- Grief as a transformative experience
Plan to join us as we explore the very heart — spirituality — of death, grief, and mourning.
Participants will receive a copy of Dr. Wolfelt’s book Healing Your Grieving Soul.
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Companioning in Special Circumstances: Exploring the Hope and Healing Series
Companioning in Special Circumstances: Exploring the Hope and Healing Series
$995.00
In grief, special loss circumstances often call for special companioning understanding and approaches. In this new training seminar, Dr. Wolfelt will provide a closer look at the specialized grief topics explored in his Words of Hope and Healing Series books.
What are the unique challenges of these types of grief? Which symptoms tend to be more pronounced? How are the six needs of mourning affected, and how can you help mourners feel safe and supported in encountering them? As Dr. Wolfelt presents each topic, join him in discussing these questions and collaborating on answers as well as offering up your pertinent companioning experiences and wisdom.
Specific topics to be covered include:
- Grief overload
- Anticipatory grief
- Complicated grief
- Infertility grief
- Loneliness
- Homicide grief
- Drug-overdose grief
- Anger in grief
- Guilt in grief
The content of this seminar is most appropriate for experienced caregivers looking to further develop their helping skills, graduates of Dr. Wolfelt’s other training courses, and more specialized grief caregivers who work with communities affected by topics covered in the training.
Participants will receive copies of all twelve books in the Words of Hope and Healing Series.
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Companioning the Mourner in Early Grief: Principles and Practices
Companioning the Mourner in Early Grief: Principles and Practices
$995.00
After a significant loss, it is common for those in grief to feel like they are going crazy. The death of someone in our lives is not only devastating, it is disorienting. This important new training (based on popular demand) will be very helpful to those of you that work with people in acute grief. The content will enhance your grief-informed body of knowledge surrounding the “crazy-making symptoms” of grief. The specific focus on early grief and beyond will enhance your helping role from the Companioning Model of grief care developed by Dr. Wolfelt.
In his many years of counseling those in grief, the most common question Dr. Wolfelt is asked is, “Am I going crazy?” Yes, it is normal to feel crazy after loss impacts your life. Yet, what people are really doing is grieving. There is a real art to learning how to normalize the experiences that leave the mourner questioning their sanity without minimizing what they are going through. The pain, too, is normal. It often feels terrible, unbearable, unsurvivable. Yet the pain makes sense because being shattered and broken is a painful experience. This training will enhance you capacity to bring those in grief the compassion and support they need and they deserve.
Participants will learn a proven 6 Step process to help the griever survive the initial weeks and months of loss:
Step 1: Know that your intense, unique grief is normal and necessary.
Step 2: Do whatever you need to do to feel safe and comforted.
Step 3: Acknowledge the illusion of control.
Step 4: Tell the Story
Step 5: Embrace your spirituality
Step 6: Step toward living even as you grieve
These six steps are based on Dr. Wolfelt’s six central reconciliation needs of mourning which he has taught throughout his career. However, because of the uniqueness of early grief, he created these six steps to support those in grief in the first weeks and months following loss. If you support people in early grief this training is ideal for you. Register early as we know this new offering will fill quickly!
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Companioning the Mourner from Hello to Goodbye, Dark to Light, and Backward to Forward
Companioning the Mourner from Hello to Goodbye, Dark to Light, and Backward to Forward
$995.00
Don’t miss the opportunity to join us for this advanced level learning experience as you build your knowledge and skills to provide compassionate support and counsel to people experiencing grief. Dr. Wolfelt often says, “You have to join the mourner where they are, before there is any space for movement.” Come join like-hearted caregivers and learn how to artfully “companion” the mourner into and through three essential truths:
Truth One: You must say hello to say goodbye.
Truth Two: You must make friends with the darkness before you can enter the light.
Truth Three: You must go backward before you can go forward.
Participation in this training will allow you to enhance your understanding of how our culture clings to a number of misconceptions about grief. In addition, you will learn about what Dr. Wolfelt calls “medical-model-treatment introjects” that make the reconciling of grief naturally complicated for many mourners. You will explore and discuss- how the mourner is often told to be strong when she needs to be vulnerable; how the mourner is often told to think positive when she needs to befriend the pain; and how the mourner is often told to seek closure when she really needs is to welcome her natural and necessary grief.
Plan to join us and you’ll learn more about how to honor these three truths— their historical roots as well as the ways in which they have been abandoned and even vilified by contemporary Western culture. You will learn specific companioning skills that allow you to join the mourner and create the necessary space to say hello on the path to goodbye, to affirm the value of darkness before light, and to respect the natural organic instinct to go backward before forward. You will also be invited to enhance your understanding of what Dr. Wolfelt has termed the “Slow Grief Movement” Register early as this training will fill to capacity well in advance.
Participants will receive a copy of The Paradoxes of Mourning: Healing Your Grief with Three Forgotten Truths and The Handbook for Companioning the Mourner: Eleven Essential Principles.
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Living with Meaning and Purpose in Your Life
Living with Meaning and Purpose in Your Life
$995.00
Dr. Wolfelt created this enlightening and empowering retreat seminar to help participants make the most of their unique and natural gifts.
Come join us and explore the spiritual aspects of finding your place in the world. Learn how to marry your values, beliefs, and gifts with how you spend your time each and every day. Explore the concept of living your “calling” and discover how to use that talent which you uniquely came to earth to use. Major themes explored in this seminar:
- Exploring the essence of purpose
- Are you listening to your calling?
- How to live from the inside out
- The benefits of living congruently
- Discovering and using your natural gifts
Participants will receive a copy of One Mindful Day at a Time: 365 Meditations for Living in the Now.
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