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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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.

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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 

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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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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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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.

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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:

As Dr. Wolfelt often says, “Depression is a primary hallmark of the grief experience.” This seminar will explore a variety of important topics related to the depression of grief. Dr. Wolfelt will examine how it is often normal and necessary to experience reactive depression after a significant loss. However, depression can sometimes be totally disabling and evolve into clinical depression, resulting in a blocked path to healing. Come join us for a much-needed comprehensive examination of this critically important topic.

An outline of the course includes:

• Introduction: the importance of the topic
• Brief review of “normal” symptoms of grief
• Exploring the sadness of grief
• Defining clinical depression and its sub-types
• Understanding the differential diagnosis of clinical depression and normal depressive grief
• Introduction to “complicated” mourning in relationship to depression
• Understanding authentic mourning as “treatment”: the six needs of mourning
• Introduction to the concept of “carried grief”
• Overview of biomedical treatments and psychotherapy approaches to care
• Companioning the depressed mourner in five areas (physical, cognitive, emotional, social, spiritual)
• Reconciliation and the transformative nature of grief

Participants will receive a copy of The Depression of Grief: Coping with Your Sadness and Knowing When to Get Help.

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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 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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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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