A204 Grief and the Quest for Meaning

The death of someone close to us, especially when it's traumatic, can disrupt our beliefs about the meaning of life. This course will present grief therapy as a means of helping clients reconstruct meaning in their lives. You'll learn how to listen beneath the story clients tell themselves and others about their loss to help them accommodate the harsh realities of loss and still find the seeds for restoring stability growing anew. Together it explores the latest diagnostic and therapeutic procedures for treating grief.

Meet The Instructor

Robert Neimeyer, Ph.D., is the author of 18 books, including Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss, and Lessons of Loss: A Guide to Coping. He is professor and director of psychotherapy in the department of psychology at the University of Memphis.

Course Contents

Session 1: "Staging" Grief • Stage and task models of grieving • Practical criticisms of traditional grief theories • Criteria for clinically useful grief theory

Session 2: Human Beings as Meaning-Makers • The constructed nature of life • Identity and self-narrative • Profound loss and narrative disruptions • Clinician's toolbox: Chapters of our lives

Session 3: The Biology of Bereavement • Symptoms of separation: An attachment perspective • Mourning and mortality • Neurobiology of traumatic memory: The narrative nature of traumatic memories

Session 4: Complicated Grief: Conceptualization and Diagnosis • Pathways through grief: Counterintuitive findings • Loss and the insistent search for meaning • Chronic sorrow and unrelenting loss • Signs and symptoms of complicated grief • Attachment disorders and the risk of complication • Clinician's toolbox: Criteria for a new diagnosis

Session 5: Loss and the Reconstruction of Meaning • Shattering of the assumptive world • The relational self: Constructing the continuing bond • The Dual Process model of bereavement • Post-traumatic growth and meaning-making • Self-transformation • Narrative revision • The construction of coherence

Session 6: A Meaning-Reconstruction Approach • Identifying therapeutic tasks • Using "quality terms" to anchor understanding and foster growth • Extending "frozen metaphors" • Implicit meanings and pregnant possibilities • Establishing a progressive focus

Learning Objectives

1. Describe deficiencies in traditional theories of grief
2. Identify signs of traumatic disruption in the client's meaning system
3. Create narrative strategies to facilitate adaptation to loss
4. Apply metaphoric listening to understanding client's meaning of loss
5. Conduct a meaning-reconstruction interview