Heavy-Hearted at Every Stage: Exploring Grief and Loss Across the Lifespan [1 CEU]

Description

Grief is a complex issue that has a dramatic impact on people throughout the lifespan. While grief is a universal experience, losses can range from death or suicide of a loved one, deportation of family members, trauma, life transitions, and other losses. Furthermore, the presentation of grief changes throughout our lives; and, our stage of development may provide us with unique strengths in and impediments to our ability to grieve our losses. Using a developmental perspective and relevant theory regarding grief, counselors can better understand the various manifestations for grief among their clients/students/supervisees and for themselves. Differences in cultural beliefs, perspectives, and practices contribute to the complexity and variability of understanding grief experiences within and across cultural groups. Special attention is paid to the unique vulnerabilities and resiliencies of children and adolescents, as well as older adults.

This presentation provides theoretical frameworks for understanding and counseling grief throughout the life span; introduces creative, theory-based activities for grief counseling; and discusses suggestions for practitioners’, supervisors’, and counselor educators’ own grief work.

Presenters:

Dr. Aubrey Uresti, Dr. Suzy Thomas and Dr. Laura Heid

The video in this course was recorded from a live presentation.