Traumatic Grief: Cognitive, Behavioral and Somatic Approaches

Loss is hard.  Grief is hard.  The challenge of accommodating loss and mitigating the strong feelings of grief is difficult with any loss in our lives.  However, it can be significantly compounded when the loss is traumatic and unexpected.  Loss of a loved one to a traumatic experience such as an acute illness (e.g., COVID; heart attack; sepsis), an accident, a natural disaster, or human-caused circumstances can produce an outcome of “traumatic grief”.  People who experience traumatic grief can rapidly cycle between experiences of acute and overwhelming grief to serious posttraumatic stress symptoms of intrusion, avoidance, distorted perception and heightened arousal.  Without intentional treatment designed to address both the grief and trauma simultaneously—just like we have learned is necessary with a co-occurring substance use disorder and traumatic stress—there is the possibility of the loss metastasizing into hard-to-heal complicated bereavement and PTSD.  This short program provides early intervention skills for clinicians to help their clients effectively address loss/grief simultaneously with posttraumatic stress symptoms in a simple, relationally driven, cognitive-behavioral-somatic process that catalyzes safe expression and externalization of grief while lessening posttraumatic stress symptoms.  All these skills are easily adapted into a telehealth delivery.  This is an excellent course for those clinicians working with survivors who have lost a loved one to COVID-19.