TRAINING &
WORKSHOPS

GRIEF SUPPORT GROUP — FACILITATOR TRAINING
SERVES: Community leaders, peers, lay people, clergy, clinicians, therapists with zero to intermediate counselling skills
LENGTH: ½ Day, 1 full Day, or 2 full days, depending on training needs

This workshop trains facilitators to run Sharing Groups. Sharing groups are different from information groups which require a great deal of knowledge and teaching acumen. Sharing Groups foreground relationship, closeness, trust, and growth. Grief topics arise naturally as the group finds its way into the important themes without the need for an agenda. This requires less grief expertise and a lot more listening and leadership skills. Emphasis is therefore on facilitation skills and group development dynamics.

Topics covered include:

- Therapeutic Goals of Groups, types of groups
- The Helpful Facilitator/co-facilitator
- Basic Group Dynamics – what to watch out for, how to nurture it
- Grief Theory – the basics and what really works
- Complicated Grief and Trauma – what you need to know
- How to run a group: check-in, sharing and check-out
- Managing conflict and interpersonal challenges
- Photo sharing, art, music and writing exercises that can deepen sharing
- Closing rituals

GRIEF COUNSELLING — CLERGY, PASTORAL VISITOR, & VOLUNTEER TRAINING
SERVES: Clergy, lay people, and volunteers with zero to intermediate counselling skills
LENGTH: 1 or 2 full days

This hands-on training is designed to build competency and confidence while counselling and supporting people in grief. Participants will learn practical and immediately applicable techniques for helping people with normal and complicated grief. Spiritual and psychological themes in grief will be addressed and strategies offered for assisting bereaved families and individuals with guilt, doubt, anger at God, addiction, isolation, dark thoughts of non-being, as well as methods for supporting survivors of suicide and sudden-loss. Participants will receive a Certificate of Completion.

Topics covered include:

- Ten Essential Grief Theories/ideas that will improve conversations
- How to distinguish between depression and bereavement and what to do about it
- Spiritual and religious themes/problems/challenges during grief and loss; guilt, doubt, emptiness
- Complicated Grief — how to assess and respond
- Talking with children, teens, and families about death and grief
- Having difficult discussions around Medically Assisted Death and Terminal Sedation
- Resources and referral information

DEATH SENTENCES — TALKING ABOUT THE HARD STUFF WHEN PEOPLE ARE FEELING SOFT
SERVES: Clinicians, therapists, pastoral counsellors, clergy, or frontline caregivers with intermediate to excellent counselling skills
LENGTH: ½ DAY

An angry family that feels they have been betrayed by the healthcare system, a husband who doesn’t want to tell his wife about his terminal diagnosis, a terrible piece of healthcare news that you have to share…

Sometimes we are called on to deliver bad news to someone we love or engage an anxious family about prognosis and future possibilities. These conversations can be frightening and complicated. We typically respond to our fears in one of two ways: deliver the news dispassionately from a safe neutral clinical position, or charge in with a sense of duty to lay out the fact. In both cases, we have failed to provide compassionate client-centered care. Talking about the hard stuff is hard, but not impossible. This training equips participants to navigate these tough conversations with clarity, purpose, and empathy.

CARE FOR THE DYING — IN A DEATH-DEFYING CULTURE
SERVES: Support workers, volunteers, caregivers, nurses, and clinicians
LENGTH: ½ day or 1 full day

In our culture dying is considered a battle, death is denied and misunderstood, and grief is often quite more intense and longer lasting than many people feel willing to endure. In an age that believes that death nothing more than the final few hours of organ failure, caregivers are hard-pressed to find opportunities for deeper conversation about existential, relational and/or spiritual themes connected to our mortality. Oftentimes, basic discussions about prognosis are avoided. Frightened families can blockade hospital rooms, demand only “positive” talk from caregivers or forbid any form of discussion that may be clinically perceived as “giving up.” As a result, plain talk about death to the dying and their families can be a tricky business.

Luckily, there are ways to have these difficult conversations — pathways toward dialogue that can help families and the dying themselves to reconfigure their thoughts and belief about dying and death. As we move from detachment, caution and avoidance to closeness, authenticity and presence, the issues and obstacles to communication dissolve away. This workshop provides the basic theories, tools and insights that will equip clinicians and caregivers to feel relaxed and trust the moment in the face of defended families, the anxieties of the dying and the uncertainty, mystery and suffering of the process of death and grief.

INCONSOLABLE — ADVANCED INTERVENTION STRATEGIES FOR TRAUMATIC GRIEF
SERVES: Clinicians, therapists, pastoral counsellors and clergy, frontline caregivers with intermediate to excellent counselling skills
LENGTH: ½ day or 1 full day

Increasingly, we are understanding the long-term effects of traumatic death upon survivors. Most people exposed to a traumatic death have transient traumatic stress symptoms from which 45%–80% recover within a year. That said, it is believed 33% remain symptomatic for 3 years or longer with greater risk of secondary problems impacting quality of life and relationships.

The profound confusion, powerlessness and horror of traumatic loss can leave people feeling isolated and shocked; unable to process the experience or find a way of making meaning out of the chaos. This workshop is designed to increase basic interventional skills and knowledge in regards to grievers who have lost a loved-one to a traumatic death such as suicide, murder, war, sudden loss, traffic deaths, workplace deaths and disasters.

Topics covered include:

- Impact of Unnatural Death on Individuals, Families and Communities
- Traumatic Grief theories old and new
- Complicating factors and Increasing Risk and Intensity of Grief Response
- Creating safety through the therapeutic relationship
- Dissociation
- Working with children and teens
- Essential Trauma-informed interventional skills

REFLECTIVE SHARING CIRCLE — A CLINICAL RESILIENCY TOOL
SERVES: Clinicians, frontline workers, Nurses, Healthcare professionals, Community-Based Orgs
LENGTH: ½ DAY

It has been my experience that staff working in milieus which include consistent encounters with grieving, bereaved and/or traumatized individuals benefit greatly from a reflective sharing experience which takes seriously the impact of their work on their mental and spiritual well-being. It is important to remember that our care for troubled and grieving clients has three levels of relation and impact: our client’s world, our personal/vocational world and the vocational world we share with colleagues. Any training modality concerning trauma and loss should therefore deal with these three areas; care of client, care of colleagues, care of self. 

The Experience: Active group reflection allows clinicians and caregivers to share at deeper levels than we do in our day to work lives. Although informal sharing can help keep us moving through challenges, an intentional active reflective process creates deeper and more powerful opportunities for healing and growth. 

Communication is a big piece of the puzzle, and the facilitated reflection process itself engages staff and evokes increased collegiality, understanding, integration and awareness. Every effort will be made to keep living human relationships in sight as we consider our person to person care. We are people doing very hard and costly work. That is always the fact that we keep at the center of the conversation. Reflection allows each to work at their own level of awareness and the process is constructed such that all members of the staff can benefit. Oddly enough, in this kind of care, who we are in the moment is more important than the technique we use.

Groups who have used Reflective Rounds have reported the following:

- Increased awareness and understanding of anxiety, coping, boundaries, and grief styles as they pertain to their personal vocational work and the ongoing support of clients.
- Gains of new practical skills to assist them in helping troubled, in-crisis, or traumatized individuals and families seeking their assistance in any environment and at any time.
- An increased sense of collegiality and understanding.

COMPASSION FATIGUE — WHEN WORK TRAUMA COMES HOME
SERVES: Frontline professionals, nurses, clinicians, physicians, caregivers, therapists, and counsellors
LENGTH: ½ day or 1 full day

Helping and responding to people who have suffered trauma or an intense personal crisis can be rewarding but comes at a great cost. Sustained caregiving with individuals experiencing unthinkable loss can lead to Compassion Fatigue. Compassion fatigue is a serious workplace hazard for anyone in the caregiving business. It is a combination of burn-out and vicarious traumatization. Burn-out occurs when caregivers become overwhelmed and emotionally depleted from day to day encounters with clients and challenging systems. Vicarious traumatization occurs when we hear about, learn about, or witness events which are threatening to the lives and well-being of others or ourselves. Modern research suggests that compassion fatigue hurts home life the most, and can lead to serious mental health, relational and somatic illnesses. 

This workshop includes education, dialogue, sharing, and the delivery of practice tools to help caregivers thrive in high-stress work environments.

TALKING ‘TIL IT HURTS — HOW TO ATTEND TO PEOPLE IN PAIN
SERVES: Caregivers, community-based leaders, volunteers
LENGTH: ½ DAY OR 1 FULL DAY

Talking with people in the midst of chronic illness, grief, sudden loss, suicide and other painful experiences can often be a challenge. Sometimes they are silent and unreachable, other times enraged and overwhelmed, or else defended and pretending to be “okay.” This workshop equips listeners, helpers, supporters and peers to enter into very difficult dialogues about extreme suffering with a sense of deep empathy, presence and clarity of purpose.

Topics covered include:

- How to identify the way our anxiety interrupts good listening
- Working with angry people
- Working with DissociatioN
- How to resist the urge to fix, solve, soothe, pacify, and advise
- Tactics for great listening that will deepen your conversations
- How to undo aloneness and seek closeness through curiosity
- Non-verbals and word cues—being attuned to the micro moments
- Following emotional trails
- Starting, sustaining and closing a conversation
- How to deal with conflict and threatening people

As well as teaching and theory, participants have the opportunity to engage each other about their own experiences of helpful and unhelpful listening and reflect on how these experiences impact their care.