Working with Loss and Bereavement for Therapists and Counsellors
This training has been designed for qualified counsellors and therapists, those in training, and professionals working in therapeutic settings who want to expand or refresh their knowledge and skills when working with clients dealing with bereavement or loss.
Feel unprepared to work with grieving clients?
Most counselling and therapy training programmes offer only brief, outdated coverage of grief – yet loss and bereavement are huge themes throughout client work. This course fills that gap with practical, skills-focused training delivered by experienced practitioners who work in this field every day.
What You’ll Gain
- Understanding Grief from a Therapeutic Perspective
- Define grief in ways that support your clinical work
- Understand what grief is, why we need to grieve, and how the grieving process unfolds
- Learn what “grief work” actually means in practice
Theories as Practical Tools
- Explore different models of grieving – not just as academic concepts, but as practical tools you can use with clients
- Understand how these models help both you and your client navigate different aspects of the grief journey
- Learn how to apply theoretical frameworks in real therapeutic situations
Recognising and working with complicated Grief
- Understand what complicated grief is and how it presents in clients
- Learn to assess and identify when grief becomes complicated
- Gain practical skills and techniques for working therapeutically with complicated grief
Practical Skills and Techniques
- Receive pragmatic tools and approaches you can use immediately in your practice
- Learn from real client examples and case studies
- Gain specific techniques for working safely and sensitively with the emotional intensity of grief work
- Understand how to provide the right support at the right time
Deepening Your Understanding
- Explore the impact of bereavement on individuals and the factors that explain why people grieve differently
- Understand different aspects of bereavement, including attachment style, sudden and traumatic death, and anticipatory grief
- Explore bereavement in the context of faith and culture
Professional Development
- Reflect on the additional challenges when working psychologically with bereaved clients, including boundaries, transference and counter-transference, and self-disclosure
- Understand vicarious trauma and develop your own self-care strategies
- Learn from a trainer with extensive real-world experience in bereavement support
Who Should Attend
Therapists, Counsellors, Psychologists, and talking therapists, including volunteers.
Key Facts
National Counselling Society (NCS) quality checked course – Cruse Loss and Bereavement Training is Quality Checked by the National Counselling Society (NCS). This course alone is not a route to the Accredited Register, nor does it fully equip a graduate to practice as a qualified counsellor
- Course length: 2 ½ hours
- Deliver: online
- Course materials: PDF of slides available, certificate of attendance
- Courses are not recorded to protect attendee confidentiality
“Thank you for the training. Everything was put forward in a way that really worked for me. Despite being a therapist for twenty+ years. Always so much more to learn! I learnt something new from it which proved to be very fruitful with the client I saw immediately after the training.”