Dr. Janina Fisher, Ph.D.
Greetings
What could you do with a new approach to processing grief?
When I originally was thinking of this course, I wanted to focus on the grief we, as a collective and as individuals, were experiencing as a result of the COVID pandemic. From the loss of person-to-person contact to the loss of loved ones, we have felt alone and cut off from our communities.
Now, the war in Ukraine compounds the world’s pandemic grief. Witnessing the losses caused by the invasion of Ukraine has been heartbreaking even from a distance of thousands of miles away.
As a species, we are dealing with so much grief, and more types of grief than ever before: social injustice, the environmental crisis, mass shootings, unrest with the Supreme Court, job loss, housing instability, isolation during the pandemic, and hostility within our communities.
The burden of our losses is heavy.
Western culture’s tendency is to bypass or avoid grief, or to become preoccupied with it and have it be impossible to let go of. Neither of these approaches helps us to be in relationship with grief.
My approach to working with grief is to develop a relationship with grief. I will show you the difference between befriending grief versus mourning.
In Living with the Legacy of Loss, we will take a mindfulness-based somatic approach to grief and loss which:
- Takes advantage of the body’s resources to achieve optimal levels of sadness — not too much or too little
- Increases resilience in the face of loss and increases our ability to tolerate grief
- Diminishes the effects of isolation and loneliness
- Understands grief as a whole-body experience
- Helps us ride the roller coaster of emotions from numb to excruciating and emerge on the other side
Using a somatic approach, you will learn how to change the relationship with grief from one of intense intrusive feelings, to being able to relate to them as a body and emotional experience without words. You and your clients can learn to mindfully follow the waves of emotion as physical sensations needing only completion and letting go.
We are living in a time of significant loss. We need no more “proof” that grief is a central issue in our lives, and that there is a greater need for how to process it.
Please join me in Living with the Legacy of Loss to discover a new approach to the centuries-old challenge of grief.
Four Recorded 2-hour SESSIONS with Dr. Janina Fisher
Learn directly from Janina in these recorded interactive webinar sessions.
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Living with the Legacy of Loss course takehomes
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Here’s everything that’s included:
Living with the Legacy of Loss
The Effects of Grief and Loss
In this webinar, we will look at the acute and long-term effects of loss identified by research in an effort to understand how our approaches to grief work can address both the physiological and psychological responses to loss. We’ll cover:
- Immediate consequences of bereavement
- How traditions of mourning and remembrance support resolution
- Understanding the many effects of grief: guilt, numbing, relief, cognitive impairment, sadness, detachment
- The role of self-compassion
- The role of social support and fellow mourners
Complicated versus Non-complicated Bereavement
In our second webinar, we will address the causes of complicated bereavement versus the factors that lead to adaptation and resilience in the context of loss. We’ll discuss how the therapist can support clients in moving through grief in these ways:
- Avoidance versus rumination
- Dysregulation and its consequences
- Boundaries versus self-disclosure during bereavement
- Helping clients learn how to grieve
- Balancing pain and comfort
Riding the Waves
In Webinar 3, we’ll learn about various ways clients can learn to notice, observe, and track the emotions of grief. Clients are often afraid of being hit by a wave of grief, and avoid people and situations that might evoke “the wave.” The fear of grief leads to complicated bereavement, as does the over-preoccupation with grief. By adopting a mindfulness approach, grief becomes less frightening and overwhelming, making it easier to resolve. This webinar includes:
- How the emotional experience of grief differs from other emotions
- Developing a mindful relationship to the grief
- Learning to observe rather than be overwhelmed by it
- Noticing grief as waves of emotion: how emotion gets stuck
- Tracking the physical sensations in waves of grief
- “Riding the waves” of grief
Befriending Grief
In this final webinar, we will work with the instinctual tendencies to stay connected to those we have lost, no matter at what cost. Acceptance and letting go are often the most challenging aspects of bereavement. Guilt and anger impede our accepting that the loss is real and it is final. We cannot ‘fight the gods’ to undo what happened. But we can learn to accept and befriend the grief. We can develop a friendly relationship to our memories of lost loved ones and also to the feelings about them that arise in the here-and-now, no matter how long it’s been. We can even let our feelings about them change and grow over the years.
- Mindful noticing rather than verbal description of emotional experience
- Breathing through each wave of grief
- Learning how to let go of pain
- Acceptance
- Moving on without guilt or shame
HERE’S WHAT YOU WILL LEARN INSIDE:
Living with the Legacy of Loss
Meet your presenter
Janina Fisher, Ph.D.
Janina Fisher, Ph.D. is the Assistant Educational Director of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, a former instructor at Harvard Medical School, and an international expert on the treatment of trauma and dissociation. She is the author of Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Self-Alienation (2017) and Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: a Workbook for Survivors and Therapists (2021). Best known for her work on integrating newer neurobiologically-informed interventions into traditional psychotherapy approaches, she is the co-author with Pat Ogden of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Attachment and Trauma (2015).
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