AN EXCLUSIVE ONLINE TRAINING

Unmasking the Pain of Loss:

Helping Clients Identify & Work with Grief

With Edy Nathan, MA, LCSWR, CST

Limited CEs are available. Click here for info.

Hello,

When I was 27, in the space of a year, my husband was diagnosed with cancer and died. Navigating through my ordeal, I learned that grief is one of our greatest allies if we know how to approach it.

But it took me a long time to understand that.

Following my devastating loss, I studied grief for years. Ultimately, it led me to become a therapist, specializing in how grief affects people. I’ve made it my life’s mission to get people to talk about grief.

There isn’t a therapist in the world who hasn’t had grief show up in their office since the pandemic.

Yet you might not have recognized the grief sitting across from you.

Instead, you might have seen a client suffocating under the weight of depression. Or fretting with incessant anxiety. Or battling with bouts of uncontrollable anger and rage.

But…Grief is a master of disguise.

It hides itself, and shape-shifts to avoid detection.

It takes a keen understanding to recognize grief’s many faces. And if you can’t see that it’s actually grief you’re dealing with, your clients might stay stuck in seemingly intractable patterns.

That’s why I’ve created this course: to help therapists identify and work with grief in all its forms.

Module 1: Redefining Grief: Curiosity and Rapport

Module 2: A New Lens for Grief Support: The Hero’s Journey as a Roadmap for Grief

Module 3: Refining Grief with the Client: How Personality Types Inform Healing

Module 4: Facing the Non-Linear Aspects of Grief: Creative Tools to Use with Clients

Module 5: Grief Work: Process and Progress

When you know what to look for, and what questions to ask, you can hone in on buried grief. You can learn to engage with grief as something to live with – rather than something to get over.

And this exploration can help your clients peer behind grief’s many masks, revealing hidden sorrows at the root of dysfunction.

This course will give you a framework, practical tools, and clear processes for working through grief with your clients.

Join me for Unmasking the Pain of Loss: Helping Clients Identify & Work with Grief.

Warmly,

Edy Nathan, MA, LCSWR, CST
Academy of Therapy Wisdom

Learn how to unmask pain and loss so you'll be able to:

Recognize grief when it is hiding
Grief loves to play hide-and-seek! It wears many masks, and it’s often mistaken for other things…but when it’s not treated, it persists.

Treat the underlying causes of treatment-resistant symptoms
Often, that seemingly intractable depression, anxiety, anger, or numbness is actually grief in disguise!

Use tools to help you talk about grief
Edy provides several creative, non-invasive ways to ease clients into openness about grief they are experiencing.

Turn grief into an ally in therapy
Look, we don’t “get over” grief…we learn to dance with it, to partner with it and integrate it. It can become a good friend and trusted ally.

“Grief is non-linear and does not follow any one path. Mimicking the unpredictability of life, grief cries out to be heard. When you listen, change occurs.”

– Edy Nathan, MA, LCSWR, CST

Here’s what you’ll receive in

Unmasking the Pain of Loss:

Helping Clients Identify & Work with Grief

1. Five in-depth Unmasking the Pain of Loss teaching modules taught by Edy Nathan

Each module explores new perspectives and tools for working with clients dealing with grief. Edy will share roadmaps and metaphors to help navigate grief, techniques to identify and unmask grief, and the path to creating better endings.

2. Access to the Academy of Therapy Wisdom private membership site

All your course materials in one easy-to-navigate platform, supported by our dedicated customer service team.

3. Downloadable course materials

Recordings, transcripts, and handouts so you can re-watch and dive in deeper at your own pace.

Plus, these special bonuses:

1) Recipe for Good Therapeutic Endings: What They Didn't Teach Us In School - video lesson with Edy

At a time when clients can easily end their relationship with therapeutic work with a text, an email, or ghosting, it is essential for therapists to create boundaries around ending therapeutic relationships. Learn how to set up good endings at the beginning and create agreements to create a safe environment for the client. The result is powerful: Good endings lead to better outcomes for self-determination and differentiation.

2) How to Dance With Your Own Grief - video lesson with Edy Nathan

As a clinician, understanding your own relationship with grief while working with others’ grief is essential. Self-reflection and self-care are often the last pieces of work we make time for. Edy will discuss how to assess our own grief, and the importance of self-assessments around losses and burnout you may have experienced, especially after the pandemic. Use the companion workbook, Working With Grief, with this lesson.

3) From Five Stages to Eleven Phases: The Nonlinear Journey of Grief - video lesson with Edy Nathan

You probably learned there are five stages of grief. Now, Edy will expand your thinking with the Eleven Phases of Grief, created and used clinically by Edy. You will be able to identify the multiple layers grief creates in the mind, psyche, and soul of anyone facing its power and potency. For the first time, grief is given an accurate dimension of experience that can be used with clients to help them normalize their grief experience.

4) Bring Compassion and Creativity to the Parts that Hold Trauma and Grief - An Interview with Lisa Ferentz, LCSW-C DAPA

In this conversation, Edy and Lisa discuss an integrative approach to grief and trauma treatment, emphasizing the importance of working with the body and using creative modalities to achieve deeper healing. They talk about how traditional talk therapy may not be enough to access and process trauma since trauma is not stored in the language part of the brain, but rather in visual and sensory experiences. Understanding this storage mechanism informs the therapeutic approach where music, movement, and metaphor can be effective. They also focus on the importance of building a foundation of safety, trust, and secure attachment.

Lisa Ferentz, LCSW-C DAPA, is best known as an expert on self-destruction and its relationship to trauma. Her approach to grief is through parts work and trauma. Lisa has a theater background and comes at therapy work through an expressive arts lens.

5) Embracing Vulnerability: Navigating the Intersection of Sex, Grief, and Power Dynamics - An Interview with Cyndi Darnell, M.HSc, G.Dip. Couns

In this conversation, Edy and Cyndi discuss the nuanced connections between sex, desire, grief, and power dynamics. They explore the intersection of sex and grief, the impact of cultural narratives on sexual expression, and the role of power dynamics in desire discrepancy. Cyndi explains that sex and grief are two sides of the same coin; both are often difficult topics to discuss and elicit strong emotions. Opening up dialog around sex and grief can empower people to find their voice, express their desires, diminish societal pressures around sexuality, and prevent sexual grief.

Cyndi Darnell (she/her) is a clinical & somatic sexologist and author of Sex, When You Don’t Feel Like It:The Truth About Mismatched Libido & Rediscovering Desire. Cyndi supports individuals, couples and polycules navigating relationships and sexual difficulties. Originally from Australia, she’s now based in New York City.

6) Acknowledging Collective Grief: Empowering Communities to Share Their Pain - An Interview with Nathalie Edmond, PsyD

In this conversation, Edy and Nathalie discuss the losses experienced during the pandemic and ongoing racial stress and trauma as examples of collective grief. They talk about the importance of acknowledging and validating grief, particularly for marginalized communities who carry intergenerational trauma. They explore the challenges of addressing and expressing rage that stems from accumulated grief, and how to disrupt the urgency, shaming, and perfectionism culture by creating a compassionate space for dialogue and curiosity in navigating the complexities of grief and trauma. They emphasize the importance of community support, racial affinity groups, vulnerability, and overcoming the fear of being rejected when addressing collective grief.

Nathalie Edmond, PsyD, RYT-500 is a licensed clinical psychologist and experienced yoga teacher who takes an integrated perspective to her consultations and trainings, grounded in multiculturalism and intersectional feminism. Dr. Edmond believes that transformation happens when we integrate mind-body-spirit and have an embodied dialogue. She runs the Antiracism Revolution community, where members have access to yoga, workshops, live streams, discussion, and resources. Nathalie’s work focuses on DEI, healing racial trauma, and helping people bring an anti-racist and mindful lens to all they do.

7) Interview with Ruth Cohn, MFT

Ruth Cohn, MFT, is a therapist who works with survivors of trauma and neglect, and their intimate partners and families, to build relationships. An avid student of trauma and neuroscience, Ruth works with couples and individuals to work with trauma and sexuality through therapy, the body, and brain training. Ruth is also a certified sex therapist and Board Certified in Neurofeedback.

8) Healing Without Narrative: The Movement of Grief and Loss - An Interview with Narayan Helen Liebenson

In this conversation, Edy and Narayan discuss the impact of personal experiences – the impact of the past on the present – that shape one’s understanding of life and spirituality. The conversation delves into the transformative power of grief, even as one loses relationships, loses their way, and leaves behind family expectations. Narayan shares about her training as a meditation teacher and the importance of being present in the moment. Edy and Narayan explore the concept of healing without relying solely on narrative and instead embracing one’s allies and personal strengths, along with stillness, movement, and the present moment.

Narayan Helen Liebenson is an Insight Meditation Society Emeritus Guiding Teacher, and has been a teacher at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center since its inception in 1985. She has studied in the United States and Asia with meditation masters in the Theravada, Zen, and Tibetan traditions. Narayan is the author and illustrator of Life as Meditation and The Magnanimous Heart.

9) Working With Grief Workbook

From the Eleven Phases of Grief, to lists of emotions and feelings and diagrams you can use with your clients, you have access to this colorful and easy-to-use workbook.The downloadable workbook shows you how to use the Hero’s Journey and Archetypes as ways to help clients speak to their experience of grief and move them out of stuckness.

10) Notes to Self Journal

A monthly journal with prompts for self-reflection, and lists of words to help clients identify their feelings. Available to you as a downloadable PDF.

11) Two Free Chapters from It's Grief

Receive two downloadable PDF chapters from Edy’s book, It’s Grief. Included are Chapter 4: Listen to Your Grief and Chapter 8: The Eleven Phases of Grief.

In Unmasking the Pain of Loss, you'll dive into these areas of grief:

MODULE 1

Redefining Grief: Curiosity and Rapport

Grief is defined and expanded upon as a response to something that is lost and cannot be retrieved, a yearning and hunger that causes a void that is difficult to understand. Edy shares a new perspective on grief; one that demystifies grief by inviting its power into your sessions, and presents our relationship with grief as a dance to be defined and redefined over time.