Complex and Traumatic Loss: Fostering Healing and Resilience

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

9:00am - 12:00pm CT

Live and Interactive Webinar via Zoom

3 CEUs

In this workshop for all mental health professionals, Froma Walsh will present a research-informed, resilience-oriented practice approach to help individuals, couples, and families who have suffered profound loss. She will address the impact of complex and traumatic situations with ambiguous and disenfranchised loss; deaths in accidents, violence, suicide, or overdose; collective trauma events; complicated family dynamics; and reverberations of past loss in life pursuits, other relationships, and across generations.

Walsh will provide core principles with case examples to facilitate clients’ meaning making; strengthen relational support; and tap social, cultural, and spiritual resources. This approach fosters healing and resilience in pathways forward to live and love beyond loss.

Learning Objectives

1. Participants will learn research-informed best practices with complicated bereavement, critiquing faulty and pathologizing assumptions of “normal/abnormal” grief to address diversity, complexity, and social disparities in situations of profound and traumatic loss.

2. Participants will learn core principles in systemic practice with shattering losses, expanding focus from individual grief symptoms to attend to relational, couple/family, social, systemic/structural, and cultural/spiritual influences in suffering and in healing and resilience.

3. Participants will gain useful practice guidelines to address situations of sudden and untimely death; ambiguous and disenfranchised loss; violent and traumatic deaths (e.g. gun violence, overdose, suicide); and collective trauma and loss in community disasters.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Froma WalshMSW, PhD, is the Mose and Sylvia Firestone Professor Emerita in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago. She is also Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Family Health. Dr. Walsh is an internationally respected clinical scholar and a foremost authority on family resilience. Integrating developmental, relational, social, cultural, and spiritual perspectives, her resilience-oriented systemic approach with individuals, couples, and families fosters healing and positive adaptation. She is past editor of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy and past president of the American Family Therapy Academy. Dr. Walsh is the recipient of many honors for distinguished contributions to theory, research, and practice, including the Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association and awards from the American Family Therapy Academy, the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, the American Orthopsychiatric Association, and the Society for Pastoral Counseling Research. She is a frequent speaker and consultant internationally, and her books have been translated into many languages. With over 120 scholarly publications, her recent books are Strengthening Family Resilience (2016) and Complex and Traumatic Loss: Fostering Healing and Resilience (2023

ABOUT THE EVENT

This workshop will take place via Zoom. Access information will be shared via email at least 24 hours prior to the start of the workshop. The workshop will not be recorded.