Robert A. Neimeyer – Grief Therapy Masterclass: Advanced Skills in Working Through Loss

This four-video series offers the opportunity to sit in sessions alongside Robert Neimeyer and Carolyn Ng, to deepen your understanding of the depth and breadth of grief in its many forms. It will also prepare you to better appreciate the many nuances that accompany grieving depending on who was lost, the nature of the loss, and who the bereaved was and reamains in its shadow. 

Neimeyer and Ng’s clinical demonstrations focus on seven unique individuals whose losses are as varied as the circumstances of their lives before and after those losses.

Guy, along with his wife, lost two of their children in traumatic and traumatizing circumstances only years apart. Having barely recovered from the motor vehicle death of his son, Guy’s wounds have been tragically re-opened, accompanied by intrusive thoughts and images related to the more recent accidental drowning death of his daughter.

Christina and her husband were living in the Philippines when COVID descended on the world. Unable to travel home to Europe to give birth to triplets conceived through fertility treatments, the couple lost two of their three babies — one in utero, and another, Melina, post-partum after contracting a deadly bacterium from the equipment used to express Christina’s breastmilk. The remaining child, Zoe, suffered irremediable brain damage from the same bacteria that claimed the life of Melina.

Loretta, age 80, is stuck in the aftermath of the loss of her husband of 56 years. Having never lived alone in her life, she now bravely navigates her inner terrain with Neimeyer in a medical auditorium in front of 200 professionals.

Lisa’s only child, Ray Ray was murdered in a convenience store shortly before she began therapy with Neimeyer’s colleague, Carolyn Ng, who we join in their third session. There she struggles to understand why, in the absence of any seeming motive, he was killed and how to move forward in life now that she no longer identifies as a mother.

Erica is reeling in the aftermath of her military husband’s suicide death. Together with Neimeyer, she attempts to understand who she was prior to his death, and who she now wants to become.

Ingrid, now 40, lost her mother, someone she perceived as an indestructible force, to cancer over two decades before. Losing that “center of my universe” when only 14, Ingrid long believed that time would heal her wounds, and that she could simply lock away her pain in an emotionally impenetrable box inside her.

Carolyn is stuck in both the event story and unfinished business surrounding the loss of her father to COVID during the pandemic, under circumstances where she could not be with him. She carries forward traumatizing memories of his death.

Watching Neimeyer with this fascinating and challenging array of grieving clients, you will gain unique insights and strategies for:

• freeing bereaved clients from the three core areas of fixation described above
• implementing three fundamental tasks of therapy with grieving clients including bracing (supporting them in the face of a story that is eroded the foundation of their life), pacing (guide them along without re-traumatizing them by hurrying) and facing (prolonged exposure while we accompany them)
• re-weaving the strands of grief narrative into a coherent and adaptive whole, including the external narrative (what’s actually happened), the internal narrative (what’s happening within), and the reflexive narrative (the attempt to make meaning of the loss)
• employing a number of experiential therapeutic techniques including empty chair, visualization, journaling, letter writing, analogic dialog, and restorative re-telling of the narrative of loss

So, join Robert Neimeyer and Carolyn Ng as they teach you how to harness the healing power of responsive presence and therapeutic versatility to guide your grieving clients from the shadows of their loss to the light of healing, growth, and renewal.