WHAT’S IN THE CREATIVE GRIEF SUPPORT CERTIFICATION COURSE?

Creative Grief Studio offers you a four month interactive learning experience that is rich, supportive, and experiential. You will receive:

• • Online grief training using interactive teaching tools such as live weekly meet ups, recorded demos, practice sessions with your peers, experiential heART-making guided by CGS team members, and reflective journaling. 
  • Guidance and support from our teaching team and guest faculty members, like Dr. Kim Manning, Dr. Lorraine Hedtke, Dr. Darcy Harris, & others, who share contemporary and perspective-shifting grief research.
  • Practical approaches for helping clients in your grief counseling / support practice to create comfort, hope, and meaning after loss. 
  • Confidence for integrating Creative Grief Studio’s theories and methods with your own skills to support people struggling with different kinds of grief, including incorporating a social justice lens when exploring grief experiences.

Creative Grief Studio’s Course Goals:

1. 1. Familiarize students and faculty with one another and the online classroom.
   2. Review core themes such as grief as a social meaning process, shame-resilience, agency, belonging, and hope.
   3. Learn the role of the support relationship and how to nurture with creative grief support.
   4. Examine current assumptions and misconceptions regarding mainstream grief theories.
   5. Study the effects of shame and how to build shame resilience.
   6. Identify creative ways to support greater range and flexibility in the experience, understanding, and expression of grieving emotions.
   7. Explore the relationships between grief and the body, and learn creative ways to help grieving clients to find ways to embody agency during and after loss.
   8. Discover the comforting philosophy and deeply respectful approach of facilitating re-membering conversations. Learn to use this approach those grieving the death of a person with whom they had a difficult or abusive relationship, or when the death was traumatic.
   9. Investigate the nature of trauma, its potential effects, how to know when your client needs specialist trauma support.
   10. Discuss grieving in community, and with a social justice lens, explore ways to provide support as grief alters a person’s social world.
   11. Grapple with the ethics, values, choices, and aesthetics for your practice, including exploring topics like advanced planning, when death is near, and finding your boundaries and collaboration interests.
   12. Learn the differences between therapy and coaching and other types of practice, how to discern whether your client needs more specialist support.

Creative Grief Studio’s Certification Assessment Preparation

For those who wish to proceed with certification assessment, we’ll review the requirements for certification, and help you to prepare logistically, emotionally, and academically for your certification submissions.

WHAT’S NOT IN THE CREATIVE GRIEF SUPPORT CERTIFICATION COURSE?

Religious doctrine

We do not teach any particular religious doctrine. Death and grief can be deeply spiritual experiences, so we welcome conversations about spirituality in this course. We expect all participants to respect the diverse spiritual and religious perspectives shared within our classroom.

Working with children

Our course is designed for and focused on work with adolescents and adults. If, however, you work with children, and understand child development, the grief theory we present is relevant. Further, you’ll learn creative activities easily adaptable to support grieving children, as well as building your own skills for creating new creative activities that fit for your practice.

The Law of Attraction

We reject the “Law of Attraction,” and other ideas that suggest our thoughts cause good or bad events in our lives. We believe these ideas are counterproductive and can contribute to pain and shame experienced by those in grief.

Foundational helping skills

We select participants who already have helping skills, such as listening, empathy, and rapport-building. Creative Grief Studio builds upon and goes beyond those foundational skills, focusing on advanced grief-specific theory and creative heART-making.

Business development skills

Whether you wish to be self-employed or already work within an existing organization, business development is NOT the focus of this coursework. We will not cover topics such as marketing and business organization.