Gestalt Workshop: Working with Loss and Grief – Event Description:
“Nevertheless, the matter of death really itches us. It itches all the time, it’s always with us, scratching at some internal door, emitting murmurs, barely audible, right behind the threshold of consciousness. Hidden and masked, it seeps in various symptoms, is the source of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.” – Irvin Yalom
As therapists, we encounter “the matter of death” not only when we work with a dying patient. Our patients, who “are supposed to live”, also bring this topic in a more or less direct way. As long as we are busy, consciously or unconsciously, with our own fear of death, we are not able to hear our clients in their despair, helplessness, and suffering. Being preoccupied with ourselves, we are less available to our clients.
This workshop will give you the opportunity to look into your own mortality, to examine your fears, and thus broaden your ability to accompany patients in their existential struggles.
Working with Loss and Grief – Workshop Goals:
- Deepening awareness of one’s own processes related to loss and grief.
- Finding hope within oneself in the face of the inevitability of life’s end.
- Acquiring tools to be more present in the face of a client’s despair/hope and to follow their process.
- Understanding the mechanisms of contact modification in people experiencing grief, including anticipatory grief.
- Learning about the dynamics of working with a terminally ill patient and their family.
- Deepening knowledge and understanding of the accompaniment process in grief.
- Increasing awareness of one’s own resources concerning experiencing loss and accommodating patients’ loss.
Working with Loss and Grief is a workshop based on the experience of one’s own losses. It is recommended that participants are not in an active grieving process after a loss (up to 6 months).
The workshop is aimed at psychotherapists and therapists in training, wishing to familiarize themselves with the topic of death, working with chronically ill patients and their families, or therapists wanting to deepen their understanding of the grieving process. It counts towards the required hours of so-called free choice, necessary in the Gestalt certification process. The number of places is limited.
