Transforming Grief & Loss: Strategies for Your Clients to Heal the Past, Change the Present and Transform the Future – Ligia M Houben

This powerful recording offers techniques and tools to improve your client’s ability to get back to living and show them the steps they need to regain positive living. You will walk away with a new understanding of the power of transformative thought and action, and how it can impact the lives of your clients.

Ligia Houben, grief and loss expert, will demonstrate tools that can help your clients find meaning, achieve breakthroughs, and learn how to build the life they want on the other side of loss or transition. You will take with you a roadmap that can help your clients cope with the grief that may arise when facing the loss of their job, after leaving their homeland, confronting the death of a loved one, or embarking on a new life after a divorce or break-up. The techniques are simple and systematic, easy to teach clients, and will heal grief and renew life again for the client. The purpose of this recording is to bring awareness to the clinician in how to help your clients cope with such difficult times in an empowering and transformative manner.

This recording is a must, if you work with clients who experience any of the following:

• The loss of a loved one and feel filled with sorrow
• Gone through a divorce or romantic breakup and want to embrace their new stage in an empowered manner
• Lost their job and do not have the confidence to find new opportunities
• Retired and feel lost as they start this new stage in their lives
• Want to overcome their fears
• Want to expand their spirituality
• Want to live with more meaning and purpose
• Want to transform their loss and transform their lives!

1. Explore different types of loss and utilize strategies to help clients identify patterns within their grieving process.
2. Incorporate the 11 Principles of Transformation® into your clinical practice to help clients reconcile grief and loss.
3. Differentiate between tasks and stages as they relate to the grieving process.
4. Integrate spiritual concepts such as acceptance, forgiveness and gratitude into your work with grieving clients to help facilitate healing and recovery.
5. Teach clients healing rituals including journaling, meditation and affirmations as strategies for coping with loss.
6. Utilize a strengths-based approach with clients to help reframe loss as an opportunity for growth and recovery.

Understanding Loss

• Different types of loss
• Loss in each stage of development
• Primary and secondary losses
• Getting to know your client’s story of loss
  • History of loss
  • Assessment of loss
  • Cultural values
  • Support and strategies

Deconstructing Grief

• What is grief?
• Cultural considerations
• Types of grief: Anticipatory and Disenfranchised
• Dimensions of Grief: Physical, Emotional, Social, Spiritual
• Tasks vs stages of grief

From Grief to Growth: The Transformative Process

• Overview of the 11 Principles of Transformation®
  • I. Acceptance of loss
  • II. Living with grief
  • III. Deeper spirituality
  • IV. Emotional expression
  • V. Sharing with others
  • VI. Self-care
  • VII. Rituals
  • VIII. Living in the present
  • IX. Modifying thoughts
  • X. Rebuilding
  • XI. Visualization of desired life

Tools and Strategies for Facilitating Growth in Clients

• Acceptance
  • Teaching radical acceptance
  • Reframing acceptance versus denial
  • Telling the story of the loss
  • Affirmations
  • Meditation
• Expressive Therapies
  • Journaling
  • Sand
  • Music, films, pictures
  • Breathwork
  • Drawing, painting
• Spiritual Tools
  • Power of forgiveness and love
  • Incorporate gratitude
• Emotional Expression
  • The Cave
  • Empty chair
  • Sharing versus dwelling
  • Letter writing
  • Rituals
  • Mindfulness
• Cognitive Strategies
  • Changing the inner conversation
  • Shifting perspective
  • Responding rather than reacting
• Looking forward
  • Values assessment
  • Guided imagery
  • ”As is” exercise

Limitations of the Research and Potential Risks

• Disparity in results across studies for grief related to trauma
• Special considerations for complicated grief and clinical depression