Grief 101: A Primer for Helping Professionals
Online Course
This course investigates theories, concepts, and practical tools related to grief and loss. It's designed with grief professionals and volunteers in mind, but it is appropriate for anyone wishing to learn more about grief and loss.
This course will introduce concepts important in conceptualizing grief and grief coping and help participants apply these concepts to their work with the people they serve. General concepts covered in this course include:
- Basic truths about grief
- The myth of the grief timeline
- Types of grief
- Secondary loss
- Grief theory overview
- Coping
- The role of support systems in grief
- Locating resources in your community and online
By the end of this course, participants will be able to:
1) Identify different types of loss and grief and the impact they may have on an individual or family.
2) Differentiate and apply grief theory, including 'stage' and 'grief work' models, as well as non-grief work models.
3) Explain and leverage the role of support systems and community resources on individual grief.
The Guide To Navigating Grief workbook:
As a part of this course, you will receive a PDF workbook called ‘Navigating Grief Workbook’. This workbook contains activities that correspond with the different lessons in this course. Typically, the activities in this workbook would be completed by someone who is grieving, either independently or with a grief-support professional. We hope that these activities help provide you with a better understanding of grief and give you some ideas for working grieving clients.
Your Instructor
Hello, we are Litsa and Eleanor, the co-founders of the website, What's Your Grief. Thank you for joining our online learning community. We hope some of what you find here will help you understand grief an grief coping a little bit better.
We are what we like to refer to as 'grief friends.' We both have backgrounds in mental health and plenty of experience working in the field of grief and bereavement. But what we ultimately bonded over was our shared experience of losing a parent to cancer in early adulthood. All our webinars and online courses are based on the ideas and information we've found most helpful in our personal grief, and in our daily work with grieving people.
We teach all our webinars and courses, so we should probably tell you, we prefer to talk about grief and loss in realistic and regular ways. If you're looking for transformative butterflies and sympathetic head tilts, I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place. Sometimes we're serious, and sometimes we joke, sometimes we're matter of fact, and sometimes we're philosophical. No matter what, though, we believe your experience with grief should always be recognized and respected, not patronized.