Bereavement Professionals’ Insights

Caileigh – A safe place to grow and heal

Caileigh talks about how accessing play therapy can support everybody. When children have that safe place to heal, everybody around them feels good and can heal, too.

Jean – Coping

Jean shares how coping can be complicated

Caileigh – Through play children learn so much about their grief

Caileigh discussed how children learn so much about their grief through play. There’s less confusion, there’s less anxiety, there’s more awareness. For the child and the parent, there is more acceptance of grief.

Jen – “Releasing grief through yoga”

Jen discusses how some poses can help release stress.

Left Out: Enfranchising Children’s Grief and Loss

By: Jessica Milette, MSW, RSW All human beings have the capacity to grieve: people with intellectual disabilities, those living with a traumatic brain injury, and children of all ages. However, many people can experience disenfranchised grief when someone dies. Disenfranchised grief is generally grief that is not usually openly acknowledged, socially accepted or publicly mourned.…

Michele – Covid and support

Michele defines expressive arts and how they can help healing in griefMIchele talks about COVID restrictions, technology and ways to support

Jeff K – “What is grief”

Jeff discusses the many aspects of grief and how we are all connected. Jeff continues to grieve the death of his mother.

Claudia – Art in community versus art therapy

Claudia explains how art therapists are trained and how what they do is different that doing art in community

Chantal – Grief and art therapy group

Chantal talks about the honour of being witness to other peoples story and exploration of grief and art therapy

Tending to My Garden of Grief

So long as I remember the lives of those I have lost, honour their presence and impact on me and celebrate their spirit, they will continue to live with me and the pain will feel bearable. It will no longer stop me in my tracks. Instead, it will encourage me and propel me forward through the transmutation of that grief into something different, something more nuanced and fluid. I’d like to share a practice for processing grief which I have found to be especially helpful.

Carrie – Thanatology

Carrie explains how thanatolgy is the study of death dying grief and loss.

Teresa – Understanding people with intellectual disabilities and grief

Teresa shares an example and discusses the importance of truly understanding people with intellectual disabilities when they are telling us their stories