Center for Loss: PTSD: Companioning the Traumatized Griever

  • 08/26/2019
  • 08/29/2019
  • Fort Collins, CO

PTSD: Companioning the Traumatized Griever

$895

As our cultural and medical awareness of post-traumatic stress have grown, we as a society and as caregivers have begun to realize the sheer magnitude of the issue. It’s now thought that about eight percent of us are experiencing the condition called PTSD at any given time.

In this training, Dr. Wolfelt will explore PTSD not as a “disorder” but instead as a component of normal, though complicated, grief. He will explain his belief that the term “traumatic grief” captures better the totality of people’s experience following traumatic loss. The symptoms of grief, normal or traumatic, are care-eliciting symptoms—not signs of illness but rather symptoms of an injury that needs careful and compassionate tending. What’s more, the missing piece in the puzzle that is traumatic grief is mourning, or the expression of grief.

Topics we will cover include:

  • Traumatic versus normal grief symptoms
  • Traumatic grief as a form of complicated grief
  • Medical model therapies as treatment
  • Mourning as “treatment”
  • Catch-up mourning for traumatic grief

Participants will receive a copy of Reframing PTSD as Traumatic Grief: How Caregivers Can Companion Traumatized Grievers Through Catch-Up Mourning.