Prescribed Reading For The Creative Grief Coaching Certification Course

Last week we held a live call to share more about the Creative Grief Coaching Certification program. On the call (which we recorded – you can get the recording here), we shared more about the way that grief and creativity intersect and we also shared about the core beliefs and values that underpin our course because core beliefs and values are much harder to teach than models and theories and tools, and participants who are generally aligned with the core beliefs and values that underpin our course are the people who would enjoy the course most and get the most out of it.

Grief theories and approaches vary widely and some are almost directly in opposition to others, In much the same vein as our discussion about the core values and beliefs that inform our course, we’re sharing details of the books that we’ve made prescribed reading for this course, so that you can get a sense of the models/ theories/ approaches that have informed this course. We hope that this will help people to decide whether our course is likely to be a good fit with the approach that feels right to them.

So without further ado, here are the books we’re asking our participants to read, along with the reasons why we chose these books.

The Other Side of Sadness by Dr George Bonanno

Having researched trauma and resilience for the past 15 years, and as head of the Loss, Trauma and Emotion Lab for Columbia University, Dr Bonanno provides a pretty thorough review and critique of the popular theories of grieving, and shares the latest research on trauma and resilience. It’s wonderful to see how much more liberating the latest research in regard to it’s judgements about how we respond to loss and trauma, and what we need!

Dr Bonanno’s research shows that there isn’t really a staged or predictable sequential process that we go through when we’re grieving – people’s experiences of grief vary very widely. He dispells the myths of “grief-work”, “closure” and “delayed grief,” and explores the value of various methods for facilitating an experience of ongoing connection even after biological death. He also provides an excellent chapter about how our emotions work.

We’ve chosen this book because it does a great job of dispelling many common myths about how we grieve and what we need when we’re grieving, and supports the liberating and affirming core beliefs and approaches that we hope our Creative Grief Coaches will bring to their clients.

Buy The Other Side of Sadness

I Thought It Was Just Me by Dr Brene Brown

Most grief coaching/ counseling theories talk about the idea of “grief-work” – the notion that we have to work at or on our grief in order to heal. The common approach is to work at trying to “remove” or “overcome” grief. Our approach is quite different. We don’t think we need to remove or overcome grief, because it’s a very natural and healthy response that (as Bonanno says) we usually adapt to or out of fairly quickly without intervention. We encourage the approach of embracing or owning all of your grief experience, rather than trying to get rid of it or purge it, because we believe that’s where the most authentic and creative power lies. Rather than trying to “work out” grief, our model helps coaches and their clients to understand the impact of shame, and to work on dissolving shame.

Dr Brown’s work is all about the impact of shame, and what we can do to become what she calls “shame resilient,” where we’re able to quickly identify and dissolve shame triggers. There are so many shame triggers in loss events and our experiences of grief and the way that other people respond to our loss events and experiences of grief. Shame adds stress and suffering to grief and separates us from each other, which disconnects us from the valuable transformational and supportive power of connection and community. When we know our shame triggers and can dissolve shame experiences, then we’re always able to know what we need in our grieving journey and we can clearly communicate what we need, which enriches our relationships, giving us access to the transformational power of community.

Buy I Thought It Was Just Me

The Dance Of Anger By Dr Harriet Lerner

The Dance of Anger is ultimately about how we can manage and nurture deeper connections and better relationships with the people who are most important to us – the relationships that are often most difficult. This book helps us to understand the dysfunctional relationship patterns we get into, and how to break those patterns and nurture intimacy instead. It’s also a wonderful resource that addresses the usefulness and transformational power of anger (which is a common emotion in grieving.)

Most approaches to supporting people who are bereaved are focused on the individual, but we believe that connection and community are incredibly important for healing and transformation, so our Creative Grief Coaching model hopes to train grief coaches who have a deep appreciation for the importance of relationship and connection and who are really at their core “relationship coaches” who will help their clients to handle difficult relationships with clarity and love, and discover and nurture connection in their family and community.

Dr Lerner is a highly experienced family and relationship therapist and the author of a dozen books about relationships, intimacy and connection, and has just released a new book, Marriage Rules, about nurturing and improving intimacy with your significant other or spouse, so we’re beyond-thrilled that she’s going to be contributing to our module on grief, friends and family.

Buy The Dance Of Anger

Re-Membering Lives by Dr Lorraine Hedtke

Dr Hedtke does a really great job of dispelling the myth of “closure” in this book, and clearly demonstrates the necessity and power of connection and community – both for those who are grieving and those who are not grieving right now. Dr Hedtke has pioneered a method for facilitating incredibly healing and transformational community conversations with people who are grieving – conversations that open up some form of ongoing connection to their loved ones who’ve died and also enrich many of their relationships with people who are important to them who are still living.

We’ll be teaching our participants about the power of remembering and ongoing connection, and the importance of grieving in community, and we’ll be showing them how to facilitate “remembering conversations.” We’re incredibly happy to have Dr Hedtke joining us to help our participants learn her process (and we can’t wait to pick up her new book about the “how to” of remembering conversations, which is coming out in March 2012!)

Buy Re-Membering Lives

Healing Through The Dark Emotions by Miriam Greenspan

The emotional side of grieving is where much of the discussion about “the right” approach gets heated and controversial. Emotions have been baffling (and scaring) us humans for a long time, and since they can be so baffling, scary and painful, it’s usually the side of grieving that we’re most worried about and keen to “fix.”

Greenspan’s book is a wonderful resource that demonstrates the usefulness of all of our emotions – even the really scary or painful ones. Where many people want to focus on “removing” or “overcoming” painful emotions, Greenspan shows how, when we choose to rather fully look at, allow, embrace, and own our emotions, we get access to their positive purpose, we transform our experience of them, and we access our own truth and creative power. She provides wonderful practical and creative tools for doing this and we know our Creative Grief Coaches will return to this perspective-shifting resource again and again.

Buy Healing Through The Dark Emotions

Effortless Evolution by Jamie Smart

This book doesn’t address “grieving” specifically, but it’s a really accessible and useful resource for understanding our innate, resilient, resourceful, peaceful and creative nature, and how to get back to that resilient, resourceful, peaceful and creative self when life circumstances separate us from it. Part philosophy, part psychology, part spirituality, this book offers lots of paradigm-shifting perspectives and ways of understanding ourselves so that we can more readily access our innate resilience, resourcefulness, peacefulness and creativity – regardless of what circumstantial challenges we’re facing.

Smart is an incredibly elegant, creative and skilled teacher, with a rich understanding and practice in strengths-based change-work, so we’re really pleased that he will be joining us to share more about his approach and philosophies.

This is a free ebook. You can get it here.

ATTEND: Toward a Mindfulness-Based Bereavement Care Model by Dr. Joanne Cacciatore

Abstract: “Few, if any, mindfulness-based bereavement care models exist. The ATTEND (attunement, trust, touch, egalitarianism, nuance, and death education) model is an interdisciplinary paradigm for providers, including physicians, social workers, therapists, nursing staff, and others. Using a case example to enhance the breadth and depth of understanding, this article focuses on attunement as a means to moderate the negative effects of traumatic bereavement, support the framework for posttraumatic growth in the bereaved, improve psychological outcomes for providers, and set the stage for the other aspects of the ATTEND model.”

Dr. Jo has been hosting MISS Foundation bereavement conferences since the mid-90′s and she launched the Trauma & Bereavement Certificate program at ASU.  This article, published in issue 1 of 2012 run of Death Studies journal is the basis of much of her work.  Her philosophy and work were the first I [Kara] encountered in the late ’90s whereby our grief experiences were not pathologized.  Through her work, Dr. Jo normalized much of what was happening for our family and then I watched as she continued to do that for thousands of other families at the MISS Foundation.  This is very “green” psychology, shying away from diagnosis and medication, and encouraging caregivers to be present in the moment with their clients.  I cannot find any other materials published today that I would more highly recommend than this work!

When you go to the journal site and click “buy now” button, you’ll see two options:  to buy full issue or just the article.  You only need the article.

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Does this sound like stuff you want to learn more about?

Much like any other area of coaching, the theories and ideas and tools that coaches draw on in their work are very diverse. We know that to some people, our ideas and approaches might seem controversial or just plain “wrong,” because it doesn’t fit the traditional ideas that they’ve learned and used, while to other people our course will be like the little pocket of pure oxygen that they’ve been looking for. And as they breathe it in, they’ll feel their heart and lungs expand and they’ll begin to feel more alive in their work with the bereaved than they’ve ever felt.

If you feel a little of that heart-expansion and sense of aliveness when you read what we’ve written here, then this course will probably be a good fit for you and we’d love you to apply.

Worried that this looks like a lot to read?

If you’re considering joining our class and worrying about getting through all of these books, rest assured, you’ll be fine. We’ve structured our learning process and manuals so that you’ll be learning experientially, which means that we’ll usually start with a creative tool and discussion about your experience of the tool, so that your starting place is your own tested experience and wisdom (always the place to start and come back to!). Then you’ll be able to layer that learning with the content from your manuals, which we’ve written to ensure that the core ideas are clear and accessible. Finally, the contributions from our guest faculty, the reading of these books and the discussions in our private forum will help you to go even deeper and broader in your understanding and use of the ideas that we’ve taught.

So don’t panic! You won’t have to have read all of these books before we start on 2 Feb. Start reading and you can read through the course and even after the live calls are finished. You’ll have everything you need to get the most out of each live call, so you won’t get left behind – even if you haven’t started reading these books yet. And you’ll have continued access to our private forum even after the live calls are finished so you’ll always be able to come back and post thoughts and questions about the reading material afterwards.

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