Compassionate Grief Work: Innovative Techniques for Healing

"Compassionate Grief Work: Innovative Techniques for Healing" offers a nuanced exploration of grief, defining it as an innate attachment-related process often hindered by various mediating factors. It delves into the distinctions between grief and mourning, emphasizing that while grief can become somatically "stuck," mourning represents the natural embodiment of loss, and highlights the unique complexities of grief intertwined with trauma, particularly relational trauma. The package challenges the notion of "closure," instead advocating for cultivating a "potent pause" to sit with the void of loss and fostering a new, ongoing relationship with those who are gone. Through innovative techniques like therapeutic letters, psychodrama, somatic focusing, breathwork, and ritual, this program equips practitioners and individuals with powerful tools to navigate and heal the multifaceted experience of grief, even in the presence of complex traumatic symptoms.

Comprehensive Curriculum

Module 1: Grief 101 (Karee Powers) — Understanding grief's faces, mediating factors (relationship nature, loss circumstances, cultural/spiritual background, support systems), essential tasks, contemplative exercises.

Module 2: Mobilizing Grief that is Stuck (Sergio Ocampo) — Grief vs. mourning distinction, when grief gets stuck in body, somatic resolution, self-supportive grief interventions.

Module 3: Grieving the Relational Wounds (Dr. Frank Anderson) — Complex PTSD and grief intersection, acute vs. relational grief, IFS for grief, navigating dual griefs, resisting societal pressure to "move on."

Module 4: The Tools for Processing Loss (Dr. Amber Elizabeth Gray) — The potent pause as therapeutic practice, ancestral relationships, continuing bonds with deceased, transforming loss from absence to transformed presence.

Plus: Special guest insights from Deb Dana (sharing from her personal grief journey after losing her husband Bob), Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, and Dr. Pat Ogden.

Learning Outcomes & Professional Benefits

Core competencies across 8 areas: Understanding Grief (faces, mediators, acute vs. relational, stuck vs. flowing); Nervous System Literacy (dorsal/sympathetic/ventral through grief, resilience as return to regulation); Somatic Approaches (stuck grief in body, somatic self-supportive interventions); Relational and IFS Perspectives (trauma-organized parts, legacy burdens); Therapeutic Presence (potent pause, witnessing without fixing); Language and Attunement (what welcomes each nervous system); Ancestral Work (continuing bonds, transformed connection with deceased); Self-Awareness (personal relationship with grief).

Faculty

Karee Powers

Karee Powers, LICSW, EMDR-C is certified in EMDR and is an EMDR trainer and consultant. She has over 17 years of experience providing psychotherapy in a variety of settings including inpatient facilities, and non-profit organizations offering care for children, adolescents and adult survivors of abuse, neglect, combat trauma, sexual trauma, phobias, generational trauma, and interpersonal traumas. Her private practice and training is centered in work with complex trauma and dissociation, using EMDR, CBT, psychodrama, somatic psychology, and mindfulness. She graduated from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill with her Master’s in Social Work.

Sergio Ocampo

Sergio Ocampo is a licensed psychotherapist, educator, and co-developer of Dynamic Somatic Touch (DST), an integrative trauma-resolution approach addressing emotional overwhelm, trauma, chronic pain, and illness. His work blends somatic and cognitive therapies including Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, family systems, generational trauma, and depth and spiritual psychology. An adjunct faculty member at Antioch University and contributor to The Embody Lab, Sergio holds leadership roles within Somatic Experiencing communities and teaches internationally, emphasizing that trauma is temporary and resolvable.

Frank Anderson (Dr.)

Frank Anderson, MD, is a world-renowned trauma expert, Harvard-trained psychiatrist, and global speaker. He is the co-author of the IFS Skills Training Manual (2017), the best-selling Transcending Trauma (2021), and his memoir To Be Loved: A Story of Truth, Trauma and Transformation (2024). Dr. Anderson has a long affiliation with Bessel van der Kolk at the Trauma Research Foundation and is a former lead trainer at the IFS Institute under Richard Schwartz. He is the director and cofounder of the Trauma Institute and Trauma-Informed Media, dedicated to integrating neuroscience with cutting-edge therapy and bringing trauma healing to the world.

Amber Elizabeth Gray (Dr.)

Dr. Amber Elizabeth L. Gray is a Dance/Movement Therapist, Human Rights Psychotherapist, and yoga teacher specializing in supporting survivors of war, torture, and human rights abuses. Her work spans active conflict zones, post-conflict areas, refugee camps, and disaster-stricken regions. An activist, artist, author, and therapist, she draws on a Polyvagal, Heart & Spirit-informed Right to Embody somatic human rights framework. With 25 years immersed in Polyvagal Theory, she developed survivor-centered, multicultural Somatic & Dance/Movement Therapy, shared globally through Body of Change eco-somatic retreats.

Deb Dana

Deb Dana, LCSW, is an author, clinician, and consultant using Polyvagal Theory to understand and resolve trauma while honoring the autonomic nervous system. She developed the Rhythm of Regulation Clinical Training Series and lectures internationally. Deb is a founding member of the Polyvagal Institute, clinical advisor to Khiron Clinics, and advisor to Unyte. Her clinical works with W.W. Norton include The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection, and the Polyvagal Flip Chart. With Sounds True, she released Befriending Your Nervous System and the book Anchored.

Bessel van der Kolk (Dr.)

Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., is a pioneering clinician, researcher, and teacher in posttraumatic stress, integrating developmental, neurobiological, and interpersonal aspects of trauma. His bestselling The Body Keeps the Score transformed how we understand trauma. With 150+ peer-reviewed articles, he has studied neuroimaging, memory, neurofeedback, Developmental Trauma, yoga, theater, and EMDR. He is founder of the Trauma Research Foundation, past President of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University, and PI of the MAPS MDMA-assisted psychotherapy study.

Pat Ogden (Dr.)

Pat Ogden, PhD is a pioneer in somatic psychology, the creator of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy method, and founder of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute. Dr. Ogden is a clinician, consultant, international lecturer and the first author of two groundbreaking books in somatic psychology: Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Trauma and Attachment (2015). Her third book, The Pocket Guide to Sensorimotor Psychotherapy in Context, advocates for an anti-racist perspective in psychotherapy practice. Her current interests include couple therapy, child and family therapy, social justice, diversity, inclusion, consciousness, and the philosophical/spiritual principles that underlie her work.