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Grief in the midst of COVID 19: What are we going to do to hold all of it? How are we going to take care of ourselves?
Jill A. Johnson-Young, LCSW
The original presentation for this month was focused on the dying process and how it informs working with grieving clients. It also addressed how to approach grief with clients, how to create a safe environment, and how to make grief solution focused, not the forever experience for your client after a significant death.
That’s all vitally important information. We can do it another time. Right now we have COVID. We are working from home or closed offices. We are trying to make practices work or to meet the increasing needs of clients in our work sites. We are facing what has already occurred in Italy. These are just some of the issues coming up worldwide, all of which are already occurring on our East Coast:
- · Funerals and memorial services that cannot be held or have to be done online- all without touching.
- · Deaths occurring rapidly, and without loved ones being able to be there, to witness, to comfort, to say goodbye
- · Family members who are sick after a death, and multiple family losses
- · The impact of witnessing mass death across the country (and world)
- · Not being able to get “home” if needed- wherever home might be
- · Medical, housekeeping, coroner and mortuary staff getting sick and fearing for their own lives as they care for others
- · “Essential” workers being exposed and not being able to remove themselves from the situation for financial and job security reasons
- · Financial stressors and losses: offices for therapists, homes, apartments, jobs, security, retirement savings
- · Unrecognized losses: graduations, proms, promotions for littles in Kinder and 6th grades, pets for those who have to move, opportunities lost, plans that had to change, not being able to see parents or elders or grandkids or ?, medical issues that had to go unresolved, holidays, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, not seeing friends, missing school, not being in plays or concerts or performances or competitions, and on and on and on. All of them.
This presentation will focus on helping therapists:
- 1) identify how to best meet the needs of clients who are coping with grief now and in the future, including all of the above losses.
- 2) identify three ways to take care of yourself while in the middle of the crisis and afterward in grief work.
- 3) how to normalize and validate the importance of all the losses for clients who minimize their own losses.
Finally, we will do some intense grief prep to help those who are going to or will lose loved ones to this disease in a way that nobody has had to cope since the last polio epidemic or the flu pandemic of 1918.
I hope you will join me, come with questions prepared that I address with you online, and still be ready for some humor and hope. Because in addition to listening and holding space, humor and hope are our best assets.
To view the seminar video, go to: Grief in the Midst of Covid-19 Video
https://www.facebook.com/grieftalker/,
https://www.facebook.com/Riversidedementiasupport/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jilljohnsonyoung/.
Interview with Jill Johnson-Young
Grief in the Midst of Covid 19 Eval Summary.xlsx