The Grieving Therapist

Description:

How do you practice good therapy when it’s the end of the world as we know it and no one feels fine? We can only do so if we act together. The planet is burning, friends and family are falling to cults, and we’re all living through the collective trauma of a global pandemic. Among therapists and healers, burnout is rampant; hopelessness and despair are, too. In this presentation psychotherapists Larisa Garski, LMFT, and Justine Mastin, LMFT, LADC give voice to the difficulties of therapising in today’s world and offer a grief-informed framework for taking care of yourself as you take care of others. Informed by narrative, internal family systems, fanfic, and trauma-sensitive therapy, Garski and Mastin explore what it means to be a therapist at the end of the world (or what feels like it). They break down 10 realms of grief that are critical to understand and work with today, but likely weren’t taught to you in therapy school, and invite you to engage with your own grief in community with your peers. With humor, compassion, irreverence, and more than a little whimsy, Garski and Mastin invite you to show up for yourself and your clients in your full humanity against it all.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of this presentation, participants will be able to –

1. Identify their own grief, and how these feelings can contribute to feelings of therapist “burnout.”
2. Define and identify “moral injury” and how this can contribute to feelings of therapist “burnout.”
3. State 3 concrete skills for their own self-care.