Loss, Healing, and Resilience

 Earn 3 CE Contact Hours

An unbearable death or traumatic loss can shatter lives, relationships, and a sense of meaning, with long-term reverberations for individuals, couples, and families. Yet decades of resilience research reveal the human capacity for healing, positive adaptation, and growth particularly when supported by strong relational connections.

Drawing on Dr. Froma Walsh’s resilience-oriented systemic framework, this workshop applies research-based practice principles to complex and traumatic loss experiences. Through clinical case examples, the workshop will address common challenges and relational constraints that can intensify suffering, block healing, and corrode bonds.

Participants will learn how therapists can facilitate key resilience processes such as active agency, hope, connection, meaning-making, and transformation to support grieving clients in forging meaningful pathways forward and rekindling the spirit to live and thrive beyond loss.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Apply research-informed understandings of grief and resilience to guide best clinical practices with individuals, couples, and families who have experienced profound loss.
• Identify practice principles of resilience-oriented systemic therapy for working with overwhelming, complex, and traumatic losses.
• Facilitate key beliefs and relational processes that support healing from despair and foster meaning, hope, purpose, and renewal after loss.

Who Should Attend:

Mental health professionals, therapists, social workers, pastoral counselors, and healthcare and community-based practitioners who work with individuals, couples, or families impacted by profound, complex, or traumatic loss and seek research-informed, systemic approaches to grief, healing, and resilience.

Meet Dr. Walsh:

Froma Walsh, PhD is Firestone Professor Emerita at the Crown School and Department of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago, and Co-Founder/Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Family Health. She is the leading international expert on family resilience, with over three decades of research and clinical practice focused on complex and traumatic loss experiences.

Dr. Walsh has authored over 120 scholarly publications, including the seminal books Strengthening Family Resilience (3rd ed., 2016) and Complex and Traumatic Loss: Fostering Healing and Resilience (2023). Her resilience-oriented, systemic practice integrates developmental, relational, socio-cultural, and spiritual perspectives.

A clinical psychologist and multidisciplinary educator, Dr. Walsh is Past Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Marital & Family Therapy, Past President of the American Family Therapy Academy, and recipient of numerous awards recognizing her distinguished contributions to couple and family therapy. She is a frequent international speaker and consultant.