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GXC 2025 Online Virtual Conference - Mental Health Without Borders

Complex & Traumatic Loss: Facilitating Healing & Resilience With Families & Communities

Froma Walsh, Ph.D. 🇺🇸
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Description

Traumatic death and loss can shatter lives and bonds, with long-term reverberations in other relationships and life pursuits. Yet current resilience research, with a multi-systemic perspective, reveals the importance of relational and social influences in suffering, healing, and regaining the ability to thrive. In this presentation, Dr. Froma Walsh distills extensive research, training, and practice expertise to highlight core principles in a resilience-oriented systemic approach in working with complex and traumatic losses. She'll identify and illustrate key relational processes--shared beliefs and practices-- that therapists can mobilize in couples, families, and communities to support healing and resilience in a range of devastating loss situations: sudden, untimely, and disenfranchised loss; deaths in violence, substance use, or suicide; widespread disaster, war, and forced displacement. We'll discuss therapeutic challenges and useful guidelines to help those who are struggling to find meaning, hope, and connection to live and love beyond loss.

Educational Goal

This presentation will enhance participants’ professional growth by deepening their understanding of systemic, resilience-oriented approaches to complex and traumatic loss. Attendees will develop greater clinical sophistication in recognizing relational, cultural, and spiritual influences on grief, and will strengthen their skills in fostering healing, connection, and resilience in individuals, families, and communities .

Learning Objectives

Participants will be able to:

  • Identify research-informed best practices with complicated bereavement, critiquing faulty and pathologizing assumptions of “normal/abnormal” grief to address diversity and complexity in situations of profound and traumatic loss.

  • Implement guidelines to address traumatic situations of sudden, untimely death; ambiguous and disenfranchised loss; violent deaths (e.g. gun violence, overdose, suicide); and in collective trauma and loss in community disasters, war, and displacement.

  • Describe core principles in systemic practice with shattering losses, expanding focus from individual grief symptoms to attend to relational, couple/family, social, systemic/structural, and cultural/spiritual influences in suffering and in healing and resilience.

  • Apply a resilience-oriented systemic approach can prevent compassion fatigue to enrich therapeutic engagement and effectiveness in work with traumatic loss.

Target Audience

  • Addiction Professional
  • Counselor
  • Marriage & Family Therapist
  • Nurse
  • Physician
  • Psychologist
  • Social Worker

Presenters

Froma Walsh, Ph.D. 🇺🇸
Froma Walsh, PhD is a Clinical Psychologist and is Professor Emerita in the Crown School and Dept. of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago, and Co-Founder/Co-Director, Chicago Center for Family Health. Dr. Walsh is the leading international authority on family & relational resilience, with extensive practice expertise with traumatic loss and complicated bereavement. Her resilience-oriented, systemic practice approach, integrating relational, intergenerational, and socio-cultural influences, helps those who are struggling to find healing and flourish in life beyond loss. Dr. Walsh is a highly regarded speaker and consultant internationally. She is Past President, American Family Therapy Academy; Past Editor, Journal of Marital & Family Therapy; and recipient of many awards for her distinguished contributions to family/relational systemic theory, research, and practice. With over 120 publications, her noted professional books are Strengthening Family Resilience (3rd ed.) and Complex & Traumatic Loss: Fostering Healing and Resilience (2023).

Financially Sponsored By

  • GXC Events - The Global Exchange Conference