Pregnancy and Infant Loss
Effective Strategies to Support Grief and Treat Trauma, Anxiety, and Depression in Bereaved Parents

This free training is designed to provide you with the skills you need to:

• Understand the nuances of loss — whether through miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, abortion, medical termination, stillbirth, or infant death
• Help clients integrate the experience of loss into their reproductive stories
• Tailor your existing treatment strategies – like CBT and ACT – to pregnancy and infant loss situations
• Intervene with the family system and stop relationship conflict from taking over
• Effectively manage countertransference reactions related to your own reproductive experience
• Help parents cope with NICU admission and neonatal death
• And much, much more!

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Gradations of Grief: Types of Early Bereavement
Intake assessment strategies for obtaining reproductive information
Nuances of loss in early pregnancy - miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, abortion, medical termination, stillbirth
Developmental tasks of pregnancy and how loss interrupts them
Coping with NICU admission and neonatal death
Medical factors facing bereaved parents
Infertility grief
Disenfranchised grief - the loss of possibility and what could have been

Tools to Help Grieving Parents and their Communities
Individual, couple, and family phases of grief - and when to be concerned
Living children and loss
Clinical management of higher rates of relationship conflict and divorce after loss
Distinguish grief versus postpartum depression
Language around loss - key things to say and not to say
How culture supports or does not support grief and loss
Best practices for managing grief milestones and establishing mourning rituals
Grief management during subsequent attempts to conceive

Therapy after Pregnancy and Infant Loss
Exploring clients’ reproductive journey and narrative
Crisis interventions to help shift clients out of shock
Stabilization phase - resourcing tools to manage the expected flood of emotions
Tailor existing evidence-based interventions to this clinical situation

• Cognitive strategies for assisting parents with neutralizing shame and self-blame
• Behavioral techniques to manage loss-related triggers
• Mindfulness and values-based interventions to assist parents with creating meaning
• Trauma processing techniques for resolving PTSD-related symptoms

Clinical strategies to support bereaved parents during subsequent pregnancies and the postpartum period after loss
How and when to end therapy when pregnancy or infant loss was the presenting problem

Clinical Considerations
Therapeutic use and management of countertransference
Self-care and burnout protection for therapists’ whose own symptoms or grief is activated
Moral injury around limited resource availability
Establishing cultural competency - inclusive practices for all individuals and family systems
When and how to refer to couples therapy and support groups
Research limitations and potential risks

Click here for outline and target audience.